In interview after interview in newspapers and on TV, Ms. Giovanni has described a student whose behavior caused her creative writing class to drop from about 70 to 7 students in the fall of 2005.

"Once I realized my class was scared, I knew I had to do something," she told The Washington Post. So she confronted him about the dark sunglasses and maroon cap he would wear in class and the darker poetry that he would write.

The Washington Post wrote this morning:

"You can’t do that," she told him, referring to the "intimidating" poems. "You can’t make me," he replied. "Yeah, I can." Her next step was to lobby the department head, Lucinda Roy, writing a letter requesting he leave the class, she told CNN. And she was ready to go all the way. "I was willing to resign before I would continue with him," she told CNN. "It was the meanness."

The NY Times reported today that Professor Roy started teaching him in a one-on-one workshop, and it didn’t take long for her, too, to worry for her own safety, working out a secret alarm with her assistant. "If she mentioned the name of a dead professor, her assistant would know it was time to call security,"

Later in the CNN interview, Professor Giovanni said that reports on Monday that the gunman was Asian left "no doubt" in her mind who did it. Her interviewer’s shock led her to make something very clear.

"But I’m not prescient," she said. It almost sounded like an apology, one that will probably be repeated as more warning signs emerge.

Unfortunately Ms. Giovanni's insights into the potential danger Cho represented is a lesson learned only in hindsight of the tragedy.

Now every cop and FBI agent is a literary critic, seeing in Cho’s undergraduate plays dark hints of what was to come. But by that logic, Shakespeare (who wrote a play in which a woman is raped and then her tongue cut our and hands chopped off to prevent her revealing who did it) was a psychopath. Cho’s writing was one element in a larger, complex picture that no one could see completely.

The quandary for school administrators is that any number of eccentric loners may be students and they may also write morbidly violent compositions in a writing class. The problem is figuring out the students who may be dangerous to themselves or others. It gets into some very gray areas of the First Amendment when you start expelling students for violent content in their creative writing class.

We don't even know if expelling those students is safe because expelling a student with violent ideation may be the very event that triggers a killing rampage.

Ms. Giovanni made her controversial debut as a self described black revolutionary poet in 1968 with a volume of poetry entitled Black Judgment. Her influence on the black consciousness movement remains huge 4 decades later.