Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life

4. Assaults on the Ivory Tower: Representations of Madness in the Discourse of U.S. School Shootings

chapter 4 Assaults on the Ivory Tower Representations of Madness in the Discourse of U.S. School Shootings In the liberal view, violence occurs at the very limit of the social order, where it displays the fragility of meaning, identity, and value; and the “progress” of modern society can be measured in the successful substitution of persuasion and consent for violence and force. But this view draws attention away from the fact that violence also (and increasingly) arises from within the authority of existing social, political, and economic arrangements and serves quite effectively to reinforce their legitimacy. —Lynn Worsham, “Going Postal: Pedagogic Violence and the Schooling of Emotion” In 2007 and 2008, two mass shootings occurred on two U.S. college campuses , Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech) and Northern Illinois University (NIU).1 The shooter at Virginia Tech was a twenty-three-yearold undergraduate English major named Seung-Hui Cho; the shooter at Northern Illinois was a twenty-seven-year-old graduate student in sociology named Steven Kazmierczak. At Virginia Tech, Cho killed thirty-two people and wounded twenty-three; at NIU, Kazmierczak killed six and wounded eighteen. Both shooters killed themselves. The extreme nature of these events, the fact that both killers were university students who committed their crimes on campus, and the fact that both completed academic writings that appear to have bearing on the crimes, have brought forth a new onslaught of opinions about the relationship between mental disability, violence, and academe.2 My concern in this chapter is the way that these two events, and especially the shooters, have been portrayed in written and visual represen141 tations. However, before I proceed, I need to include a note about the painful nature of this material. I am not involved directly with either school or the persons who were affected by the events; I am not part of “the inaudible knowledge inherent to everyday life on campus” (Nickel 159). In my efforts to shape a discussion that is both useful and sensitive, I have been guided by Kathleen W. Jones’s highly personal and intelligent account, “The Thirty-third Victim.” Jones, a faculty member at Virginia Tech, writes that “the memories are still incredibly raw” (78), and makes a plea that we remember Seung-Hui Cho as an individual who committed suicide, amidst all the public constructions of the shootings on April 16, 2007. My own construction is not an analysis of either shooter as an individual, nor is it an indictment of the members of the Virginia Tech and NIU communities. Rather, this chapter focuses on the ways that accounts of Cho and Kazmierczak in›ect public myths about mental disability , race, class, nationality, and gender, as well as myths about the proper functioning of higher education itself. I am acutely aware that such analysis may seem beside the point for those with a more personal stake in either shooting—or could even seem like an apologia for two men who committed murder and injured or traumatized countless people. My own status as a survivor of trauma has made me, if anything, more aware of the possibility that what I am now writing may be, in the colloquial term, “triggery.” My intention in this chapter is not to pass judgment on either Cho or Kazmierczak, nor to “heal” or further distress victims and survivors. Nor is it to pass judgment on any particular writer about the events. Rather, it is to critique the rhetorical structure through which news of each shooting unfolded, and to demonstrate the ways that prevailing myths about mental disability and violence shore up an ongoing structural violence in American society . As I wrote this chapter, I kept coming back to the statement made by one of Cho’s professors: “All our hearts are broken” (Falco). I believe that analysis can incorporate heartbreak, can even help show ways to move through heartbreak; that is why I have written what you read here. I begin, then, with the words—the explosion of words that emerged following each shooting, and what I think those words might teach us. The coverage that followed the events ranged from sober Wall Street Journal accounts to lurid Esquire articles to online blogs and bulletin boards. Much of it focused on the killers themselves: what they looked like, talked like, what they wrote, what medications they took (or refused 142 Mad at School to take), whom they dated, what...