Yesterday NAS president Peter Wood wrote "Character Lessons: What We Can Learn From the Huntsville Killings." In it he wrote:
“Higher” education is not much of a barrier against jealousy, disappointment, fantasies of revenge, or even blood hatred. I hear stories in confidence from time to time from frustrated and angry academics who are filled with self-pity about the treatment they have received. Often enough their grievances are real. It would be a good thing if universities still had at their center a sense that higher education really does demand of us something higher—something morally as well as intellectually higher.
Today the article received a comment by John Hundscheid, worth reprinting here:
I have lived in Huntsville, AL for the last 17 years and have many friends who attend the University of Alabama at Huntsville. A week before the shooting at UAH, there was a shooting at Discovery Middle School in Madison (a suburb of Huntsville). A ninth grader shot another ninth grader in the head during a class change. My first reaction was that the UAH shooting was a copycat incident. It came as a shock to learn that a faculty member, rather than a student, was responsible for the violence at UAH. However, there is an eerie similarity between the two incidents. In both cases, the perpetrator was described as "cool" and "collected" when the incident occurred. Dr. Bishop and the ninth grader both shot their targets, went to the restroom to dispose of their weapons, and waited for the police. The lack of passion makes these killings all the more disturbing. More passionate killings are easier to rationally comprehend. We can attribute such actions to a person being on edge, disrespected, disturbed, etc. But when a Harvard-trained neuroscientist or a fourteen-year-old intentionally targets and kills his or her colleagues with such precision and deliberation, I think our modern paradigm of rationality is challenged. The incident brought to mind that passage from the Summa where Aquinas argues that there can't be intellectual virtue without moral virtue. The key to the relationship between intellectual and moral virtue is prudence. Prudence requires both moral and intellectual virtues because we have to comprehend the world and act in an appropriate way. And Prudence seems to have lost favor in modern conceptions of virtue. A quick search of the Oxford English Dictionary reveals it's even a sort of pejorative now ("prudes" ) or has been confined to a strictly utilitarian conception ("In politics there is nothing wrong and everything prudent in changing the game plan at halftime if necessary to win"). I don't think our society has a language to describe or explain the tragedies in Huntsville over the last two weeks and so we rightfully remain silent in our grief.
