Is higher education higher in the moral sense? One way to consider the question is to reflect on the occasions when it clearly isn’t. Most of the carnage on campus in recent years has been the work of students, often acting out of academic resentments.
On August 15, 1996, Mr. Frederick Davidson, a thirty-six-year-old student who had failed his first attempt to defend his master’s degree thesis, “Characteristics of Torsional Shape Memory Alloy Actuators,” went before his examining committee at San Diego State University a second time. A few minutes into the defense, he opened a laboratory first-aid kit, took out a 9-mm handgun, and fired more than twenty rounds of ammunition into the three engineering professors who comprised the committee. Mr. Davidson later explained to police that his thesis advisor had bogged him down with extraneous assignments.1
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