Lab Stabbing At UCLA

It has been a bad year at UCLA. First there was the tragedy if a death in an organic research lab due to a t-BuLi fire, which drew international attention, and then yesterday there was a stabbing in an organic teaching lab. The facts of the latter case are not yet clear, so I will reserve commentary on the case.

In the last few years I have had a handful of students whose behavior in lab made me wonder about their stability. We faculty walk a fine line when we encounter a student whose behavior is troubling. Is the student just a bit strange or is what we are seeing a warning sign of future danger.

In one case the student had gone off his medication. After he verbally attacked and threatened with physical harm one of my colleagues in a class and the university became involved in the case the parents expressed upset that we had not alerted them to the situation. Explaining to them that we were not able to violate the students rights by contacting them until something happened that we could use to justify an emergency contact did not help. Faculty get trapped between the rights of the student as an independent adult and our en loco parentis (in the place of the parents) responsibility.

In another case, the student's only came alive when explosions or fires were discussed and placed his folding knife on the lab bench at the start of every lab in spite of my telling him every meeting to put it away. He never turned in a lab report all semester and was very hard to engage in conversation. After the end of that semester he did not come back to school and I often wonder what happened to him.

Every time there is an incident on a college campus right after I say a prayer for the victims and the faculty who will wonder if they could or should have done something to avoid the event, I think "There but for the grace of God go I".

T.S. Hall