Bloodless Coup

Faculty Killed, In Virginia and Iraq

I was struck by the fact the three of the first four names I've seen listed as killed in Blacksburg were faculty members.

Though of course Virginia Tech isn't the only place where professors have been killed this week.

In Mosul, gunmen killed the dean of the Political Science College and a professor at the city university's College of Arts on Monday, authorities said. The professor, Jaffar Hassan, was gunned down first, around 9 a.m. as he was going to work, police said. Talal Younis al-Jalili, the college dean, was shot dead outside Mosul University in central Mosul around 2:30 p.m., local police said.

And how did the dean of political science at Mosul University get his job in the first place?

But he has the dean's job only because his predecessor, Abdul Jabbar Mustafa, was taken at gunpoint from his house on New Year's Eve and shot twice in the head in one of a series of political assassinations in the northern Iraqi city that police have been unable to solve.

I mention these events, not to take anything away from what happened at Virginia Tech, but to note killings of professors, generally. Beyond that, one does wonder what our involvement in Iraq would look like, if every event there that's similar to what happened here at Virginia Tech got the same kind of coverage by the US media.