From the very day after the Virginia Tech massacre I could smell marketing, what with all the Hokie flags, sweatshirts, and bumper stickers on display. At the time, I saw it as an opportunistic attempt to shore up an impersonal institution's image while giving people a chance to "care in public". The problem with this is that it downplays the personal tragedies of those murdered, who are far, far more important as human beings than as students who attended a university with a turkey for a mascot. However, many thought I was being too cynical.
As it turns out, I wasn't being cynical enough, because where there is massive marketing, there is also money to be made. Finally, some of the families of those murdered at Virginia Tech are speaking out against the commercialization of their loved ones' senseless deaths - for which the VT Administration bears a good deal of responsibility. I guess I felt it went without saying that VT would be selling all this merch and taking all this pity money and put it in their general fund for their own purposes. But I'm glad that the people who really knew the victims are speaking out against the university. Here's their statement:
We, as family members of the Virginia Tech victims, are both angry and disappointed. We are angry about being ostracized from a government-chartered panel investigating a government-sponsored university (Virginia Tech), and about how the university has used the names and images of our loved ones to raise millions of dollars without any consultation. We have many unanswered questions. We don't speak for everyone, but in addressing these issues we are speaking to issues and outcomes that affect families across this nation. We seek accountability to make our campuses safe for all our children and their teachers, and to remember that all the victims of this act were good people doing great things - that is our focus. We are of one mind that we must, and will, be represented by membership in the work of this panel. This is, in our minds, non-negotiable and the minimum this panel owes to us, the memories of our loved ones, and the future safety of our campuses across the Commonwealth, the nation, and the world. We want this panel to uncover the unbiased truth about the events and decisions of April 16th which took the lives of our loved ones, the events prior, and the reactions following, as the Governor's charge at the first meeting tasked. By collecting all the facts, the panel will be able to expose the flaws in Virginia Tech's academic student conduct, procedural, and mental health actions. Through such exposure, the university will be able to identify necessary changes to handling students with severe emotional and behavioral problems. The panel needs access to all of Cho's records, including immigration and mental health records, and we strongly support use of Crime Commission subpoena power to get them. The health privacy laws must be addressed in terms of the balance between patient privacy and the safety of those patients and the public around them; we do not accept that patient privacy is (or should be) the sole overriding criterion in making records available to those charged with public safety and security of our college campuses. Although not a focus of this meeting, we cannot let pass the point that sensible gun control measures are in no way incompatible with anyone's Constitutional rights and are at least as likely as some other recent suggestions to help prevent future tragedies of this nature. We are not advocating any particular solutions, but we are sure that having more guns more readily accessible on college campuses is not part of it. We are very concerned about the accountability of the Hokie Spirit Fund. We expect that a university which takes the names and images of 32 victims for vast fundraising purposes will, at the very least, consult with the families on how this money is raised and how it is being disbursed. This is not only a moral but a legal duty. Finally, we believe this goes well beyond the Commonwealth of Virginia, and that a federal commission needs to be empanelled to address the larger issues that affect all families and students across the nation.
While I don't agree with everything they're saying (especially the gun control stuff) they have a lot more of a right to bring it up than anybody else. Not enough to convince me, but enough to at least be respected. And I'm glad somebody with credibility is finally challenging the University's use of the massacre as a marketing ploy.
Hat tip to Matt Walters for the story.
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