Larry Levine was killed by a lone gunman at Umpqua Community College while teaching Writing 115, an introductory class that I would describe as “Freshman Comp.” I was an adjunct freshman comp instructor at Massasoit Community College almost forty years ago, and I remember what it was like to offer students the possibility of authority through writing. Many considered themselves “bad” at writing, and, by extension, “bad” at thinking. I tried to invest them with confidence in their perceptions and voice, while teaching them how best to express and develop them.
Writing, whether expository or creative, opens a channel for students that remains closed elsewhere. Sometimes this involves confession; sometimes it involves aggression. Twice during my semesters at Massasoit I personally brought students to Health Services for counseling. One student had emigrated from Greece and had been sexually abused by a high school teacher. The other, a very young single mother, was overcome by family that shamed her constantly. They wrote about suicide; I was their audience, and, frightened, I had to respond.
I’ve also faced aggression. As director of Creative Writing and the MFA program at UMass Boston, every year I had to deal with—and teach my TAs to deal with—what the university calls “disturbed and disturbing students.” My first year as director, a visiting writer was so unnerved by hostile emails from a student that she requested security outside her classroom and an escort to the parking lot. Luckily, the student dropped out. A new assistant professor showed me love poems directed to her from a student in her workshop, as did an MFA TA—both women, as was the visiting writer. That two of these three students dropped their classes relieved me as a supervisor, but left me anxious about how to confront their harassment safely if they hadn’t.
Sources report that the Umpqua killer enrolled in Larry Levine’s class, but not if he attended. It’s not clear whether, as at Virginia Tech, the shooter’s writings raised concerns; the term at Umpqua had just begun. But for years, ill-paid writing instructors have been a select audience for violence within our culture. I don’t know any other category of faculty so likely to deal with painful imaginings and so vulnerable to them. Even when schools develop protocols, which many established after Virginia Tech, writing instructors bear the brunt of revelations they are not professionally trained to handle, putting them in a far more dangerous position than other college teachers.
Those of us who teach writing are alert to material students share in our classes that they won’t share anywhere else. Sometimes it’s heartbreaking; sometimes, terrifying. When we give students authority as writers, we assume responsibility as audience. Writing instructors aren’t psychologists, and no writer wants to be a censor. Yet we’re often the first to know what’s on a student’s mind as we offer tools, and authority, to join conversations from which other venues exclude them.
What to do? In several cases, I held meetings—never alone, and always with my office door open. Sometimes the meeting defused tension. I convinced the TA’s student to admit that he knew it wasn’t appropriate for him to ask his teacher for a date—and to apologize. The violence in another student’s response to a prompt, it became clear, was not personal but an attempt to copy the manga, horror movies, and video games he admired (why he, and our culture, find brutality so admirable is a deeper question). I’ve had the luck of a supportive chair. But I couldn’t begin to sort out on my own how to deal with a truly dangerous student—only that, as a writing teacher, I was more likely to discover the signs of one than my colleagues in history, chemistry, or classics.
Correction: I wrote earlier that Larry Levine was the killer’s first victim. An eyewitness interviewed on CNN today contradicted this.