My opinion: "Psycho"s can be admitted to any college. They often have not committed offenses that rise to the level that gets them barred from colleges until they do something like murder. They may have engaged in relationship violence but often none has been reported to authorities until they do physical damage that they can’t hide.
But at Binghamton there have been numerous grisly horrid situations that, in my opinion, have been handled poorly.
Students were not warned after one of the murders that there was possibly a murderer in their midst until much later-at which point that person could have killed many others-it was just luck that nobody else was killed during the period after the murder was discovered and before the campus was notified. The campus should have been in lock down. It was not. A long time ago a faculty member was stabbed to death by a student. Warning signs had been ignored. There is now mounting evidence that the university under-estimates the danger posed by dangerous individuals even after they threaten others. They view many situations as not posing credible threats even when threats are explicit and when the perpetrator appears to have a history of assaults. They’ve been wrong in the past.
There have been other questionable deaths. A student was killed, supposedly by a hit and run. The driver was identified but many students (and apparently the young woman’s mother) feel (and there appears to be supporting evidence) that there was more to the story than the woman, a highly ranked tennis player, was simply hit by the car.
A student was killed falling off a balcony during a party. Some students apparently blame the university-rightly or wrongly-because the administration apparently scheduled a very brief oddly scheduled break to coincide with a very popular downtown event called the Binghamton pub crawl. Somewhat in retaliation, students apparently held their own “pub crawl” on a date that the school was in session. But because it did not coincide with the city’s “pub crawl” there was lack of the oversight that there is when the parties involve the city. I don’t believe there were any deaths caused by the pub crawl itself. A better approach would be for the university to acknowledge that the event is probably many students’ favorite event of the year and to try to make it safer for students rather than to try to work a (bizarre) schedule around the event.
A better administration would help a lot.