What's Writing Got to Do with Campus Terrorism?

Maybe nothing. Either that or everything.

By Chris M. Anson

Nothing: I’m not sure I follow, exactly.

Everything: Members of these groups have a need to disclose, to share their twisted thoughts as if to persuade us of their rationality. But in doing so, they give us clues. The anonymous evildoer lays down a crumb trail to his whereabouts. The named blogger, in whose thoughts unimaginable deeds slumber, offers up prophetic themes and images, bits of plot—a murder here, a suicide there; at turns, revenge on an exacting teacher and the bloody demise of a schoolyard bully.

Nothing: Come on, Ev. You know better than that. Writers can dissemble. Who’s to say that the product of a writer’s mind offers anything but the most cracked mirror of real thoughts and beliefs? More like a house of mirrors. Unimaginable, you say. It’s all imaginable. Did the author of scenes in which kings’ eyes are gouged out and young lovers poison and stab themselves to death try to blow up his schoolhouse? Did Homer also suffer from the “destructive rage that sent countless pains on the Achaeans”? Did Dostoevsky hack up his pawnbroker and her sister? Did Richard Wright stuff a woman’s body into the furnace, or Dreiser drown his girlfriend in a lake to clear the way for the one he really loved? Do you think that Stephen King, John Grisham—

Everything: I’m not quite saying that, N. Consider Ted Kaczyinski, the infamous Unabomber. This lunatic was caught precisely because he wrote, taunting the public with his bizarre letters and his technology-denouncing manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Futures.” I’m sure you know that his brother David recognized that Ted had penned the manifesto and notified the FBI, which led to his capture. If he hadn’t written, in other words, he might still be out there, assembling his next homemade bomb and plotting its detonation in the office of some hapless computer scientist or at some gathering of unsuspecting people. Professors. Little kids, for God’s sake. Writing saved them.

Nothing: Nothing but an isolated case. How many random acts of violence, hatred, revenge, and just plain spite-inspired mischief are perpetrated daily without a shred of written text? Does everyone leave a suicide note?

Everything: Isolated case? D.C. snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Malvo sent cryptic notes and tarot cards to police. The Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold kept extensive journals of their plans. Jack the Ripper, Son of Sam, the BTK killer, Zodiac, the Black Dahlia Avenger—they all wanted to communicate through notes, letters, tips, sometimes even messages written on their victims.

Nothing: What about nonliterate societies, then?

Everything: Off the mark, N. In all its savagery, prehistory and its continued manifestations in undeveloped societies shouldn’t count.

Nothing: What a statement.

Everything: Still, I take your point, but the likelihood is there, or the possibility. If writing stopped the Unabomber, it saved innocent people. Just one case justifies its more systematic use as a weapon against even local terrorism. And every case thereafter strengthens my point.

Nothing: Goodness. You’re saying in essence that we ought to expand the use of writing as a surveillance system? Beyond the limits we’ve already reached? The thousands of crumb trails being followed even at this moment under the provisions of the Patriot Act? Are you entirely happy to have your emails scrutinized by some bureaucrat fishing for coded messages from al Qaeda operatives?

Everything: Well, yes, but I’m advocating the expansion and extension of this surveillance and warning system in our schools. We practice it already, but it’s haphazard and idiosyncratic. We need a process, a set of clear procedures, like fire drills and plagiarism policies. Besides, as a law-abiding entity, I have nothing to fear about my e-mail messages.

Nothing: Sadly, we have everything to fear. Say you’re a first-year student enrolled in a creative writing course as a free elective. You don’t have a rich fund of life experience yet, and your imagination is still rather puerile and undeveloped. You know you need drama, but all that comes to mind is the stuff of Kill Bill and Grand Theft Auto. You sow the seeds of a plot—three students wanting to blow up their school, led by a semi-suicidal, eyebrow-studded goth who listens to death metal and fancies himself sitting at the right hand of Beelzebub. After you submit it, your story, which pleases you and adds just an iota of motivation to your otherwise uninspired academic life, immediately gets cycled through various administrative offices, triggering an investigation into your background, inquiries into your campus life, a Kafkaesque tribunal of some sort. They learn that your parents divorced when you were twelve, that you were depressed in high school (but not quite clinically), that as a child you had an undescended right testicle, that your uncle was prosecuted for writing bad checks, that four years ago your cousin got busted for underage drinking— hmmm, a pattern. Meanwhile, five of your classmates are undergoing similar scrutiny, two for writing about fictional murders, two for creating personas involved in gangs, and one for narrating the thoughts of a girl who, despondent over a cheating lover, wades into the ocean at midnight to “meet the blackness, the cool, cold nothing.” Now stretch this imagined scene across the country, spinning it into thousands of inquiries at countless schools and colleges and universities. A little industry of intrusion.

Everything: Exactly. Once we can identify the cluster of potential risks, we then apply a set of criteria to separate the unlikelies from the possibles and probables. Not everyone gets the same alert level, you see. But those past cases when some warning lights flashed and were ignored, or when someone expressed concern about a student but was brushed off up the administrative line—those would now be subject to a kind of triage system, to layers of tests by trained personnel, perhaps psychologists.

Nothing: But this “cluster of potential risks”—writing turned in to teachers—is already sanitized. I’m sure that students prefer to verbalize their fantasies beyond the walls of their classrooms. In fact, it’s probably more likely for young people to write crazy things on blogs, Facebook pages, and Listservs than in academic papers.

Everything: Everything they put on the Internet, at least what’s publicly accessible, is, well, accessible. And ought to be used.

Nothing: Would you not agree that ferreting out potential havoc-wreakers by following trails in their personal lives is a little excessive and violates their right to privacy on some level? Say I’m a teacher of history and someone in my class seems a little off. Antisocial. Odd doodlings on the cover of her notebook, maybe swastikas, pentagrams. A strange reference or two, in passing, in a paper. I locate her personal blog and learn all sorts of things about her that I didn’t know, political beliefs I don’t agree with, lousy grammar. But no red flags, just a young person exploring the world of ideas, probably without much guidance. Reading her next paper, I’m reminded of these ideas; an image of her, of her ideology, her Facebook friends, forms in my mind as I’m grading, affecting my response and my judgment. You’d say that the advantages of my extracurricular knowledge—in the name of campus safety—outweigh the questionable ethics of my Javert-like snooping and its effects on my judgment of students’ work?

Everything: Glass half full, N! Teachers can be trained to read more objectively.

Nothing: Nevertheless, if I were that teacher I might not think that it’s part of my job description to poke around in the personal lives of my students. The risk is too great. I’d probably stop assigning writing at all. Would you agree that there’s a limit here?

Everything: Of course. But within that limit, let’s agree that we can use to our advantage those dark thoughts made visible. A window, N, a window. . .

Nothing: A slippery slope, Ev, like so much post-9/11 thinking. You see, I have a right to make my dark thoughts visible without some dim-witted henchman of the government using them against me or suspecting me of insurrection and mayhem.

Everything: Not against, for. Sick people who gun down innocents end up killing themselves, getting lethally injected, or rotting their lives away in prison. We’re talking about preemptive strikes. They need help. We see the dangers coming and we act, for their safety and for ours.

Nothing: The more preemptive we become, the less we simply await signs of trouble. There’s a big difference between noticing hints of suicide or rage in students’ papers and actively gathering information about them. Remember that the provisions of the Patriot Act allowed the Justice Department to investigate antiwar protests led by the National Lawyers’ Guild at Drake University in 2003. The FBI’s Joint Counter-terrorism Task Force subpoenaed documents and records from the student-led group and got hold of campus surveillance tapes, all within the presumed guidelines of our “new” laws. They found nothing, of course, but you may recall moments in history when such unfounded investigations by authorities were themselves a kind of terrorism. And there are many other examples, some worse. I’m almost afraid to tell you about them because it puts me at risk of being scrutinized. Thank goodness nothing will come of nothing.

Everything: But if we look, we see. If we seek, we find. We’re talking about terrorism. Dead students.Anguished communities. Families torn asunder. Tragedy of the worst kind. And preventable.

Nothing: And how deeply do you consider we look, Ev? Do we notice every allusion as it slips—or so we think—in and out of a shadow of a writer’s mind? Every student’s work will lead us through a maze of hints both real and imagined, confusing our true purpose for reading. As our collective paranoia builds, do we not risk viewing our charges with collective suspicion? Was this not the climate that resulted in four dead, one paralyzed, and nine injured on the campus of Kent State in 1970? When the National Guardsmen fired, were they not influenced by the paranoia of cumulative “tips” and “hints”—writings protesting the establishment and cops and the military-industrial complex? Was it another kind of tip or hint when just weeks before Governor Reagan of California said in reference to student protests, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with”? Everyone was writing then, too, you know. Wouldn’t you agree this was a case of campus terrorism caused by misinterpretation of motive?

Everything: Accidents happen.

Nothing: That’s all? For millennia, good people’s writing, writing in protest of dominant and sometimes wrongheaded political systems, ideologies, and actions, has been used against them. For students to become members of a truly participatory democracy, don’t they need to use their voices? How does such a fundamental part of education get twisted when they fear your system of identification and “triage,” your airport security in the schools? Imagine the safe blandness of it all, not a word of contestation, the silence of passivity.

Everything: We’re talking about plans for mass murder here, not a Listserv post about embryonic stem cell research or whether there should be a market for baby seal furs.

Nothing: Freedom means freedom to write. Anything. Dozens of studies have shown that writing acts therapeutically, for traumatized veterans and nursing home residents and prisoners and troubled kids. The most common form is the personal journal, a place to express one’s innermost thoughts without fear. How many of your so-called miscreants, otherwise driven to act, have written their way toward reason and reason and reasonableness in their personal logs and blogs and journals? Have used writing to find their way? All those possible victims—little kids, for God’s sake. Writing saved them. Do you want to squelch that?

Everything: But this kind of writing has nothing to do with thwarting campus terrorism.

Nothing: It has everything to do with it, Ev! From the earliest of literate times people have deliberated with themselves over profound issues, both personal and public. How do you think we come to any resolution to do or not do something, to act or not act, to be moral or not?

Everything: Don’t you think the mass murderers deliberated? What difference did it make whether they wrote down their schizophrenic contemplations before crawling into their paramilitary fatigues and draping themselves with semiautomatic Glocks? Nothing would have changed their minds.

Nothing: But wouldn’t you agree that even one case of anger abandoned justifies the use of writing to explore one’s confusions and frustrations, alienation and identity, goals and fears? And wouldn’t you agree that even one case of a bad motive abandoned justifies the use of writing to encourage young people to treat each other—potential perpetrators—without prejudice and ridicule, to deny one another the reasons for enacted bitterness and hatred? And wouldn’t you agree that even one case of a changed mind justifies the use of academic writing to do something more than test for the accumulation of facts? And would you not agree that all this must be done—writing, thinking, deliberating— without the imposition of an academic panopticon? And every case of harmful action thwarted thereafter, whether we know about it or not, strengthens my point.

Everything: But these are nothing but imagined cases.

Nothing: Every future case is imagined, Ev. We imprison ourselves from fear. College campuses are statistically among the safest public places on earth.

Everything: Safe from what?

Nothing: Everything.

Everything: I’m not so sure. But regardless, I don’t think that’s the last word.

Chris M. Anson is University Distinguished Professor and director of the Campus Writing and Speaking Program at North Carolina State University, where he works with faculty in nine colleges to help them incorporate writing and speaking into their classes more effectively. His e-mail address is chris_anson@ncsu.edu.

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