The Classroom Conservative

Reading Robert Fulford Reading Gertrude Stein

I had a surreal moment reading the National Post recently.  Robert Fulford devoted a column on the first page of the “Arts & Life” section to Gertrude Stein.  Really, it was a discussion of Two Lives, Janet Malcolm’s book on Gertrude Stein, but, still, there they were: the words “Gertrude Stein” above the fold in a national newspaper.  Fulford did a nice job introducing Stein to people who know the name but know little else about the author, but the real thrust of the article was Malcolm’s apparent suggestion that readers give another chance to The Making of Americans (1925), Stein’s most imposing, impenetrable tome.  As a fan of Gertrude Stein who teaches her work regularly, I can ease the troubled consciences of Post readers: it is not necessary.  Over nearly a thousand pages, Stein carries out her experiments in modernist composition.  She repeats herself in what those people familiar with her work will recognize as her signature gestures.  The measured “action” establishes both her ideas about time, or how we perceive time, and the conventions of plot.  The sprawling story of family allows Stein to explore themes relevant to human relationships.  Like the critic Edmund Wilson, quoted in Fulford’s column, I got through about half of The Making of Americans in my first semester at Oxford.  But I found excellent illustrations of what Stein was trying to do in two shorter, more accessible books.

   

Three Lives (1909) was Gertrude Stein’s first published novel, brought forward by a vanity press soon after she moved to France.  My students often grumble that it is slow, but by writing it the way she does Stein manages to subvert assumptions we make about rising action in novels.  Life does not move towards some inexorable, dramatic climax, and neither do these stories.  Readers can gather evidence that we both act in keeping with our natures and learn our behaviors as we go along; Stein remains equivocal on this point.  Most importantly, Stein undertakes Three Lives with a “painterly” technique.  Using her “insistence,” that is repetition to you and me, she emulates the strokes of a paintbrush, creating a surface narrative that hints at greater depth.  What she does not do, just as her cubist friends did not do, is privilege one element of her composition above another.  She does not isolate for her readers points that are important, and mundane details are treated in much the same way as details on which the plot should, presumably, turn.

   

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), on the other hand, is far less frustrating to student readers.  Supposedly, the book is the story of the life of Stein’s long-time partner, but on the last page – spoiler alert! – the author is revealed to be Gertrude Stein herself.  Today, we are somewhat more savvy about autobiography: James Frey taught Oprah Winfrey that we cannot always trust the “facts” of an author’s “truth.”  But Stein was playing with the conventions of life narrative all this time ago.  The result is an intriguing, indirect look at her life in Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century.  What it reveals most for me is how modern authors used autobiography to engage their ambiguous relationship with fame.  While writers like Stein wanted a healthy readership so as to measure their success, many of them believed that only a few people could really appreciate what they were trying to do.  One can see Stein struggling with the paradox throughout this autobiography.

Monsters on Campus

It has taken me some time to get there, but I think on balance it was a mistake to have Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the campus of Columbia University.

   

I agree with those people who have cynically interpreted Columbia President Lee Bollinger’s excoriating introduction of Ahmadinejad as a reaction to the criticism the university had already received.  But let us just for a moment imagine that this had always been Dr. Bollinger’s intention; let us imagine that Columbia wanted to bring Ahmadinejad to campus to revile him, once and for all, as one of the globe’s genuine menaces.  It was a dangerous risk to believe Dr. Bollinger could thus unmask Ahmadinejad in that forum.  Luckily, in a sense, the Iranian President does that for us whenever he opens his mouth – but, then, in simply reinforcing something we already know, Columbia ran the risk of granting his views some measure of legitimacy and giving him an opportunity to twist and spin what he says.  There was absolutely no upside to Bollinger’s “debate”: he could only win what had already been won, and he could have potentially lost much more to Ahmadinejad.

   

I would like to leave open the possibility that there is a forum where monsters can regularly be called to account.  Look at how the Nuremberg Trials, beyond achieving its measure of justice, revealed the face of evil and influenced international law. I have nothing but respect for the minds at work on our college campuses, and I cannot say categorically that our universities should not play a role in creating such forums.  In fact, I think universities should discuss contentious ideas daily, and that is why I have struggled with this issue.  I am also uncomfortable in branding people as inappropriate for a college audience.  In this polarized world, you too often revile the person whose views I respect, and vice versa.  But, every now and then, people emerge who should not be heard in an academic environment – as obviously as the public good is not served by shouting “fire” in secure movie house – and we need to have the good sense to banish these people, people like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in spite of our morbid curiosity.

Farewell To The Record Store

From behind a two-way mirror in the back of the store I watched them.  It was a holiday crowd, and John Mellencamp’s The Lonesome Jubilee was on the CD player.  All the customers, all seventy-five of them, say, were dancing to “Cherry Bomb” as they browsed.  It was a remarkable moment of Christmas cheer in the early 1990s, a testimony to the power of music, a wonderful memory of how much fun it was to work in a record store.  With all apologies to my current employer, it was the best job I ever had, and I did it for five years at $5.75 an hour.  It struck me last week that this memory truly belongs to another era, like working as a blacksmith or perhaps the person who went around lighting streetlamps.  I bet the VCR repairman thought he had a job for life, too.  You see, with a few minutes to kill after work, recently, I wandered by my local record store and found it shuttered.  Out of business.  And I am left to lament the end of the record store as I knew it.

   

Now I want to be very clear here: I worked for Sam the Record Man in St. John’s, Newfoundland from 1987 to 1992.  It was part of a large chain, though in my earliest months there it had all the charm of a small, independent store like that in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.  Similarly, the store that closed here in Lethbridge was an outlet of A&B Sound.  But what these chain stores had in common, and had in common with the independents, was a deep back catalogue and a staff that was legitimately interested in music.  (Scott, wherever you are: you were smart enough to jump before the roof caved in, and I hope you’re gainfully employed.)  Many of the large stores today have clerks who would just as soon be serving in the food court if there was an extra buck in it, and these places really exist only to move a few hundred units of the newest releases, anyway.  The small music store – two of my favorites are Fred’s in St. John’s and Megatunes in Calgary – cannot compete pricewise on these chart toppers, squeezing then what can be devoted to the overhead necessary to maintain that back catalogue.  I dare you to try to find a copy of Camper Van Beethoven’s Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart or Graham Parker’s The Mona Lisa’s Sister or Danny Wilson’s debut at Best Buy.  I dare you to find a clerk at Future Shop who has heard of them.  The used CD shops are cool, but more often than not they have only a dozen copies of Celine Dion’s last record, discarded by teenagers trying to pay their cellphone bills.

   

The record stores of the future will surely be organized around downloads.  Many American bookstore chains have developed hybrid book and music collections that are hinted at in some of our larger Chapters stores.  I suspect that once Heather Reisman figures out that I do not want to buy bric-a-brac from her, Chapters will move faster in this direction.  Starbucks partnering with iTunes to encourage coffee shop downloads hints at the ultimate convergence.  I hope only that, having sampled a song, I’ll still have the option, ultimately, to buy the CD, hold it in my hands, and not simply download more.  For while the ability to buy an individual selection is fantastic, there will never be anything quite like having the disc, keeping it on the shelf with all the others, safe against hard drive implosion.  Surely, these new places will sell expensive coffee, but maybe the local metalhead or the garage musician or the college radio DJ will get to brew it for us, talking about music as they do so.  Maybe, if we’re really lucky, the best of these new record stores will still have a back catalogue where I’ll be able to buy a copy of The Lonesome Jubilee.

My iPod Hates the CRTC

Okay, it is not really the CRTC it hates, I suppose. But the antiquated media in this country is somehow symbolized for us by the CRTC, right? It represents all that is backward thinking, slow-to-react, and nanny state-ish about the way we are organized. It is the reason why I had to wait years before Fox News was introduced in this country, long after it had established itself as the most popular cable media outlet in the United States. It is the reason why I have to buy my favorite television channels “bundled” with things in which I have no interest. It is the reason why the songs I like on the radio are paired with songs aired only because their airing helps achieve a mandate of promoting something labeled nebulously as “Canadian culture.” I suspect it is the reason why our cell phone service is so lousy in this country, and I am wondering if they might not be behind global warming and third-world hunger somehow, as well.

Woody Guthrie’s guitar used to have a slogan on it that read “This machine kills fascists,” in bold letters. “This machine kills old-fashioned media,” my iPod should say.

If I am late to the MP3/MP4/podcasting thing, I apologize. But having caught the fever, I am an enthusiastic advocate. I leave my house in the morning with all the songs I want to hear. I can play Richard Thompson’s 1991 album Rumor and Sigh without rummaging for it, and if this reminds me that I have not heard Fairport Convention’s “Matty Groves” in some time, I can click to hear that, too. Inevitably, this takes me to Sandy Denny’s solo work. For someone with a short attention span, this revolutionizes how I listen to music. I can happily pay a dollar to hear OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” without a whole album I do not want. But if, having bought Serena Ryder’s cover of “Good Morning Starshine,” I like what she is about, I can go to the record store and buy her whole If Your Memory Serves You Well.  (I did; you should, too.)  Similarly, I leave with the podcast of the New York Times book review and National Public Radio’s program on popular culture. I can even listen to Chris Evans, the British media darling of the mid-1990s, try his comeback on BBC radio. But Canada’s mothercorp need not worry: I can load lots of CBC programming, but I can make my CBC a George Stroumboulopoulous-free zone!

There are still drawbacks, of course. I am always a day behind in listening to Pardon the Interruption, ESPN’s sports talk program. And this program, like Bill Mahar’s excellent Real Time, is still audio without video. Even though I have the most memory yet available on iPod, I assume anything beyond a few minutes of video is prohibitively large. I love talk radio, and live talk radio is best. We still need to integrate, say, satellite radio with podcasting more effectively to combine the thrill of live programming with full choice. I still cannot control podcasts fully. If I miss a title of a book reviewed, I have to wait to get back to my computer to browse to the part of the hour-long program to retrieve it. But the revolution has started in the palm of my hand, and these little obstacles will not stop it. I do not even care that I have to listen to commercials or that I will, eventually and inevitably, have to pay for more content. I just want control.

It is the fault of the media nanny state. There is no doubt. By forcing conventional media to program to our differences, they have not brought us together: they have driven us away into our narrow little worlds. I can sometimes get the news I need, but I have to watch Peter Mansbridge do a slow survey of every little pocket of the globe to get it. On a recent Sunday night before a holiday, we lost electricity service for a couple of hours, an uncommon occurrence in the land of buried power lines. I could get all kinds of media reports about the diversity of the global village, but I could not find out what was happening to me, here. Then, at the point that we lose sight of ourselves in this multitude of images we see, we are encouraged to see ourselves without defining features at all. Unable to arrange holiday programming for every possible combination, for example, the system collapses onto itself with generic “happy” greetings. This is why, the rest of the year, popular programming is so milquetoast. When I have to wait in line for my niche programming or accept some generic pablum, I go off and create a world of my own, down the end of the little earbuds coming out of my iPod.

I assure you that know the dangers of insularity, incestuous thinking that is never challenged. I am not looking for an escapist little world of my making. On-line music services automatically review your purchases and listening habits and suggest things of which you have never heard. This is how I discovered folk singer Jolie Holland, for example. (I recommend, most heartily, Escondida from 2004, if you have not heard it.) This is the answer to the “Canadian content” issue, by the way. Are you listening to Kris Kristofferson? How about some Murray McLaughlin, then? Like Elvis Costello? Do you know that he recommends Ron Sexsmith? I think it is important to balance my Fawlty Towers with my King of Kensington, my Bill O’Reilly with my Rex Murphy. But I do not need to CRTC to tell me that. Oh, and incidentally, when my computer is networked, I instruct iTunes to share its contents freely. No one can “steal” my music, but they can freely choose to sample the widest range of my interests. That is more than the CRTC, on a broader scale, lets me do, willingly.

The English Professor’s Pet Peeve: “Amount” or “Number”

Have you noticed how no one makes the distinction between “amount” and “number,” anymore?  I hear students complain about the amount of classes they have to attend.  I hear announced the amount of hockey games upcoming.  I really hate it when I hear people talk about the amount of people attending a given event.

   

“Amount” is used to discuss things that cannot be individually counted.  There is a great amount of suffering in the world.  I have an unbelievable amount of work to do.  Students may have an unreasonable amount of reading.  Things that can be separated have a “number.”  I guarantee you that there are a great number of people suffering.  I have a number of tasks to complete.  I assign my students a number of texts.

   

I like to draw this distinction because I think it is important to separate ethereal concepts from tangible objects, and language lets us do that effectively.  There is no amount of arguing, there are no number of arguments that will change my mind.

An Unlikely Defender of Socialists

I spent this afternoon a lovely half-hour with my friends at Adler Online.  (Hi, Peggy Chapman!)  Judging from the traffic on this site afterwards, some of you heard it as well.  Charles Adler is such a generous radio show host, and there are few experiences as pleasant as settling in with him as he answers calls from his listeners, the Adler Nation.  I made the point, regarding the debate about petroleum royalties in Alberta, that there are few insults more potent out this way than calling someone a socialist.  But it is folly to suggest, as some people have, that royalties on big oil represent a socialist coup.  Economists like to refer to royalties as taxes, but I see them as the paying of rent.  In any case, one of Mr. Adler’s callers misunderstood me and thought I was defending socialism and a careful government control of the oil sands in Northern Alberta.  Nothing could be further from the truth!  The unfairly generous royalty scheme that attracted wary investors to the oil patch in the 1990s is a classic example of government intervention, necessary then, perhaps, but representing unwarranted meddling in a market economy now.  I read the 105-page report on this topic to the provincial government, and the recommendations to raise royalties would still leave the oil sands a better investment than everywhere save the former Soviet republics and the Gulf of Mexico.

   

What was very clear from the discussion on Adler is that some people outside Alberta resent the wealth in this province.  Because Alberta has a surplus that our government has not always managed well, few people seem outraged at the fire sale of a non-renewable resource going on in Fort McMurray.  This reminded me of an experience I had when I first moved West.  I was at a grocery store in Calgary, and the shopping carts there had the now-familiar mechanism that requires a loonie to separate the locks.  I found many of the carts that day still scattered around the parking lot; the minute it took to return the units was not worth the dollar to busy people.  I find that attitude deplorable.  In fact, I would say that precisely because Alberta has so much, we have an even greater responsibility to manage responsibly what we have.  And as long as there are still health care premiums in this province – heck, as long as there is still a provincial income tax – I hope all Canadians support ensuring that big oil pays a fair share to do business in the oil sands.

Let's All Play by the Same Rules, Shall We?

According to Jon Harding’s story in today’s National Post, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers have their “mouths wide open” in shock at the report of an Alberta panel that recommends the province increase dramatically its royalty take from oil and gas development.  May I remind the thin-skinned men and women of the CAPP that there are many systems by which we might organize ourselves, and collectively we have found capitalism to work best.  It is centered around the market forces of supply and demand.  As it stands, the province of Alberta has oil and gas (the supply) and to keep your business going you require it (the demand).  I bought a fuel-inefficient jeep with gasoline prices at 48.5 cents a litre, and I had to revise my own “business plan” when that price doubled: I bought a small sedan.  The oil patch may have to change the way it does things going forward, but we all know that no one is going to pull out of Alberta -- just as we all know I am not going to stop driving entirely.  And before anyone begrudges me my tiny ownership stake in the oil sands, remember that it is the market in which I live and work that has been petroleum heated these past years.

   

It seems very clear that before any combination of cheap alternative fuels allows us ever again to ship products to remote parts of Canada from all over the world without thinking about the long-term viability of this strategy, we will have squeezed all the oil and gas out of North America.  It is true that we need someone to extract all these petroleum products, and every time our furnaces cut in we should be grateful to the current operators for doing that.  They have the infrastructure in place, and it is much more efficient for them to keep going than it is to replace them.  So, might we lose their future investment, as Claudia Cattaneo argues in her Post piece?  That is unlikely, owing to the fact that we are the only game going.  Where else will CAPP members put their money?  The middle east?  Mexico?  How about into fuel cells?  That has not worked out so well for those well-meaning Ballard folks on the West Coast.  But, hey, if this gives alternative energy research and development a shot in the arm, that’s great, too.  Alberta has lots of room for that industry.  It would not be fair if, at eighty dollars a barrel for oil, I was still paying 48.5 cents a litre for gasoline.  More people want more gasoline now than they did at the end of the 1990s.  More people want more of what is underground in Northern Alberta, as well, and so I am for calculating every cent CAPP members can bear for carrying out their business there.  That is the key to achieving sustainable development rather than the deadly cycles of boom and bust that have defined this industry for years.  The market tests constantly what we can endure on the retail energy side, and now we should see what is possible at the other end of the equation.  Those are the rules that have applied to the rest of us, and they should apply to the oil patch, too.

No Books, Please: We're Students

Roy MacGregor in the Globe and Mail has written of an informal boycott of textbooks on university campuses in Canada and the United States.  Mr. MacGregor compared the gouging of students with the suffering of commuters watching gasoline prices rise: everyone hates the cost, but what can you do?  Well, automobile owners make a lot of noise about carpooling and walking, taking the bus and riding their bicycles, and yet I still see a lot of other people in their little (and not so little) metal carapaces each morning.  I wish we could stand up (literally!) and make a difference in gasoline consumption, if for no other reason that, moving forward, there will be a lot less available oil.  In the meantime, I hope that some apathy creeps in and short-circuits student moves to do without their textbooks.

 

Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I have to tell you that by teaching English I miss out, largely, on the gravy train of academic publishing.  You would be hard pressed to find two professors who could agree on how to read: marxist? feminist? post-structuralist?  No?  How about reader-response? formalist? new historicist?  When the prairies get really dry and a dream about living again by the sea, I imagine my English textbook that would be adopted everywhere by everyone, in the same way as there is a “standard” text in, say, child psychology.  Then, I crash back to reality and realize that the only real money maker for me would be in literary anthologies, where new editions involve replacing one Margaret Atwood story with another.  Perhaps if I was moving my own books in this way, I could mount here a heartfelt defense of the academic publishing industry.  In that I sometimes get a free book for helping review potential texts, I will be as curmudgeonly as I please.

 

Generally speaking, I work with novels, and I usually teach six a semester.  I aim to limit my students’ bill for the course to roughly $100 a term, meaning that anything beyond $15-$20 a book does not work for me.  Used books can cut this cost about twenty percent.  Luckily, the kinds of novels I teach seldom have new editions, and so by sticking with one version year in and year out, there are usually used copies available.  There are editions I trust, editions with no errors, editions that I have annotated over time; sometimes the cheap knock-off editions you see on the remainder tables are cheaper, but hopefully not by much.  When I tell students to look at the second paragraph on the hundredth page, I want my hundredth page to be their hundredth page.  When I am not teaching novels, I teach literary essays, and I seldom find an anthology that gives me what I want.  I usually put together a “coursepack” for my classes, and while these are not always cheaper, they are an easier “sell” in the sense that students perceive no waste: we read all that I make them buy.

   

Now, it is not fair to say that I make anyone do anything.  If I could, I would make people use the serial comma and not try to create plurals with apostrophes.  But, as Mr. MacGregor sets out in his column, I do designate my books as “required” because we refer to them daily.  Other professors barely refer to textbooks, using them as confirmatory authorities that complement lectures.  In this case, the structure of the text might better than the lectures reflect the shape of the course.  Such a text might be a welcomed flotation device in the choppy seas of midterm.  But it is frustrating when the text seems to have nothing to do with the course or, worse yet, when it constantly contradicts the lectures.  About the only thing worse is when disorganized professors do not progress through their syllabi, never getting to a book that must then be sold used, unread.

 

Let me share with you here some inside information from the underbelly of the academic book trade, and perhaps you can find a strategy short of a boycott.  There is a perception in some circles that university bookstores provide their institutions a license to print money.  Not true.  The long line during the first week of classes is all they have in common with Tim Horton’s.  There is a significant markup on logo merchandise but nothing else.  Book orders are done well in advance of the start of the semester, and sometimes a professor will be told by the bookstore just before classes begin that an old edition is no longer available and everyone has to scramble at the last minute.  For this reason, it is not always a good idea to lock up a used book early or “borrow” a relic from your great aunt’s bookshelf.  That said, some university bookstores cannot carry overhead, and they will have to bring in used copies as part of their regular shipments, reducing the potential discount.  A line on a used copy can be valuable in this scenario.  The coursepacks I describe above cannot usually be bought back after the term and so sometimes a used textbook sold again to the bookstore when you are done is your best value.  I try to keep in mind the potential resale value of a text when weighing it against the coursepack option.  Your professor should place “optional” texts on reserve in the library where a limited amount of photocopying is permitted under copyright laws.  Some of my students have had success sharing textbooks, though it is not always practical to share them in class.

   

Have I written anything here that takes the sting out of that $175 science tome?  Probably not.  But as someone who has tried to teach James Joyce's Ulysses to students who do not even own the novel let alone have cracked it, I implore you again to buy your books.  You really will not have to eat macaroni and cheese forever.  Honest.

A Truly Awful Idea in New Brunswick

The Commission on Post-Secondary Education in New Brunswick released on Friday a report that recommends what might be the worst idea I have ever heard for the post-secondary sector.  To help meet the need for skilled labor, they propose merging satellite campuses of their comprehensive institutions with community colleges to create polytechnics that would grant applied degrees across a range of vocational areas.  Now, I have no quarrel with either applied degrees or vocational training, but a renewed commitment to them should not come at the expense of comprehensive universities.  There are certainly funding challenges for satellite campuses, where institutions have to duplicate administrative services to offer programs remotely.  Presumably, systems that have adopted this model have determined that rather than relocating students centrally, they need to offer programs in a variety of geographic locations.  Comprehensive universities have invested in their satellite campuses, and it is short-sighted to write off this investment in the pursuit of a false economy.  Here is what no one tells you about scientific and, to some extent, applied scientific training: it is prohibitively expensive.  I think you know it is costly, but do you realize that it is the post-secondary sector’s loss-leader?  I imagine that huge institutions that have disentangled their scientific training from their humanities and social science streams are able to move forward only with mind-boggling government and industry subsidies underpinned by carefully-tended endowments.  On any smaller scale, an institution can survive only by balancing lab-based scientific endeavors with good old fashioned (and, generally, modestly priced) chalk and talk from its bookish eccentrics.  This fiscal shell game is one of the wonders of the comprehensive university.

   

Now, I want to make something abundantly clear: I am not advocating a second-rate scientific education.  When that day comes (oh, Lord, not soon!) when I am cut open like a Christmas goose, I do not want my surgeon following, in paint-by-numbers fashion, any remedial textbook on cardiac care.  Scientific research is, and should be, a crucial priority of public policy.  My partner works in cancer care, and the last time I checked she was in no danger of finding herself out of a job; if we do not want further to mortgage our civilization to middle eastern oil interests or simply let our cars and furnaces chew up our food supply, we had better keep up with looking for alternatives there, too.  But, accepting that we can never know everything, we can decide on more than the basics of a science education and supplement that with a well-rounded sampling of humanities and social sciences.  For while poorly-educated scientists may be conspicuous by the black plume of smoke coming from their labs, narrowly-educated people more generally may only be revealed by their lack of full participation in our civilization.

   

The polytechnic model did not work in the United Kingdom.  The science education in these institutions was, simply, second-rate.  To invest quickly in the kinds of people and resources needed to convert these neglected backwaters to comprehensive status quickly in the 1990s, the whole post-secondary sector there was nearly bankrupted.  If students want a quick reality check, they need only remember that this was the time in which tuition was first introduced in England, Scotland, and Wales.  By all means, let us do everything we can to find new programs that can be accommodated at our comprehensive institutions.  Continue to support applied degree colleges that have contributed much-needed specialized expertise to our workforce.  But the comprehensive university is a marvel: let us not undermine it in this way.  The resulting costs in the long run will be real, and they will be felt widely.

Disrupting Educations, Saving Lives

Over two recent nights, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ran a documentary that sought, in part, to explain the actions of a twenty-five-year-old gunman who killed one young woman and injured twenty other individuals at Dawson College in Montreal on the afternoon of September 13, 2006.  I will not belabor the obvious point: Anastasia de Sousa, the young woman who lost her life that day, deserved at least the forty minutes of national media attention given her killer.  I do not accept that the CBC was justified in granting his desire for notoriety on the off chance that we might learn something from the story of a loser whose only hobby, according to an acquaintance, was drinking beer in the afternoon.  It is a belief popular amongst progressives that by examining the sordid conditions in which this young man wasted his life, we might prevent other people from following him.  Viewers on the right might have looked to see if there were recognizable symptoms of dysfunction in the killer, things we might think we see in potential killers around us.

   

In the wake of the shootings on the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg on April 16, 2007, there was a lot of talk about whether the strange behavior of that twenty-three-year-old gunman might have provided clues about his propensity to kill thirty-two people that morning.  The killer had been treated for mental illness as a youth – and his stalking of young women at Virginia Tech, as well as his overall demeanor and his writings in his English classes, seemed to have raised red flags with some of his professors.  However, our responses to non-lethal threats on campus suggest that we cannot always trust our assumptions about behavior.  In Durham, North Carolina on March 13, 2006, a black exotic dancer claimed that she had been sexually assaulted by members of the Duke University lacrosse team and, subsequently, three white students were wrongfully accused of the act.  It’s Not About Truth, Until Proven Innocent, and A Rush to Injustice, books about the case published over the last three months, underline how things we believe about race, youth, and even university athletics led in this case to a railroading of innocent students in a tense atmosphere.  Much of the faculty and student body condemned these young men on virtually no hard evidence at all.

   

So, against this background of contradictory information, what can be done about the girls on campus with the threatening miens?  How about the young man who enrolls in every class his ex-girlfriend takes?  As the Duke lacrosse case illustrates, people remain innocent until they are proven guilty, and a rush to judgment can ruin the opportunities of those students wrongly accused; as the Virginia Tech case illustrates, people who do harm to other people sometime foreshadow their violence with threatening behavior.  But the reality remains that universities contain at least as many eccentric characters as any other organization, and perhaps because of the solitary nature of academic pursuits, serious illnesses lurk beneath the veneer of only a small percentage of introversions.  I have been in classrooms with men and women whose very presence made me feel uncomfortable.  People have lurked outside my office late in the day.  I have received notes, letters, and emails that were inappropriate.  Students have submitted work to me that have suggested various degrees of mental imbalance.  We often encourage people to seek professional help and, sometimes, we even help facilitate it.  As a rule, however, creepy poetry does not justify removing someone from a class, even though one of my most solemn duties remains the securing of my teaching space.  In the final analysis, I am an advocate of more intervention than we usually see on North American campuses, a position often taken by commentators outside the universities.  But those of us who would rush in precipitously must also be prepared, of course, to take responsibility for our mistakes.