Madness at Virginia Tech: doing nothing about the kid behind the sunglasses.(Seung-Hui Cho)

NIKKI GIOVANNI, a Virginia Tech English professor, is an African-American poetess of the Maya Angelou school. At a memorial service after the slaughter of 32 people, she compared the shootings to a "baby elephant watching his community be devastated for ivory," and to a baby dying in Appalachia when his house is "run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized."

Judging by those comparisons, she certainly believes more than her share of liberal hokum and is definitely not the "judgmental" type. But she reacted the way any commonsensical person would when the non-responsive, sunglass-wearing Seung-Hui Cho was in one of her classes--she demanded that he be removed. On CNN's Larry King Live, she said, "And I did what I should do, which was tell my supervisor he's got to go or I'm going to resign." So far, so good.

Then she went on to explain that it wasn't "obvious" that Cho was dangerously disturbed, although "he did ugly things" and Giovanni was notionally ready to resign rather than be in the same room with him. "You can't just go plucking them out because they may do something," she said of students with problems. She professed even to consider it a kind of risk to insist that he leave her class: "What if he had graduated and ...