Daniel Cucher

It's been almost a week since the shootings here at the UA, and I'm wondering if we're still shocked. I suspect most of us have comfortably pushed Monday's events into a small corner of our brains reserved for the horrors of reality we'd rather not consider.

These types of things hit us hard at first, then seem to drop almost entirely out of our consciousness. We become numb, first to the latest tragedy, then to tragedy in general. Eventually, we barely bat an eyelash at the news of school shootings or burning towers crashing to the ground. We'd just rather not think about it. But we should, and think hard.

The day after the shooting, I expected to spend a good part of at least one or two of my classes discussing the killings. I suspect many other students also thought there would be some conversation. But after a brief three-minute assessment of gun control in my first class, the conversation was cut short in favor of the syllabus. Clearly, students in the class were eager to continue speaking their minds. But what they had to say was hushed because there was a class to teach and life goes on.

I've spoken with several students who feel that the classroom community is largely ignoring Monday's killings. Very few students report having taken part in dialogue in school after the fact. Outside of class, we may discuss the murders, but in school we face an eerie silence.

I attribute this practice of classroom ignorance to the deterioration of the academic institution. In short, school has forgotten its role in society. It is not simply enough to educate us in the specific topics for which we attend class. The greater role of education is to help us develop perspective on our world, to think and to understand. Our learning is useless if we cannot exercise our minds in the everyday world.

When I step into my theology class, I expect to leave with expanded theories about God and God's role (or lack thereof) in the world. After my neurobiology class, I should better understand how the brain functions to make us the way we are. My Italian-American film class should enrich my sense of cultural identity and help me to dissect the human condition. In my fiction workshop, I should gain perspective on how we interpret our world and express truth through metaphor and narrative.

No class should serve the sole purpose of injecting us with facts and skills. When we ignore a major human event to pursue curriculum, we miss an opportunity to take what we've learned and ask how it colors the way we see life. There are few more important applications for what we know than the assessment of world affairs.

By analyzing how human behavior shapes the world, we come to understand who and what we are. All of the classes we take should be lenses through which we may better see and know the state of mankind. Different classes ÷ assorted collections of minds and teachings ÷ provide us with different tools for comprehension. Holding a dialogue (for at least one class period) keeps us from narrow-mindedly oversimplifying these murders. There are so many factors that contribute to a man loading himself up with a deadly arsenal and gunning down three women professors on a college campus. It is neither an isolated nor a simple event, as we are encouraged to believe.

We are so quick to compartmentalize events in our modern world because it keeps us psychologically organized and comfortable. We don't classify these murders as terrorism because there were no religious extremists involved. But terrorism is precisely what occurred on Monday: one man's attempt to terrorize the world through a spontaneous killing spree.

Considering the astounding number of people responding to our modern world this way, we had better take a few minutes out of class to try and figure out what is going so terribly wrong. We cannot afford to isolate such killings and blame fringe extremists or insane individuals. We are all intimately involved and so we must ask: Where is the imbalance? What do our various academic ideologies have to say about it? What can I do?

The fact that this issue may be ignored in classrooms across the country is both shameful and alarming. But that the UA murders have been so completely brushed off within our own buildings is a condemnation of us all, and it holds us all accountable the next time someone comes to school to kill.