Don’t Shoot the Chairman

“Are you a professor,” the nice lady at Borders said to me yesterday. I was buying Valentines’ presents for my husband and daughter, the Book Thief for her (she’s never read it) and Jesus in Islam for him (he’s interested in all things having to do with scriptural representations of the big guy [no he’s not Christian {he’s not Muslim either}]).
“They shot someone because they didn’t get tenure,” the lady said. She looked meaningfully at her colleague.
“In Alabama.”
The cashiers were both African American. I was and am white. Something passed between them, that I felt but couldn’t read.
“University of Alabama?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Why’d they take it out on them?” She said.
I drove home in a hurry and went online. “Them” turned out to be the department chair and two professors, along with 3 others all sitting in a meeting where an assistant professor was informed she didn’t get tenure. I guess she pulled out a gun and shot them then and there. The assistant professor who was the shooter was a scientist. Her husband was waiting in the parking lot.
“Well!” I said to my husband, “she certainly knew how to handle a gun. She shot 6 people.”
“Crap,” said my husband also surfing online. “I think she’s Jewish.”
A lot of teachers in academics from lecturers to full professors to teaching assistants, say they hate the chairman and the administration. A lot of people say that the tenure process is completely unfair. This has been a line waiting to be crossed. Something is happening in the world of edu. We keep on saying it’s a refuge, safe space, but we know now that it isn’t. Something has to change. All of it has to. From preschool to med school.
The Montessori school knows it. Evergreen State knows it. And the Whidbey Island MFA program knows it. The school must change into something else.
When I was a graduate student a friend and I made up a hit list. We were filled with rage a lot of the time. Graduate school in the humanities was fiercely competitive and we all knew there weren’t enough jobs to go around.
It’s worse now.
“Do you tell prospective graduate students there are no jobs?” I asked a colleague a few years ago. “Oh,” she said. “I never even thought of that when I was in the PHD program.”
I did. I had to get a job. A lot of people in academics have to work. If they don’t make it in the academy, they have to start all over again. You are not an automatic hire in the k-12 system. It doesn’t work like that.
Should we abolish tenure?
Maybe.
But until we figure out how to make hiring and firing in education more honest and fair, until we figure out the whole nexus of what edu needs to be. We are going to have these horrible things happening. It’s going to columbine. It’s already happening.
Until our country supports education, it’s going to columbine. Until we take education seriously, it’s going to columbine. First it was students in high school, then it was a student on a college campus, and now it’s an assistant professor in the sciences for Pete’s sake.
It all needs to change. Now.
My colleagues at the Borders cash registers know something about being underpayed and undervalued. They condemned the violent act that emerged within what they and most people consider a space of privilege. But they also seemed to know that crazy stuff happens when you least expect it. In seemingly pastoral spaces. The unthinkable happens on the margins of what we think is possible. It continues to call us into awareness. We need to heed the call.