Teaching the Terrible

            When terrible things happen, it’s tempting to assign them to a category of This Will Never Happen Again. “Phew!” says the mind, “we got through that ordeal. Let’s get back to life, real life, and leave these terrible things alone. Let’s put this behind us and not think about it again.” Enduring the trauma was brutal enough, what could be gained from investigating it? Some things, we tell ourselves, are beyond comprehension.

            What’s true for individuals is even truer for institutions. When terrible things happen on college campuses, the tendency is strong to cordon off the event. In October of 1999, a computer science student at Kalamazoo College killed his ex-girlfriend with a shotgun in his dorm room. Then he turned the gun on himself. “We’ll never make sense of this endless night,” said Jimmy Jones, the president of Kalamazoo. We’ll never know why Neenef Odeh killed Maggie Wardle. Best to bury the dead, mourn their passing, and get back to the business of life.

            But the idea that something so terrible could not be known challenged the instincts of a certain English professor. Over the course of the next ten years, Gail Griffin interviewed the friends, family, and teachers of Neenef and Maggie. She chronicled the short and long term reactions to the murder-suicide on campus. She read police reports and described meetings to address violence against women. She considered the pressures that first generation international students experience when they go off to college and the confusion many people had because Maggie “did not seem like a victim.” By the end of her investigation, she was able to deliver an account of her college that not only delineates the telltale signs of an abusive relationship, but also suggests a method for looking at the terrible: allow yourself to be affected.

            In the penultimate chapter of The Events of October: Murder Suicide on a Small Campus, Griffin considers the multiple stories that attempted to make sense of Maggie’s murder and Neeneh’s suicide. There was the story of the young man under too much pressure, who finally “snapped” when his girlfriend ended the relationship. There was the story of Michigan’s lax gun laws that made the purchase of a hunting rifle so easy. There was the story of domestic violence that explained Maggie’s death as part of a troubling pattern in which women, particularly young women, are more likely to be killed by intimates than strangers.

            The mind, as Griffin points out, often goes into shock after a trauma. It slows down and enters a stage of numbness. The numbness serves a purpose at first; it stops the body from overreacting. But numbness also stops the healing process from occurring. Rather than thinking through the myriad responses to such a complex tragedy – the fear that other young men might suddenly go hunting for their girlfriends, the guilt that nobody saw this coming, the sadness that two vibrant young people were no longer in the classroom – numbness permanently fixes the traumatic event in a neuron made sluggish with fear.

Absent an explanation, the administration did what smart people often do when they can’t find the logic in an event: they cordoned it off from the knowable, removed it from the syllabus. These are things we can’t understand, said the college administrators. Go back to the classroom and learn what we can teach you. It sounded convincing but that’s because the administration was numb to its own feelings.

            In a time when students are harder to come by, and tuition-paying parents want to see results from these high-priced institutions, we might understand why colleges feel the need to cordon off terrible things. First, there is the human tendency to section off trauma as something beyond comprehension. Second, there is the need to prove to an increasingly demanding public that college administrators are totally in control. Put those two things together and we can see why the terrible would be eclipsed by the manageable.

            Yet developing the tools for investigating the terrible may be the most valuable lesson colleges and universities can provide. Not only do we need to recognize dangerous patterns in intimate relationships, we also need to cultivate imaginations capable of anticipating the worst and adept at creating alternatives. Those lessons are only as useful as they are relevant to the world we live in. For this reason, Montaigne wrote that to philosophize is “to learn how to die.” We think about the possibility of death not out of morbid fascination but because we want to be more alive in terrible situations.

            Students at Kalamazoo were numb for a long time after the murder-suicide. According to Griffin, college counselors reported that many students “lost a year.” Maggie and Neenef’s peers numbed themselves with drugs and alcohol and computer screens. Eventually, however, and this is the part of the journey that feels most important, the affected people began to work with their affections. A friend of both Maggie and Neenef said some years later, “Maybe their lives weren’t in vain. Maybe it made us better, the people who were affected.” There is a profound wisdom in this observation. Our capacity to be affected speaks volumes about our capacity to be alive.

            Gail Griffin will be speaking at Marlboro College this coming Sunday (7:00 pm, Ragle Hall) about the terrible thing that happened at her small college some many years ago. She will tell you how her community was affected and how tempting it was to cordon off the terrible thing, to push its brutality far, far away. But she’ll also show us what it looks like to consider the terrible in all its gruesome details and to chronicle a community through its disparate stages of shock and grief. The terrible will never be abolished. Griffin’s polyphonic work, however, reveals the myriad ways we are affected, opening up the possibility for many ways to go on.

Meg Mott teaches political theory at Marlboro College. Comments welcome at www.megmottshottopics.com.