HOW DO YOU ANALYZE SUCH A SENSELESS DEATH

What happened at Southeast Missouri State University last week was tragic. A young life, full of promise, was brutally ended. The prospects of seven other students, now jailed and facing formidable legal battles, are clouded. The death of Michael Davis, victim of a beating that apparently took place as part of a fraternity hazing, is an astonishing waste. Look here for no silver lining. Lessons should be taken from this incident, but they are too grim to show as anything but tarnish.

How do you analyze such a short life and senseless death? The hopes and dreams of parents who sent Michael Davis to this university have been dashed. His siblings have been forever changed. His friends have been robbed. There will be no December commencement that would confer on him a degree. The world will not know his writing skills. Collectively, we are shortchanged a young man who, by all accounts, was respectful, good-natured, diligent and gifted. To repeat, the waste is astonishing.

We presume here no guilt of the persons who have been arrested in the death of Michael Davis. The courts will sort that out, and the prosecution of this very unusual case will be tricky. What appears to be a fact at this point, however, is that a 25-year-old student died of a beating, a horrible enough crime even if the elements of fraternity hazing were not mixed in.

The personal loss in this case -- to family, to friends, to the university community -- is overwhelming. One can not overlook, however, the institutional loss that has been suffered. In the competitive marketplace of higher education, Southeast Missouri State is a school necessarily concerned with its image. Its move to Division I athletics, its restructuring of academic programs and its elevated standards for admission all attest to that. However, neither CBS News nor CNN nor the New York Times has made inquiries about those things. Instead, the word distributed out from these national media outlets is that Southeast Missouri State played host to a hazing death, with one student losing his life and other students in jail because of it. A lot of good work is torn down by an act of fatal irresponsibility.

And, at a school where so much effort is spent on minority recruitment and where committees fret over the state of racial relations, the fact remains that there are 12 ? African-American students who won't attend classes this week that were attending six days ago. Could it be that some of the energy expended discussing diversity on campus might have been better directed toward assisting this fraternity toward more worthwhile pursuits?

If there is any word that sums up this whole sad incident, it is "failure." There were so many openings for people to step in and stop this tragedy, but not any were employed. How did the university fail to protect a young person from a campus organization with a history of abusive behavior? How did loved ones and friends fail to intercede when there were clear indications of a young man in trouble? How did fellow fraternity members, supposedly sworn to brotherhood, fail to interrupt the systematic violence that apparently prefaced membership in this group? In short, how does a student get slowly beaten to death in the environs of some of the finest minds in Cape Girardeau without anybody doing anything to stop it?

Some people will unfortunately use this incident to reinforce stereotypes about young people, university students or fraternities. The fact is that most young people are principled individuals, most university students are valued residents of this community and most fraternities are constructive organizations that corral the energy of male students in a positive way. However, the fraternities at Southeast Missouri State -- and those around the nation, for that matter -- will fall short of the leadership they espouse if they don't speak in unison now to condemn hazing as a part of initiation. Most fraternities have long since abandoned this archaic rite, but the message again needs to be amplified.

A memorial service will be held on campus this week for Michael Davis. There will be kind words said about the victim, well-deserved from what we now know about this man. However, at this service, there should also be a message conveyed, one that speaks not just to fraternities but to all members of the university community. It goes beyond intolerance for hazing. It must speak to people's obligations to one another. It must speak to the need to not turn a blind eye to violence. It must speak to helping a fellow human being in trouble. Above all, the word should go out that this sort of thing must never happen here again.