That is, more or less, the question asked and the answer provided by the Eagle Forum’s Phyllis Schlafly:
What was the motive behind 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui's killing of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech? Why was he consumed with hate, resentment and bitterness?
Cho was an English department major and senior. As a frequent lecturer on college campuses, I have discovered that the English departments are often the weirdest and/or the most left-wing.
A look at the Web sites of Virginia Tech's English department and of its professors reveals their mindset.
Schlafly proceeds to ask if Cho took “Professor Bernice L. Hausman's English 5454” and then runs through a list of books used and topic discussed in the class, saying they sound “like just the thing to confuse an already mixed-up kid.”
So apparently, English 5454 was in some way responsible for Cho’s inexplicable crime … except that he probably never took the class, considering that English 5454 is a graduate-level class at Virginia Tech and Cho was merely a senior.
Schlafly goes on to selectively mock various other classes offered by the Virginia Tech English Department in which students are assigned books “about an urban prostitute who finally kills herself and [one] about a violent man who kills his girlfriend,” while taking the opportunity to attack several professors by name:
Or maybe Cho preferred the undiluted Marxism espoused by English instructor Allen Brizee, who wrote: "Everyday, the capitalist system exploits millions of people. ... Our role in the capitalist system makes us guilty of oppression!"
Brizee did indeed write that as part of an anti-capitalist rant… which he then explained thusly:
Whew, quite a mouthful! … [W]hen studying Marxist literary criticism, we must place ourselves in the mindset of the revolutionaries so that we can effectively examine text as they would. Marxism has come a long way since the 1800s, and Marxist critics today certainly take a less dogmatic approach to literature. But at the same time, we cannot disregard the original dogma that sparked the social movement that changed our world.
Perhaps, in the future, Schlafly can learn to scroll down the web page in order to avoid presenting quotes ridiculously out of context.
She then concludes
At the campuswide convocation to honor the victims, professor Nikki Giovanni read what purported to be a poem. On behalf of the English department, she declaimed:
"We do not understand this tragedy,/
We know we did nothing to deserve it."
Maybe others will render a different verdict and ask why taxpayers are paying professors at Virginia Tech to teach worthless and psychologically destructive courses.
“We did nothing to deserve it” say those scarred by this horrible tragedy – but Schlafly begs to differ.
