In this article, the author hopes that educators can begin a long-overdue public discussion about how they encourage and defend their students' civil liberties--while doing a lot more to enhance their safety. To start, they need to confront the problem that nearly all their students, like their children, believe that "ratting out" a friend or fellow student is a far worse offense than shutting up. In college-student culture, you don't rat. Not about your fake ID, not about the drug dealer in the next dorm, not about the gun you heard about across campus, not about the fraternity's term-paper bank, not about an athlete's no-show "job." However, college students are on their way to becoming adults. And adults need to move beyond adolescent peer bonding. The author is not proposing that students become a nation of campus informers, but that if they are going to have a chance of stopping future massacres, just like the tragedy that happened at Virginia Tech, they will have to spend as much time talking about community members' responsibility to the whole as they talk about the right to "do one's own thing."