Somebody stick a fork in it. We're done — at least for a while. The mercy of the academic calendar gives us a moment to step back and try to figure it all out.

Something is wrong with what we're doing in our colleges and universities in this country.

I'll admit it. And I'll say that evangelical Christian colleges and universities (I teach at one) aren't immune from missing the significance of moments like this. All of higher education is a journey — one we're frequently too busy to look at critically. Death among our students has a way of slowing us down.

At no time in recent memory was this more clear than the day — was it just weeks ago? — that an angry English major at Virginia Tech put a high-powered handgun to his head and pulled the trigger. Prior to that gun blast, this strangely quiet young man had systematically, calmly, silently killed fellow students and professors in ways that has put all of American higher education on notice. John Dewey was wrong. So was Walter Lippmann and others in the 1920s Progressive Movement who said the answer is our minds, not our souls.

Train up the children, Dewey believed. Do NOT depend on parents, and definitely avoid the influence of people like pastors or other clergy. No, train kids up to be thinking, reasoning adults — let them experiment, do not ever tell them they're wrong because they need to find that out themselves — and they will, ultimately choose well. They'll do the right thing because deep inside, they know what's good and their default is to choose what's best. (What's ironic is how many commencement speeches in the next couple weeks will have spouted this kind of drivel despite the looming clouds of Blacksburg behind them.) Where the whole thing falls apart, Dewey believed, was when moralistic adults step in and muck up the mix with admonitions about God's place in all these decisions.

Lewis P. Lipsitt, profesesor emeritus of psychology, medical science and human development at Brown University, last month in the Providence Journal reminded us again that there's just something about people — something deeply dark. He put it in terms perhaps only a biology-trained scientist would: "The human animal can be more destructive of its own species than and its living environment" than any other.

The truly frightening thing about Cho Seung-Hui was not his guns but his ego. This was a young man with the kind of mental focus necessary to plan a mass execution and time it in such a way that he layered his killing with ground-transport mail of his video, still-photo and written explanation for it all.

In an odd way, I look forward to the scholarly analyses of what happened in Blacksburg that snowy day. But what will be hard to take are those who will be claiming that this young man was a shy, unassuming person. No, he was an egotist
of a proportion that far surpasses those he called his egotistical persecutors — people he railed against for their wealth and self-love.

C.S. Lewis calls self-hate a kind of egotism that can be as destructive — perhaps more darkly forceful — as arrogant self-love.

"Deeply egotistic," Lewis says, "now with an inverted egotism, it uses the revealing argument, 'I don't spare myself" — with the implication "then a fortiori I need not spare others."