Letter from a Target-Rich Environment

It’s a bright day in early August, and the semester hasn’t yet started. There are twelve of us altogether—new hires at the university—and we’ve been summoned to a classroom on the sixth floor of the Humanities Building for yet another seminar in professional development. For the last week, we’ve been subjected to a dull march of policies and protocols, reviewing instructor manuals clotted with indemnifying legalese. So far the gist of orientation can be summarized with two brainless provisos: Don’t sleep with your students and Don’t buy them beer.

This session is an Active Shooter training. In the designated classroom, twelve rows of desks face a projection screen up front, and the ceiling’s ancient fluorescents give off a wan, spectral glare. I find a seat among my colleagues, and though we have come to this university from places as varied as Togo, Korea, and New York, we are all in our late twenties or early thirties, and thus share a common history. At cocktail parties and departmental mixers throughout the week, we bond over the usual adolescent touchstones, regaling each other with stories about where we were on 9/11 and marveling at the fact that, even though we were children, our parents still let us watch the O.J. Simpson trial on TV. As people who came of age during this epoch of hysteria, all of us are naturally a bit jittery about the seminar. After all, we have no trouble recalling a time when newspapers were glutted with articles about razor blades in aspirin bottles and people in matching Nikes quaffing mugs of arsenic-laced Kool-Aid. What was the name of that cult again? No one can remember. Then someone brandishes a smartphone and tells us it was Heaven’s Gate.

The seminar is conducted by two plainclothes officers, both of whom have guns holstered to their hips. Pacing at the front of the classroom with a grim, prosecutorial air, one of the cops clears his throat and says, “Before we dive in here, let me ask you all a question. Where are you right now?” What follows is a long beat of claustrophobic silence. As academics, we resent the use of cute pedagogical tactics. “You mean where we are, like, existentially?” one colleague quips, but the cop remains wholly unfazed. Finally, another colleague responds in a dutiful tone that we’re on the sixth floor of the Humanities Building. “Good,” the cop says, pointing at her. “But better yet, does anyone know what room we’re in?”.”