Richard O. Jones

And there's the case of a young Asian woman from Orange County who posed as a Stanford University freshman and simultaneously fooled the Santa Clara University's Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) program where she excelled in classes as a cadet. Until she was discovered May 20, 2007, Azia Kim, 18, spent eight months living at Stanford in two dormitories with unsuspecting roommates. Kim, who graduated from Troy High School in Fullerton last year and told people back home that she had been accepted to Stanford, apparently was able to keep up her deception at Stanford for almost an entire year. It was later learned that she didn't want her parents to find out that she was not accepted at Stanford; although she was accepted at UCLA her parents preferred Stanford, the more prestigious school.

The bloodiest massacre on a college campus in American history occurred in April 17, 2007 at Virginia Tech, which left 33 people, including the suspect, dead. According to university officials, 23-year-old Cho Seung Hui, a South Korean native who has lived in the United States since childhood, used a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun and .22-caliber pistol in the attacks. The suspect, who killed himself at the end of the rampage, was a senior English major who lived on campus. Cho, who was the brother of a State Department contractor who graduated from Princeton, was described by those who encountered him over the years as at times angry, menacing, disturbed and so depressed that he seemed near tears. Perhaps, in my opinion, part of his depression could stem from the fact that his brother graduated Princeton, a prestigious university, and Cho was not at such a distinguished school.

Asians have been at the center of news stories, in the past few months, involving campus chaos. In June, for instance, an Asian student named Audley Yong set a fire and called in a bomb threat to sabotage the graduation ceremony at UCR because he wasn't graduating and his parents had flown from Japan to see him graduate.

While Blacks are at the bottom of the totem pole academically, underrepresented in corporate America, and overrepresented in the penal system, they set the trend for what's cool in pop culture, and are apparently driven over the edge least often.  According to the National Institute of Mental Health in a 2004 report, Blacks are least likely to commit suicide or mass murder when compared to Asians and Whites, the two reining stars of American success. I just thought those statistics were interesting... umm.

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