I have a PhD in Rhetoric. I have several times ended up running a composition program, which meant managing 20-60 people, and I now direct a thriving writing center, and that means managing a staff of about 100. I have never had a management class. I have never had training in what to do when your staff is worried they might be killed on the way to work.
And this is now my concern.
There were a lot of requirements for my getting a PhD in Rhetoric. I had to take six courses in the history of rhetoric, another six or so classes in various things (including an entire course on Victorian novels), pass a 90 minute oral exam that involved being able to describe in detail such thrilling authors as Geoffrey of Vinsauf or Pierre de la Ramee (Petrus Ramus to the Latinophiles among you), achieve translation fluency in two languages (at least one a “hard” language), and write a dissertation (about 50k words on a topic).
And, from that training, I went on to management positions. Along the way, I have tried to pick up skills involving performance management, giving useful criticism, onboarding, developing a performance improvement plan. But, let’s be blunt, achieving a translation fluency of German has not been something on which I’ve often drawn when trying to figure out how to fire someone, and so my training was less than ideal. Since most of my current staff is undergraduates, and I only manage them indirectly (I spend most of my time running around the university trying to persuade supportive but fiscally-strapped administrators to give us money), my current management style is mostly to help the people involved in direct administration to be as effective as they can. And I try to get more money. I’m not claiming to be an ideal manager, but I am saying I am giving it my best effort.
Several years ago, an undergraduate committed suicide in the main library on my campus. Since he used a gun, and since there was much confusion, that incident involved a lot of my day locked down in my office in a building that was rumored to have an active shooter (it didn’t). I was behind a 1950s desk that was up against a metal filing cabinet filled with papers and a metal double-walled mail chute. I spent the time cleaning out my files and updating Facebook because friends were worried. I was willing to grant that there might be an active shooter, but, other than working to get some undergrads in the hallway into a safe space, I was satisfied with my safety and so wasn’t especially worried.
Today there was a stabbing attack that was fairly random, several hundred feet from where I was, but it was in a space through my employees walk. And so I may not sleep.
I have never been trained for management, but I like to think I have done a lot to rectify that because I can see the value in giving useful feedback, knowing how to write an ask, making sure timesheets are correct. This year I have had to find out what to do if ICE comes to my workplace and tries to drag off a student or employee, and now I have to get more training on what to do with a staff that can reasonably be worried about their safety while walking through the center of a college campus.
This isn’t about whether guns should or shouldn’t be allowed on campus. This should not be another opportunity for people with serious mental health issues to rationalize their not getting help by yodelling false flag. This certainly shouldn’t be another salvo in the war as to whether they are better than us. It isn’t about whether the assailant is a person of color, or mentally ill, or a member of them.
When this kind of act happens, the impulse is to identify the group membership of the assailant, all in service of insisting that this incident proves that they are the cause of all evil. He’s a dem, or Muslim, or white, or not white, or conservative, or Christian. His having done this things proves that dems, Muslims, whites, non whites, conservatives, or Christians, or whatever are evil.
That kind of rhetoric, demagoguery really, doesn’t help. It’s the problem. He is a consequence of that kind of rhetoric. I don’t know anything about the assailant, but I’ll guess mentally ill. And I’ll guess that he has been hanging out in an informational enclave that is full of rhetoric about how evil THEY are, and how WE are in danger of extermination. Perhaps the people promoting that rhetoric meant it metaphorically, perhaps they didn’t think much about what exactly they meant, and they just wanted to get more clicks, viewers, or ad revenues. Perhaps they meant it.
But, perhaps he only consumed mainstream media. Is that really so different? How far does one have to go in mainstream media to find hyperbolic claims about a war on the ingroup? Whether or not he was hearing voices in his head, he could have heard voices in the media telling him that some group was trying to exterminate his kind. He certainly wouldn’t have to go far to find rhetoric saying that we are in a war against them, and the only solution is to exterminate them. And so, perhaps, he did.
That might not be what happened in this case, but it might be. It certainly is what did happen when Jim Adkisson shot up a Unitarian Church, or when Dylann Roof shot up a black church. We have an awful lot of media (including mainstream media like Fox) that are all “they’re trying to kill us” all the time. And that has to have a consequence.
Yet, instead of the media deeply invested (and profiting from) their rhetoric of “THERE IS A WAR AGAINST US” having to rethink their implicit promotion of violence, I have to think about what to do tomorrow to make my staff concentrate on their jobs when we all now know that they might have been killed today.