I went to a memorial service today, held by Cornell in honor of the students and faculty killed Monday at Virginia Tech. Non-denominational university “services” aren’t the sort of thing I normally attend, and it actually seemed a little funny to me that a memorial service would be held at all, since we have no specific connection with Virginia Tech. But my choir had been asked to sing for it, and my section was short of available people. The time was convenient for me. So I went. And actually, a surprising number of people showed up for the service.

It wasn’t as bad as I expected. I identified no obvious blasphemy, and the speeches, though basically silly, were at least short. I wasn’t sure how to feel about the fact that my choir was singing the final segment, In Paradisum from the Durufle Requiem Mass. I mean, on the one hand, it was nice to be singing something genuinely religious (and even intended to be sung on behalf of the dead!) but of course it’s distressing to skip all the intermediate stages (the praising and humbling oneself and pleading to be delivered from eternal death) and cut straight to the happy wishes about being welcomed home by the saints and martyrs. On the whole, though, the former consideration wins out. It’s good to be singing a religious piece, and things could get a lot worse. (Last fall, for example, we were asked to sing at a memorial service on the anniversary of September 11, and the selected piece was the setting of some ridiculous poem whose message was basically, “Though I personally have a special affection for my own country, I should never forget to acknowledge that every other country is basically just like mine.” That seemed to me a deeply offensive message to be promoting in honor of the anniversary of a national tragedy, almost like going to the funeral of a child and hearing in the eulogy, “Well, you had a special fondness for her pretty hair and rosy cheeks, but after all there are pretty, rosy-cheeked five-year-olds all over the world so don’t think yours was anything special.” If families of victims attended – quite likely in upstate New York – would that be a comforting thing to hear? I skipped that service in protest.)

One part did make me rather uncomfortable: they asked a member of the local Korean church to sing a song, and made a big point of the fact that it was coming from the Koreans. That seemed rather insensitive to me, and I heard a couple of Korean students later saying more or less what I was thinking: why was it necessary to draw special attention to the fact that the shooter, Cho Seung-Hui, was a Korean immigrant? What difference does that make? I suppose it’s a sort of novelty since Americans aren’t used to seeing Asian culprits in horrible crimes like this, but you can hardly imagine that they would have asked a black student group to make a special contribution at the service had the shooter been black. Anyway, the really ridiculous thing about that song was the selection: Panis Angelicus. This coming from a member of an evangelical-type church, at a service in which the Angelic Bread was certainly nowhere in proximity. I suppose to them it was just a nice song in Latin, but I was certainly aware of the absurdity.

What’s really sad about such events, though, is to see the extreme impoverishment of a “spiritual” service in which there is no tradition to draw on and God cannot be mentioned. We get randomly-selected songs whose significance nobody in the crowd understands. At the front of the chapel sat a table with some burning candles on it, which was never mentioned or touched throughout the service — were they supposed to represent prayers? It was never clear. In the three speeches and reflections (one by a faculty member whose son attends Virginia Tech, one from President Skorton, and one from the provost, Biddy Martin) the message emphasized over and over was: Virginia Tech is an awesome school, and we feel lots of solidarity with them. That was the whole message. Go Hokies.

What else can you say, really? You can’t say that God loves the deceased and died for them, and that we’re praying for their salvation. You can’t reflect on the moral value of bearing the cross for His sake. That means, of course, that very little can be said about why their deaths might have been meaningful. You can’t promise that goodness will prevail on the last day, that the dead will rise again, that justice will be satisfied, mercy offered and the world renewed. With every genuinely comforting message ruled out, there really isn’t anything to say except… Go Hokies. Wear your maroon and orange tomorrow, kids.

Actually, if they were honest, a university might find a lot of material for reflection in a tragedy like this one. School shootings have become a recognized phenomenon in America; Monday’s massacre, though shocking in its way, nonetheless fit into an already-identifiable type. What does this say about our society and our educational system? We can talk about whether guns are too readily available, and whether video games are corrupting the minds of the youth, but beyond these cliché issues, surely there’s something more to be said about a societal phenomenon where every few years some alienated youth both feels and acts upon the impulse to kill his classmates.

One thing, at least, seems to be indicated, and the Doctor and I were discussing this today. We appear to have lost the notion of schools or universities as moral communities. Actually, outside of parishes or families, we may have lost moral communities altogether; certainly neighborhood blocks and workplaces don’t seem to function as such anymore. But for all the talk recently about what a wonderful and warm community Virginia Tech has, it’s obvious that everything couldn’t have been wonderful. One person at least was unhappy in Virginia. And when Cho Seung-Hui’s writing teacher brought some of his extremely disturbing work to the university administration suggesting that he might be psychologically unstable, the answer seems to have been, more or less, “Well, there’s nothing we can do about that.” The young man was, I believe, advised to seek counseling. He declined to do so, and that was the end of it. (I don’t mean to pick on Virginia Tech, by the way – I’m sure it would have been more or less the same at almost every other university in America.)

Well, you can’t arrest someone for writing nasty stories, but surely a college administration could do a little more? Could they, perhaps, make a psychiatric evaluation mandatory for students who show signs of being dangerous or unstable, and, for those who need it, make their attendance of counseling sessions mandatory under penalty of expulsion? Discussing this with the Doctor, I do remember Notre Dame being relatively proactive about looking after freshman students, at least. In my early months at the university I was required to have meetings with a whole slew of people (rector, RA, freshman advisor, senior undergraduate mentor, etc.) who all opened the conversation with the same question (“How are you adjusting?”) and asked me about my drinking habits. (I didn’t drink at all… still don’t.) I found this rather irksome at the time, since I felt perfectly fine and not in need of all these interviews, but in retrospect I can see the reasoning. I happened to be a “low risk” student, but the truth is that 18-year-olds are pretty immature and a lot of them probably need all the help the school can provide. Notre Dame also had some rules intended to raise the level of public morality. The no-sex rules were taken seriously and we had enforced parietals and quiet hours. In my dormitory we were not permitted to write obscene or offensive messages on other people’s marker boards, and students across the university were not permitted to hang pornographic pictures on their bedroom walls.

I do think, then, that Notre Dame was a good step up from many schools in the country, which isn’t to say that the environment was wholesome in every respect. But could a school like Cornell implement even relatively modest “morality” rules like Notre Dame’s? Attending a service like that, one tends to doubt it. In order to foster a moral community, the university would need some kind of moral foundation from which to draw. It is more than evident that they do not, and since they aren’t comfortable standing in loco parentis anyway, they’re not really looking for one. Students are customers, and customers can’t be told what to do, Given the sort of environment this creates, it’s not that surprising that particular people with poor social skills can come to see the university environment as The Enemy, nor is it surprising that such people are allowed to fester in their own hatred until every once in awhile they snap.

Youth ought to be a time when both intellectual and moral formation are given together. These can be mutually reinforcing when they are imparted simultaneously and in the right way. Schools like Cornell have virtually no hope of building such a model in any robust way, simply because they don’t have the spiritual resources, but others around the country might take note. Making people smarter without tending to their souls is a risky business.

President Skorton emphasized over and over in his speech today that Cornell and Virginia Tech are “of one family.” The idea seemed to be that they were alike merely in virtue of both being universities, and that made us a family. It seemed like a bit of a stretch to me at the time, but perhaps it really wasn’t. The memorial service itself, through its essentially vacuous nature, emphasized that Cornell is a community with no moral foundation, no sense of human purpose, and no resources for forming the characters of young people. Perhaps the same was true in Virginia.