No Right to Remain Silent

What We've Learned from the Tragedy at Virginia Tech

By: Lucinda Roy

Narrated by: Lucinda Roy

Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins

Publisher's summary

The world watched in horror in April 2007 when Virginia Tech student Seung-Hui Cho went on a killing rampage that resulted in the deaths of thirty-two students and faculty members before he ended his own life. Former Virginia Tech English department chair and distinguished professor Lucinda Roy saw the tragedy unfold on the TV screen in her home and had a terrible realization. Cho was the student she had struggled to get to know–the loner who found speech torturous. After he had been formally asked to leave a poetry class in which he had shared incendiary work that seemed directed at his classmates and teacher, Roy began the difficult task of working one-on-one with him in a poetry tutorial. During those months, a year and a half before the massacre, Roy came to realize that Cho was more than just a disgruntled young adult experimenting with poetic license; he was, in her opinion, seriously depressed and in urgent need of intervention. But when Roy approached campus counseling as well as others in the university about Cho, she was repeatedly told that they could not intervene unless a student sought counseling voluntarily. Eventually, Roy’s efforts to persuade Cho to seek help worked. Unbelievably, on the three occasions he contacted the counseling center staff, he did not receive a comprehensive evaluation by them–a startling discovery Roy learned about after Cho’s death. More revelations were to follow. After responding to questions from the media and handing over information to law enforcement as instructed by Virginia Tech, Roy was shunned by the administration. Papers documenting Cho’s interactions with campus counseling were lost. The university was suddenly on the defensive. Was the university, in fact, partially responsible for the tragedy because of the bureaucratic red tape involved in obtaining assistance for students with mental illness, or was it just, like many colleges, woefully underfunded and therefore underequipped to respond to such cases? Who was Seung-Hui Cho? Was he fully protected under the constitutional right to freedom of speech, or did his writing and behavior present serious potential threats that should have resulted in immediate intervention? How can we balance students’ individual freedom with the need to protect the community? These are the questions that have haunted Roy since that terrible day. No Right to Remain Silent is one teacher’s cri de coeur–her dire warning that given the same situation today, two years later, the ending would be no less terrifying and no less tragic.

©2009 Lucinda Roy (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

Words needed in the wake of a tragedy

Inside the tragedy of Virginia Tech, from the point of view of one of the most critical insiders Roy shares her experience as Seung-Hui Cho’s advisor, survivor of the tragedy and spokeswoman for the victims. Roy explores how Cho’s disturbing writings and the failures of a academic system and not withstanding her own to prevent such a tragedy. Shifting condemning common public attitudes such as “they (the victims) were in the wrong place at the wrong time”, Roy acknowledges the reality of issues like academics privacy, the Gun Show Loophole, and the handling of active shooter situations on campus. But Roy also uses her literary gifts to both bring a message of healing and of refusal to allow the tragedy to define Virginia Tech yet still acknowledging the emptiness it has created for the community. As someone who knows both many Tech alumni and lived near both Cho and many of the victims (I was in the 7th Grade at the time of the tragedy), I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to understand the tragedy.

First few chapters ok

A lot of the same information repeated. Not a lot of information. Narrator has a great presentation, just not impressed with the information given.