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UVa-Wise Iraq vet hopes hearing will reverse being thrown out of school over essay

WISE — Today a student at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise may learn whether school officials are convinced he’s nothing like the character he described in a story his creative writing class found disturbing on Feb. 28.

Steven Daniel Barber, 23, an Iraq veteran who enrolled at UVa-Wise in August, was expelled Feb. 29, the day after sharing a story he wrote about a character in an English class who contemplates murdering his professor before turning to thoughts of suicide.

Chancellor David Prior heard an appeal of the expulsion Monday. Though Prior was unavailable to comment, Barber said Prior will announce today whether he will uphold his expulsion. At the time of his expulsion, Barber had been working on a double major in political science and administration of justice and maintained a GPA of 3.9.

“One of the first stories that we read was about a girl who murders her boyfriend, and it was graphic in the act with the blade going in his back and blood spraying everywhere and all this crazy stuff. And you know, a couple of us told jokes — you know, I don’t want to date her, that kind of thing. But nobody took it seriously because everybody can separate the author from the character,” Barber said Monday.

“In my story there is no violence. He doesn’t do anything other than drinking and drug use and writing. There is no violence. But yet, everybody assumes that the character is the writer, which couldn’t be further from the truth,” he added.

After he submitted the story, officials searched Barber’s dorm room for the weapon his character kept under a pillow. Though no weapons were found there, Barber told Sgt. Randy Wyatt with campus police he had a .45-caliber handgun, a small .22-caliber Derringer, and a 9 mm handgun in his car and that he had a permit for them.

Barber said he believes a policy prohibiting weapons on campus violates state law prohibiting governmental entities from restricting the possession of firearms.

Barber added that he often refers to what happened at Grundy’s Appalachian School of Law as an example of why students should be allowed to have guns on campus.

“This guy goes in, he shoots — I think he killed three people — and two students run out to their cars, they get their weapons, they get their pistols, and they run back inside and subdue the guy. Nobody remembers that because it had a low body count, and the reason it had a low body count is because two students ran back inside with their weapons and subdued the killer,” he said.

The discovery of the weapons coupled with the story his classmates found disturbing led campus officials to require Barber to undergo a series of mental heath evaluations. As part of the process, he was escorted by campus police to a Frontier Health facility in Big Stone Gap.

Wyatt said in a report that he was waiting in the lobby while Barber met with a counselor. Wyatt said he received a page from Dean Jewell Worley. Wyatt said in the report that Worley then told him that Barber was “going to be committed” and had been expelled and banned from school property pending a March 6 hearing with Vice Chancellor Gary Juhan.

Wyatt was not available to explain what he meant by the term “committed,” but Campus Safety Chief Steve McCoy said Monday that it meant Barber was “involuntarily transported” to Ridgeview. Temporary detainment is “similar” to involuntary commitment, “as far as a police officer is concerned,” he added.

“A TDO (temporary detainment order) is different from commitment,” Barber said. “TDO is just that some crisis counselor decided there was probable cause that you are crazy. Involuntary committal is when the judge says, not only is there probable cause, it’s decided that you actually are crazy.”

Commonwealth’s Attorney Marcus McClung said Monday that the differences between detainment and committal are not relevant to Barber’s case. His handgun permit would have been suspended during the execution of the TDO, he said, and to reinstate it Barber would just need to present favorable evidence at an appeal, such as a finding of mental competence.

When asked whether possession of the handguns on campus might still warrant the student’s expulsion, Juhan said, “There’s nothing that’s that clear-cut.”

“Each case is looked at individually — given the history, given the events that surround it and what got us to that point,” he added.

Barber said his last run-in with Juhan concerned the vice chancellor’s attempts to censor an underground newspaper he and some friends distribute on campus.

“Notes from Underground” concerns college politics, with varied topics including the lack of an American flag on campus and the possibility of racism affecting how the SGA handles funds distribution, Barber said.

As for his questionable story, Barber concluded, it’s “just a free speech issue.”

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It's odd the political correct universities tolerate left-wing and Islamo-fascist hate speech, including their calls for the murder of Jews and Christians. This is ignored all the time.

In another case a student was brought up on hate crime charges for flushing a Koran down a toilet!

Many colleges glorify murderers such a Che Guevara. They glorify Yassar Arafat, the father of modern Islamic terrorism.

This is absurd to the extreme. As a vet myself I know for a fact there's a lot of hostility towards the military in general in many universities.

Let's recall the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy where an unqualified Nigerian got in on a race quota, gunned down several people, but was stopped before another VT style slaughter because two people just like Barber had guns in their cars and stopped him. The Grundy incident is fact.

In this case there was no due process. The is the same problem at Northeast State where a mere accusation of sexual harassment is an automatic expulsion and the accused isn't even allowed to know who the accuser even is.
This was according to officials at that time. Both I and another vet blasted the policy as an attack on the Constitution. They claimed the Constitution doesn't apply on campus.



Somebody has to decide in a state college that state law is the law and they can't make up their own laws to suit their political views.

Kitty Hegemann | 3/11/2008 - 3:56 PM - (Suggest Removal )

I think this man is a victim of what I call the crazy veteran syndrome. It happened after the Vietnam War too. Everyone assumes that the vets coming back from war are all twisted psychopaths and are like ticking time bombs waiting to go off. A lot of TV shows and movies used the crazy veteran as its' plot back then. Now as more Iraq vets come back and try to integrate back into society it seems to be happening again and this seems to be an example of it. This guy just wrote a story for his creative writing class. If he were antisocial and acting strange I'd check on him but it doesn't seem to be the case. Remember, the last time someone shot up a campus and killed students it wasn't a veteran.

Joe Allison | 3/11/2008 - 11:15 AM - (Suggest Removal )

This is a travesty. He is a Iraq war veteran, he kept his permitted firearms secure in his car, and they are censoring the fiction he is writing. I am not surprised that someone who has recently served our country would be writing fiction that features violence. Tom Clancy, Stephen King, many thousands of authors and film writers and TV screenplay writers all write similar stories for which they make a living and are not expelled from school and treated as a criminal.

Jeremiah Jones | 3/11/2008 - 1:00 AM - (Suggest Removal )

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