NCSU Engineering, Agriculture, Terrorism
I have to admit, I feel a little guilty about the title, but I woke up to NPR talking about this and it really hit me that hard. In a nutshell, one of the people wanted for questioning in connection with the London Tube bombing happened to be a student at NCSU. Here's a news article.
The thing that gets me most is all universities pride themselves on making better people by offering quality educations. Even if you don't care for Wolfpack Red you can't deny that it is a really good school that draws students both locally nationally and internationally. No one can deny that it is something to be proud of.
And students who go to universities are in an environment where they can experience new and different thoughts, ideas, and customs. See it, experience it, and make decisions about it that shape the rest of your life. If you doubt this just look at any universities listing of student run organizations. College is the time to try new things, grow your hair out, color it purple, shave your head, or pierce something.
And now we have these black marks reoccuring where someone comes to a place of learning, experiences new things, takes away great knowledge, and uses it in ways no one ever imagined.
What's the answer? There isn't one that I can see. If you limit who you allow to gain knowledge you destroy the whole reason for doing it. It is certainly not the Universities responsibility to profile and deny based on the possiblity that someone will use their knowledge for something other than the greater good. All they can do is offer the tools to do so and hope that the experiences of the student drive them down that path.
In this I guess the universities are successful, surely at least 50% of all university graduates manage to keep from breaking the law, or wantonly hurt others. (I almost wrote 90% and then I remembered Enron, I'm betting those guys had MBAs. There goes the curve.)
