Let me begin my own commentary by saying that the tenure process is not to blame for this shooting. While few things in this world easily fall into black and white (the gray areas are far more prevalent), there are times when homicide can be understood. [I'm feeling chills of discomfort even here. I seem to be at a loss for words as to how to describe my feelings here.] A child whose parents have abused him or her mercilessly can suffer from PTSD (or a range of other mental disorders) causing him or her to dissociate and murder the abuser. I know that I am treading on shaky ground here. As I write this, I am still torn by my belief that murder is never right, never the answer. My next position is also shaky, given that I have just claimed that homicide can be understood. Still, I must say that many people do not receive tenure, and they don’t all go into faculty meetings and start shooting. By that same token, not all children who are abused kill the abuser. So, I don’t want to say that just because other people who don’t attain tenure don’t become shooters that Bishop’s failure to attain tenure could not factor into what she did. To be clear, this does not justify her actions. Ultimately, we will continue to have more questions than answers about her motivation and psychological state. Hopefully, her psychological evaluation will provide insight into why this obviously disturbed individual killed and injured her colleagues. All factors considered failing to attain tenure does not justify homicide.

In spite of some of the arguments that academic culture and tenure requirements can be blamed for Bishop’s actions on Friday, perhaps we can gain something by discussing the culture of academia– not as a justification for homicide, but as a part of our lives that might benefit from careful consideration, perhaps even a bit of excavation.

I have long been of the opinion that the culture of graduate school does not encourage self-care but in fact rewards behaviors that are unhealthy and even dangerous. How many of us have complained about the little sleep that we get while being secretly proud of our dedication? We work through the weekend, late into the night, at the expense of sleep. We fail to eat regular meals and crowd our schedules with additional projects and committees. Being busy demonstrates our ambition and dedication to our work, even when it comes at the expense of our health and relationships. I am completely guilty of buying into this culture and even having pride in my capacity to deny myself. In fact, it comes naturally to me. I’ve always been dedicated and obsessed with my work. It has been my life for so long that I almost forget that there are other things in the world. I inherited my mother’s workaholic gene. Yet this dedication that is so prized when demonstrated through our busy lives, sleep deprivation, and singular obsession with our work has often been to my detriment. Those who know me are aware of my health problems, which are extensive and at times have been disabling. There have been countless times where my obsession with work (and demonstrating the dedication that I have) has been extremely detrimental to my health, often resulting in set backs that I could ill-afford. As an epileptic, I must have a certain amount of sleep and avoid stress as much as possible. Two of the biggest factors in triggering seizures are stress and sleep deprivation. I know this and have tried to get enough sleep and avoid stress. (The latter of which is kind of a joke when you’re on the job market.) Yet even knowing all of this, last March I was working feverishly on a project, not getting enough sleep, and feeling the mounting stress of dissertation work and the upcoming job market. As a result, I ended up in the hospital emergency room, having my clothes cut off of me, and getting fourteen stitches above my left eye. I had a seizure and fell on my face, the cause of which, my doctor adamantly insisted, was my stress and sleep deprivation. This seizure could have caused me to lose an eye; the head trauma could have killed me; I was lucky. Every time I look into a mirror and see the arching scar above my left eye I am reminded of this. Yet even with this powerful reminder, I don’t always get enough sleep and the stress of dissertation and job market is such that I am losing my hair. My point in revealing all of this is simple: I can’t do this alone. I still live in a culture that praises lack of care and views care of self as indulgent.

Certainly this is not exclusive to academia. Being driven and ambitious is highly valued among many, particularly in the United States. The corporate culture is most assuredly a proponent of this mentality. It makes me wonder if corporate culture values have seeped into academia. Corporate practices most certainly have; universities are most often run like corporations rather than educational institutions. So, have the teachers and scholars taken on these characteristics or have we always been this way? And if we have taken on these characteristics in response to a corporate culture, is it because the university is run like a corporation and behaving like aspiring executives is our best way to ensure job security or is it because of a more pervasive ideology? Or am I asking the wrong questions? Would these answers be too simplistic to truly explore why we drive ourselves into the ground? Okay. I’m digressing somewhat and pontificating a lot, so back to Huntsville…

Let me continue to say that I am confused by my response to the shooting in Huntsville and the information that continues to filter into the news. Reports of Bishop’s previous violent acts and alleged violent acts are of great concern, while at the same time they raise concerns regarding inclusion of prior bad acts. Certainly in a legal setting this is frequently not allowed when trying a defendant in court, but in the court of public opinion everything is fair game. It certainly raises questions about vilification that goes beyond the shooting. How many of us would stand up to the rigorous scrutiny that Bishop is undergoing? At the same time, her past and the extreme nature of the events being uncovered are certainly piling up, foreshadowing what could be a terrible avalanche. From the shooting of her brother (with two versions of the story varying widely) to her alleged involvement in the attempted bombing of a fellow professor to punching a woman in the head at an IHoP in Huntsville because she got the last booster seat (Bishop plead guilty to the charge of assault and battery in this case) this story just continues to get more and more bizarre and convoluted. In truth, the more I read the less I understand and the more confused I become. All I can say at this point is that all of this violence saddens me and like the stories I’ve read on trauma blogs, it makes me question humanity. To paraphrase from a favorite character: the one thing that humans have been consistently good at is inventing and learning new ways to hurt and kill one another.

*Note: I know that the more mainstream media outlets have also been following the story, as evidenced by this NY Times article, but I have been primarily following it through the coverage on The Chronicle website.

Completing and remembering 2009

• What was your biggest triumph in 2009? Dealing with my diagnosis of epilepsy, the disfiguring scar of my latest seizure and still managing to successfully defend my prospectus and apply for jobs.
• What was the smartest decision you made in 2009? Choosing to rise above the pain of a failed relationship and not allowing it to ruin my work.
• What one word best sums up and describes your 2009 experience? Difficult.
• What was the greatest lesson you learned in 2009? The importance of family and maintaining friendships in spite of how busy you get.
• What was the most loving service you performed in 2009? Providing support to a friend even though I disagreed with her decisions.
  
• What is your biggest piece of unfinished business in 2009? My dissertation
• What are you most happy about completing in 2009? My prospectus
• Who were the three people that had the greatest impact on your life in 2009? My dissertation director, my mother, and my best friend.
  
• What was the biggest risk you took in 2009? Taking the time to rest this summer rather than working obsessively.
• What was the biggest surprise in 2009? The end of my romantic relationship
• What important relationship improved the most in 2009? The relationship with my brother
• What compliment would you liked to have received in 2009? One that I did receive: [paraphrased] You’ve dealt with so many difficult challenges and yet you keep going on, so I’m proud of you.
• What compliment would you liked to have given in 2009?  I feel that I gave all of them. I constantly give my family and friends compliments on their skills and talents and express my appreciation. When I consider what I could have said, I’m at a loss. I’ll continue to contemplate it and update it if I can think of anything.
• What else do you need to do or say to be complete with 2009? Move on with my personal life, putting aside the pain of  a failed relationship.

Creating the new year

• What would you like to be your biggest triumph in 2010? Getting a job that I love with people that I get along with in a place that I enjoy living.
• What advice would you like to give yourself in 2010? Trust that things will work out and do not let stress overwhelm you.
• What is the major effort you are planning to improve your financial results in 2010? Consider carefully all purchases before making them.
• What would you be most happy about completing in 2010? My dissertation
• What major indulgence are you willing to experience in 2010? A trip to Italy
• What would you most like to change about yourself in 2010? I’d like to improve my organizational skills and stress management.
• What are you looking forward to learning in 2010? How to teach as a professor, adapting to the shift between graduate student and “professional” academic
• What do you think your biggest risk will be in 2010? Choosing the next step in my career.
• What about your work, are you most committed to changing and improving in 2010? My methods of organizing, collecting, and saving information in my research
• What is one as yet undeveloped talent you are willing to explore in 2010? Musical aptitude (if I can find the time)
• What brings you the most joy and how are you going to do or have more of that in 2010? Writing. I intend to set aside a special time each day for my academic writing and a separate time (at least a few times a week) for personal writing.
• Who or what, other than yourself, are you most committed to loving and serving in 2010? My mother
• What one word would you like to have as your theme in 2010? Success!

My grandmother never had her own social security number. When she was born they weren’t issued at birth and the only time a woman needed to/could attain one was if she went to “work.” Otherwise, a wife used her husband’s SSN with a digit added to the end. First of all, let me emphasize how very hard my grandmother worked. She grew up on a farm and married a farmer. They had a little bit of land and by the grace, a home to shelter them; that was pretty much it (even though it was much more than many people had). My grandmother worked out in the fields with my grandfather, sun up to sun down. And working in the fields on a farm is very different from working in your garden, especially when you are working without the farm machinery that we take for granted now. This one photo remains burned into my mind: my grandmother, scarf tied around her head, breaking up soil with a hoe. Even though this photo is taken later, after they were successful enough to say own a camera, for me this is the document that will always serve as evidence of my grandmother’s work. A social security card would tell me nothing about who my grandmother was, about the things that she did. That single photo contains a world of meaning for me that extends far beyond The documents that prove that she was born, that she married and that she died tell me tell me almost nothing about my grandmother, yet even without the stories that I can associate with this photograph, it would still tell me more about who she was as a person. I could see where she lived, a piece of her daily life, how she held her body, what kind of clothing she wore. All of these seem so much more important than knowing her exact date of birth or death. Yet it is our birth certificates that we place in safety deposit boxes. It’s not that these things are unimportant but if I had to choose between a record of when I was born and when I died and a moment in between that showed what I did, I’d choose the photograph that caught me between the birth and death certificates.

All documentation, all records are necessarily incomplete. Even the official documents that tell you when you were born. They give you a date, a place, and the names of your parents. They don’t tell you about the ambulance driver who got lost taking your mother to the hospital and the elevator that got stuck between floors as your mother was being taken to the maternity ward. The entire story of the day that I was born tells you so much more about the bizarre life that began that day than knowing what day it actually was. The date is important for lots of reasons but the story of that day is so much richer. So, my birth certificate tells you little about the circumstances of my birth. Similarly, my grandmother’s photo represents a piece of a moment and place in time, providing no knowledge of what cam before or after or of what was happening outside of the photo’s boundaries, yet that document makes her real to me in ways that a birth certificate never could. So why is it more likely that evidence of her death and birth will remain long after I am gone than will any evidence of the life that she lived between? How do documents get imbued with value? And what makes an official document more valuable than that photo? And what does it say about the ways that women and men are valued differently, when those official documents, the ones that make you “real,” are denied to women?

(A note on my grandmother’s SSN: several years after my grandfather’s death my grandmother had to apply for a social security number in order to get Medicaid. Already in her eighties, my mother helped her with the complex application process to obtain, for the first time, her own SSN. Until then, in the eyes of government assistance, she wasn’t “real.”)

And a comment on the photograph: I don’t know who took it, although I know from stories that it is reflective of my grandmother’s life. It was only in writing this that I considered the circumstances necessary to take a photograph. Did my grandparents own a camera early in their married life? Wouldn’t that have been a strange luxury for a struggling farmer? Could it have been a wealthier relative? And if so, why take such a photo? Why be a voyeur to another’s hard work? (I know that photographers do this all the time but it somehow seems stranger that a relative would photograph and look on without offering help.) What was the impulse that made the photographer want to capture this particular moment in time? I welcome any possible answers to these questions.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of  others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,–an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in     one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder (The Souls of Black Folks)

Often I have felt as though those around me were seeing the world with a different set of lenses, ones which are blurry and leave images soft along the edges, whereas in my world all of the edges are hard and unyielding.  Speaking with other survivors has lead me to believe that I am not alone in this feeling.  Many of us feel that we see what others cannot.  Whether or not this is a deeper truth or a figment of the traumatized mind remains to be seen.

Judith Herman refers to a similar thought process in Trauma and Recovery, though she likens her version to George Orwell’s “doublethink” and the psychologist’s use of the word “dissociation”  According to Herman, “the dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness” (1).

“To speak publicly about one’s knowledge of atrocitites is to invite the stigma that attaches to victims” (2) I have plenty of friends from high school (middle and elementary) who do not believe that I was abused. I worked long and hard to create the appearance of a normal family, not because I wanted to be like everyone else, but because I didn’t want my abuse to be the thing that distinguished me from the crowd.  I wanted to stand out, but because of who I was not what was done to me.

Let’s take something horrible and make something good out of it.  I want to show the horror; give voice to the voiceless; but I also want to make what we have, take what we have suffered and transform it into something that gives the former meaning.  So that our sacrifices will not have been in vain.