days.
Then death intervened.
On Friday, at a faculty meeting, Amy Bishop murdered three of her
colleagues in the Biology Department of the University of Alabama/Huntsville and badly wounded three others.
I learned about this homicidal violence the way one does these days:
first a crawl at the bottom of a newscast, which noted her Harvard
training as a neuroscientist. Apparently, the fact that a Ph.D. from a
prestigious university would fatally ransack a human body with bullets can still
shock us. Then TV elevated the murders to “Breaking News” and a “Developing Story” with law
enforcement officers giving their sober press conferences.
Then The New York Times began to run its fact-filled stories.
Dr. Bishop left her pistol in a second-floor bathroom.Dr. Bishop is a
wife, married to another scientist, James Anderson. Dr. Bishop is a
mother, with four children. Dr. Bishop and her husband have been
responsible for some promising biotechnology inventions. Dr.
Bishop,perhaps significantly, had been denied tenure and was appealing
the decision. Dr. Bishop was outspoken about university
policies. Dr. Bishop was considered a lousy teacher. The
Times found colleagues who said she was “a little quirky
but no more so than most scientists.” Dr. Bishop had fatally shot
her brother in 1986 in Massachusetts but never charged with a
crime.
a pink sweater, a heavy face, dark hair cut in a page boy with bangs,
looking fierce and distraught in one photo, blank in another. The
pictures tell me nothing except that her appearance would be familiar on
a campus. Murders, of course, are far less familiar on an American campus
than frumpiness. Both sweetly and despairingly, we want campuses to be
islands of civility and learning in a sea of disputations, blows, and
ignorance.
However, I am rarely surprised by violence on a campus. The academic
ideal of being an island of civility permits quirkiness to flourish—among all the disciplines. Unfortunately, more
than quirkiness abounds. Every day I see wonderful, wonderful people at
work, but I have also noted a rudeness that self-righteousness
justifies; indifference to the well-being of others; and the moral
equivalent of manslaughter through reviews, tenure and promotion letters,
memoranda, and gossip.
Within departments and dormitories, little villages within the large city
of a big university, people know each other well, unless they dwell with
an oblivion to others that borders on and flows into neurosis. People
know who is on edge, who is cruel, who is merely a curmudgeon. People
know about the stresses of the tenure process, and who seems to be
handling it well or not. The “shock” that gets expressed on
campuses where violence occurs should not be over the fact of murder
itself. It should be over our inability to tell who will merely
“speak violence” and who will bring a weapon to a faculty
meeting. I believe that our tolerance does permit vicious feelings to
spill out with comparatively little harm. Words are less harmless
than sticks and stones. So folklore tells us. But our tolerance, like our
devotion to academic criticism and research, does atrophy our capacity to
tell who might actually murder or critically wound us.
When I was making notes about snow and the city, I observed feet. Who was
wearing sneakers, who boots? Whose pants were protected from slush, whose were wet and dragging in
puddles of ice and water? The task, without lapsing into paranoia, is to ask whose feet might be
carrying death towards us.