The Class Struggle in American Higher Ed

December 23, 2012 in Access, Financial Aid, Student Loans, Tuition and Fees | by | 2 comments

This, from the front page of today’s New York Times, is a really strong piece, and really worth reading. I may find time to say more about it after the Christmas break, but for now I’ll just cut and paste what I said about it on Facebook a moment ago…

One thing stuck out powerfully for me in this story is that making students jump through hoops sucks.

Too often recently, administrators and legislators have justified increased tuition by bumping up financial aid concurrently. But even when those hikes are commensurate — and they often aren’t, and they rarely are in the long term — more tuition plus a new financial aid system amounts to a new hoop. Students of means, students with educated parents, are generally good at navigating hoops. Students at greater risk often aren’t. So poor students fall through the cracks.

Predictably. Inevitably.

The NRA, Newtown, and Columbine

December 21, 2012 in Grade School, High School, Politics, Violence, Youth | by | 1 comment

Today’s press conference by NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre has been greeted with a storm of derision and outrage from across the political spectrum. Even moderates and conservatives were appalled — New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s comment that the speech reflected a “paranoid, dystopian vision” of America was distinctive more for its phrasing than its sentiment.

One of the most ridiculed elements of LaPierre’s appearance was his call for a national volunteer force of armed guards to patrol every school in America — a “blanket of safety,” he called it, and he wants it in place by the end of the Christmas break.

Many observers pointed out that Columbine High School had an armed sheriff’s deputy on site on the day that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered thirteen and wounded twenty-one more in what stands as the bloodiest high school massacre in the nation’s history.

Some conservatives are “peeved” by this criticism, however. As Daniel Foster writes at the website of the National Review,

“it isn’t like the deputy was sitting around eating doughnuts. … He traded fire (that is, he drew fire) with Harris for an extended period of time, during which Harris’s gun jammed. … In this highly chaotic tactical environment, the deputy acted both bravely and prudently, and who knows how many lives he saved by engaging Harris.”

Let’s consider this a moment.

Wayne LaPierre asserts that the solution to the problem of school shootings is bringing armed guards onto the nation’s campuses. Critics point out that the worst high school shooting in American history took place at a school where just such a guard was on hand. And how do LaPierre’s supporters respond?

You see? It works!

The NRA and its allies believe that Columbine was a win. They believe that we need more Columbines, not fewer.

Erik Loomis’s Critics Like Violent Rhetoric Just Fine — As Long as the Targets Are Gay.

December 20, 2012 in Faculty, History, Speech, Violence | by | 6 comments

University of Rhode Island labor historian Erik Loomis has garnered a lot of conservative attention in the last few days.

After the Newtown shootings, Loomis tweeted that he wanted “Wayne LaPierre’s head on a stick.” (LaPierre is the head of the NRA.) Though this statement was obviously metaphorical, some high-profile conservatives pounced on it, and gave it a lot of attention. Loomis has since been visited by the police and called in for a meeting with his dean. You can find the whole story — along with an ever-growing list of Loomis’s academic supporters — here.

The whole thing would be silly if it weren’t potentially so damaging to Loomis’s career.

How silly? Well, there’s this, for starters. Robert Stacy McCain has been one of the more vocal conservative bloggers on the Loomis beat. As part of his campaign, he invited someone named “Badger Pundit” to guest post about Loomis’s dissertation — a history of union organizing among loggers in the Pacific Northwest.

That post wound up giving prominent play to a few paragraphs in which Loomis discussed homosexuality among early 20th century loggers. Unsure what to make of the discussion, but eager to pass it along, Badger Pundit quoted liberally from the brief passage, linked to the Monty Python “Lumberjack Song,” then tossed in an aside about how reading the material left him feeling like “I needed a shower.”

Classy.

But not as classy as commenter Danby, who opined that given the sleeping arrangements in logging camps of the era, any “homosexuals” among the loggers “would soon be found out and beaten with axe handles within an inch of their worthless lives.”

That comment has at the time of this writing received nine upvotes and just one  lonely downvote. It’s also attracted a reply from Badger Pundit himself, who called it “fascinating,” “a great read,” and “a real contribution to the understanding of U.S. history.”

To recap: Calling for a political enemy’s “head on a stick” is a firing offense. Imagining gays “beaten with axe handles within an inch of their worthless lives” is just good writing.

Tucson, Aurora, Newtown: Is President Obama Finally Ready to Act?

December 17, 2012 in Grade School, Politics, Violence, Youth | by | Leave a comment

Here’s the entirety of the only passage in President Obama’s speech in Tucson after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting in 2011 that even implied advocacy for governmental action against gun violence:

“We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of such violence in the future.”

Here’s the analogous passage from his speech in Colorado after the Aurora shootings in July:

“I hope that over the next several days, next several weeks, and next several months, we all reflect on how we can do something about some of the senseless violence that ends up marring this country, but also reflect on all the wonderful people who make this the greatest country on Earth.”

And here’s the analogous passage from his speech tonight in Newtown:

“This is our first task, caring for our children. Our first job. If we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything right. That’s how, as a society, we will be judged. And by that measure, can we truly say, as a nation, that we’re meeting our obligations? Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to keep our children, all of them, safe from harm? Can we claim, as a nation, that we’re all together there, letting them know they are loved and teaching them to love in return? Can we say that we’re truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live our their lives in happiness and with purpose? I’ve been reflecting on this the last few days, and if we’re honest with ourselves, the answer’s no. We’re not doing enough. And we will have to change.

“Since I’ve been president, this is the fourth time we have come together to comfort a grieving community torn apart by mass shootings. Fourth time we’ve hugged survivors. Fourth time we’ve consoled the families of victims. In between there have been an endless series of deadly shootings across the country, almost daily reports of victims, many of them children in small towns and big cities all across America. Victims who much of the time, their only fault was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“We can’t tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change. We will be told that the causes of such violence are complex, and that is true. No single law, no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society, but that can’t be an excuse for inaction. Surely we can do better than this. If there’s even one step we can take to save another child or another parent or another town from the grief that’s visited Tucson and Aurora and Oak Creek and Newtown and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that, then surely we have an obligation to try.

“In the coming weeks, I’ll use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens, from law enforcement, to mental health professionals, to parents and educators, in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this, because what choice do we have? We can’t accept events like this as routine. Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage? That the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?”

Should be an interesting next few weeks.

Gun Violence In American Schools Is Nothing New

December 14, 2012 in Students | by | 4 comments

We’re seeing a lot of suggestions today from the right side of the political spectrum that events like today’s massacre at a Connecticut elementary school are something novel in American history — that they’re a reflection of the fact that we took prayer out of schools, or that our society has lost its sense of morality, or something.

Well, a couple of years ago I did some casual research on the history of American school shootings. A conservative scholar on a blog I read at the time had said that he’d looked for evidence of such shootings in the 1940s and 1950s, and found none, so I fired up the search engine for the archives of the New York Times, looking for articles published between January 1, 1940 and December 31, 1959 that included the words “shot” and “school.”

The search returned 4,940 results.

Most of these weren’t actually articles about school shootings, of course. Many were stories about gun violence that happened to refer to a school that a perpetrator or victim attended. A significant number were sports coverage — articles about target shooting competitions, or shot-put records, or even teams that the Times believed to have a shot at a state or national title.

But as I made my way through the articles, I found that eighteen of the first two hundred were reports of school shootings in which one or more people were killed or wounded.

There were three suicides and six homicides among these eighteen incidents. More than half involved a student perpetrator, and at least three were accidental shootings on school grounds.

Reading these stories, each of which I’ve excerpted below, suggests a world in which gun violence was anything but rare in the school setting. There were premeditated killings alongside instances in which tempers flared or caution was absent, and the Times seems not to have been terribly surprised by any of it. (In March of 1949, for instance, when a student at New York’s elite Stuyvesant High School accidentally shot one of his classmates with a 38-caliber revolver, the story got just five short paragraphs on page 30, and the shooter was charged only with “juvenile delinquency.”)

Anyway, here’s the list of eighteen. Remember, this is only a small sampling of the shootings that occurred — the result of a spot check of about four percent of the hits on a search on one metropolitan newspaper’s archives.

  • May 23, 1940: “Infuriated by a grievance, Matthew Gillespie, 62-year-old janitor at the junior school of the Dwight School for Girls here, shot and critically wounded Mrs. Marshall Coxe, secretary of the junior school, on the first floor of the building this afternoon.”
  • July 5, 1940: “Angered by the refusal of his daughter, Melba Moshell, 15 years old, to leave a boarding school here and return to his home, Joseph Moshell, 47, of 252 East Girard Avenue, Philadelphia, visited the school this afternoon and shot and killed the girl, according to the State Police.”
  • November 18, 1942: “Erwin Goodman, 36-year-old mathematics teacher of William J. Gaynor Junior High School in Brooklyn, was shot and killed in the school corridors on Oct. 2 by a youth whose hand he had clasped in thankfulness for acting as peacemaker a few minutes earlier.”
  • February 23, 1943: “Harry Wyman, 13-year-old son of Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Wyman of Port Chester, NY … shot himself dead tonight at the Harvey School, a boys’ preparatory school.”
  • June 26, 1946: “A 15-year-old schoolboy who balked at turning over his pocket money to a gang of seven Negro youths was shot in the chest at 11:30 A.M. yesterday in the basement of the Public School 147 annex of the Brooklyn High School for Automotive Trades.”
  • November 24, 1946: “A 13-year-old student at St. Benedict’s Parochial School here shot and fatally wounded himself tonight while sitting in an audience watching a school play.”
  • December 24, 1948: “A 14-year-old boy was wounded fatally here today by an accidental shot from the .22-caliber rifle of a fellow-student … the youth was shot in the head when he chanced into range where Robert Ross, 17, of Brooklyn, was shooting at a target near a lake on the school property.”
  • March 12, 1949: “A 16-year-old student at Stuyvesant High School, 345 Fifteenth Street, was accidentally shot in the right arm yesterday afternoon by a fellow student who, police said, was ‘showing off’ with a pistol in a classroom.”
  • July 22, 1950: “A 16-year-old boy was shot in the wrist and abdomen at 10 o’clock last night in Public School 141 … during an argument with a former classmate. They were attending a weekly dance sponsored by the Board of Education.”
  • November 27, 1951: “David Brooks, a 15-year-old student, was fatally shot as fellow-pupils looked on in a grade school here today.”
  • April 9, 1952: “A 15-year-old boarding-school student who shot a dean rather than relinquish pin-up pictures of girls in bathing suits was charged with murderous assault today.”
  • November 20, 1952: “Rear Admiral E. E. Herrmann, 56 years old, superintendent of the Naval Post-Graduate School here, was found dead in his office with a bullet in his head. A service revolver was found by his side.”
  • October 8, 1953: “Larry Licitra, 17-year-old student at the Machine and Metal Trades High School, 320 East Ninety-sixth Street, was shot and slightly wounded in the right shoulder at 11:30 AM yesterday in the lobby of the school while inspecting a handmade pistol owned by one of several students.”
  • October 20, 1956: “A junior high school student was wounded in the forearm yesterday by another student armed with a home-made weapon at Booker T. Washington Junior High School.”
  • October 2, 1957: “A 16-year old student was shot in the leg yesterday by a 15-year old classmate at a city high school.”
  • March 12, 1958: “A 17-year-old student was indicted yesterday for carrying a dangerous weapon. He had shot a boy in the Manual Training High School March 4.”
  • May 1, 1958: “A 15-year-old high school freshman was shot and killed by a classmate in a washroom of the Massapequa High School today.”
  • September 24, 1959: “Twenty-seven men and boys and an arsenal were seized in the Bronx last night as the police headed off a gang war resulting from the fatal shooting of a teen-ager Monday at Morris High School.”

Update | When I conducted the original research for this post I was investigating school shootings generally, not mass killings. Since I posted this new piece, several people have drawn attention to the fact that each of the shootings I list here had only a single victim.

There seems no doubt that mass shootings are on the rise in the United States, both in schools and elsewhere. Consistent with that, when I did another more thorough search of the 1940-59 New York Times archives today, I was able to find only one mass school shooting — a 1940 incident in which a California junior high school principal shot and killed four people during a Board of Education meeting before committing suicide a short distance away.

It’s likely that there were other mass school shootings during the forties and fifties, since even my newer research is far from comprehensive. But there certainly weren’t many.

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StudentActivism.net is the work of Angus Johnston, a historian and advocate of American student organizing.

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