Despite the massive media fixation over the past 10 days on the murder of Yale graduate student Annie Le, the take-home message associated with this coverage has been wrong.

First, the murder was spun as the latest example of the growing problem of urban crime in New Haven, Conn. The off-campus location of the laboratory into which Annie Le was last seen entering was exhaustively referenced and examined by every cable news station covering the story.

Then, word got out that the building was actually a veritable fortress, complete with more than 75 surveillance cameras and requiring key-card access between rooms. So naturally the story became one of university crime, with a special focus on the 1998 unsolved murder of another Yale student, Suzanne Jovin. This focus, too, was cast aside when the New Haven police chief classified the murder last Thursday as an instance of “workplace violence.”

My initial reaction to this was: not so fast. The victim was a graduate student, and the alleged killer was a lab technician for the university. The murder occurred in a university lab. This crime clearly had a strong campus component to it.

This not only drew me into the story but it also sent a chill down my spine. My guess is that Le’s death also motivated a number of students — both graduate and undergraduate — in Madison to wonder what steps had and were being taken to protect them from something similar occurring on our campus.

That is why I am still somewhat surprised to find no response to or even acknowledgement of the murder from our UW administration. Nor has the chancellor’s office released a statement on the prevention or prevalence of workplace violence in the university setting. In lieu of even a banal reminder that we’re all safe at UW, I took a look at university policies myself.

Now, clearly with unpredictable acts of violence like these, considered extremely and terrifyingly rare, only so much can be done in terms of prevention. The most important thing any university can do to protect students who work with university staff is to perform background checks on potential and current non-student employees. As of 2007, UW indeed does these checks.

In terms of what has been done to address the growing problem of workplace violence in a downturn economy, UW is on less solid ground. While formal guidelines exist defining a) what constitutes workplace violence and b) how to report such violence on the university’s Office of Human Resources webpage, there is no available information on how to identify people at risk for committing violence, nor has there been any attempt by the university (in light of recent history) to distribute such information to student employees.

Unfortunately, most of us at UW have also been seriously affected by this kind of senseless, tragic and unforgivable act of violence.

This April will mark both the two-year anniversary of the murder of UW student Brittany Zimmermann and the three-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre. Tragedies like these behoove us to learn what we can in hopes of preventing similar incidents in the future. Zimmermann’s untimely death initiated public outcry and eventual reform of the Dane County 911 Center, as well as a call for renewed vigilance in preserving personal security.

However, Zimmermann’s death also likely disproportionately affected student perception of their safety on and around campus. And the Virginia Tech shootings even brought a call from some sectors to allow concealed carry of handguns in college classrooms.

Similarly, the murder of Le has spurned calls for the requirement of severely stringent personal background checks for future employees at Yale. Proponents here note that the alleged killer got into a fight with his girlfriend in high school, evidence that this whole thing could have somehow been prevented by such checks.

We must learn what we can from these events, but we must also be vigilant against our own instincts to make overly grandiose recommendations based on isolated and seemingly unpreventable acts of violence. The murder of Le is the latest such tragedy college students have had to face, and I, regrettably, can assure you it will not be the last.

That is why it is important we make the realistic processing of tragedies like these a priority. More than a few — in fact most of these events — cannot be meaningfully categorized, ascribed general meaning or even reasonably prevented. Instead, these tragedies, as Yale president Richard Levin put it, are often “… more about the dark side of the human soul than anything else.”

I would add also, Mr. Levin, the tenuousness and fragility of life.

Alec Slocum ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in philosophy and legal studies.