Since sometime in the late spring of 1999, I have had somewhere on my bookshelves a sixteen-by-sixteen-by-four-inch Champagne Perrier Jouët gift box, vintage 1990. Glossy maroon, decorated with white-, pink-, and gold-colored flowers, and bigger even than my one-volume Oxford English Dictionary, the gift box calls attention to itself wherever it is, even before it is opened. And I have opened it many times.
The sixteen-by-sixteen-by-four-inch maroon Champagne Perrier Jouët gift box was one of two parts of a final project by Gil Grabow, a student in the Spring 1999 version of my course The UT Tower and Public Memory in the Division of Rhetoric and Composition at The University of Texas at Austin. Led by Joshua Fischer and joined by each of the twenty or so other students in the class, Gil helped invent, compose, and somehow deliver inside each of 30,000 copies of The Daily Texan a tabloid-sized magazine of writing by UT students called Our Tower: Reflections on Public Space and Memory.
After being closed to the public for more than two decades because of eight suicides over forty years, the observation deck of the Tower was scheduled to reopen in September 1999, and the prospect of that reopening offered students the previous spring semester a powerful exigence for their collaborative invention and writing. Students also asked me to contribute to Our Tower, and my contribution with a headline written by the student editors -- “Yankee Rhetorician Tells It On The Tower: Why We Must Care” -- is found elsewhere in this project, as is the rest of Our Tower.
Much more important than my essay was the rest of Our Tower, comprised of student contributions. As Fischer illustrated in his editor's note, students in the Tower class heard loud and clear my message that they had agency to intervene in our shared world, if only they would seize it:
It is safe to say that most of us are immensely excited to welcome the Tower's re-opening, a symbolic gesture we see as representative of the University's willingness to open things up here. The status quo has ruled for too long. It is time to create new memory on this campus, surrounded by pride and excellence, not tragedy and closure.
The upcoming arrival of the Martin Luther King Jr. statue is also a timely addition to campus memory, and it is high time to grace this campus with heroes from every culture, not just confederate men who don't speak to the present or the future. Joining MLK on the East Mall will be a plaque memorializing the victims of Charles J. Whitman, who single-handedly shattered more than just lives. He scarred our universal memories, even those of us not born by 1966.
This publication is in no way a tribute to Whitman. If anything, it is a tribute to his victims, and to others who met death from the Tower, including A.P. Thomason, a UT English professor who jumped from the 24th floor in 1945.
His suicide becomes quite symbolic if you re-visit the campus atmosphere of 1945. This is not an easy task, but research shows that year to be one of the most tumultuous in UT history, when the UT regents fired UT President Homer P. Rainey.
Rainey stood firm for academic freedom and tenure, and lost his own job. It was not the first time the regents changed history here, as the controversial Littlefield Memorial statues were all funded by former UT regent Major George Littlefield. We now live with these confederate heroes welcoming the world to the heart of UT. Clearly, we need newer heroes.
It will be interesting to monitor UT today, as its tenure decisions continue to rid the campus of some of its finest faculty, especially women and minorities.
It is said that academic freedom is under attack. If that related to students as well, then let this publication attest to our freedom as tuition and fee-paying students of this great University....
This September, the UT community reclaims one of its most cherished public spaces. Let this serve as an early tribute to everyone involved in allowing this to happen.
It is no longer their Tower. It is "Our Tower." (Fischer)
Nearly twenty years later, from the vantage of Penn State, it seems clear that neither the Tower at UT nor college education in general belongs to students. The Tower's reopening, along with a stainless-steel cage around the observation deck and a tour that includes no mention of Whitman or the reason that the deck was closed for two decades, served only as a short-lived public-relations opportunity for UT. And the lack of any educational memorial to the Tower shootings -- a topic to which we will return -- wastes a grand opportunity for teaching about the public health consequences of public and domestic gun violence in the United States.[5 ]
Yet the Tower course at UT was not primarily about gun violence. Nor was it primarily about the Tower shootings, Charles Whitman, or even Whitman's victims. I would not claim to be an expert on any of those things, though I have learned a great deal about each of them over the years from reading widely and deeply, from inviting witnesses and researchers to class, and from listening carefully to anyone who wanted to speak with me or my students about the Tower itself, the Tower shootings and public memory, or public violence more generally. The Tower course, first and foremost, was a course about memory and invention, two of the canons of rhetoric. Each semester I taught it, students and I conducted a collaborative inquiry into invention and memory, centered on the university's most infamous day.
More generally, public memory studies and public memory pedagogies present a means of reinvigorating our shared democratic practices precisely by making the processes of public memory formation themselves more public. Just as the Tower course was first and foremost about memory and invention, my current Rhetorics and/of School Shootings course at Penn State is primarily about public memory on campus and the possibility of sustainable publics. By encouraging students and other citizens, widely defined, to come to terms publicly with troubling events in their shared world, we materially enable -- echoing Hannah Arendt’s understanding of “public” in The Human Condition -- a space for shared reality to appear. We can talk together about difficult things. In fact, we have to. It's the best hope we have. And we are infinitely smarter together than we are separately.
Among the other items in Our Tower were letters students had solicited from people who remembered the Tower shootings, who were on campus that day, or who thought the incident should be forgotten. One student wrote a feature story on UT President Larry Faulkner and the initiative he showed in responding affirmatively to students who had perennially proposed reopening the observation deck of the Tower; another featured a UT police officer who had prevented a shooting in the UT president's office in the Main Building, adjacent to the Tower, in 1991. Inspired by UT Law Professor Sanford Levinson's Written in Stone, Fischer analyzed "The Six Pack," statues honoring heroes of the Confederacy just south of the Tower, and interviewed UT Professor of Asian Studies John Nelson about his idea to have an interfaith ritual cleansing of the Tower -- an idea that came to fruition and about which I wrote for Rhetoric and Public Affairs (“Rhetoric and the Anti-Logos Doughball”). Our Tower also included a proposal that the Tower be lit to celebrate academic as well as athletic milestones and a brief proposal for a memorial to Whitman's victims -- "a simple plaque with the words 'Life Is Worth Living.'" While students in my rhetoric courses at both UT and Penn State have collaborated on group projects with real-world consequences -- public scholarship -- the scope of this particular class's work on Our Tower and the sheer audacity of circulating it via The Daily Texan make this group stand apart from all the rest -- so far.
In addition to Gil Grabow's work on Our Tower -- and the sixteen-by-sixteen-by-four-inch maroon Champagne Perrier Jouët gift box and its contents -- the other part of his final project was a poster presenting a graphic and discursive map of possible causes for Charles Whitman's actions on August 1, 1966. The background of the poster was Whitman's head and neck, and Gil had carefully cut and pasted onto the poster excerpts from Whitman's autopsy and Gary Lavergne's A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders to explicate possible factors, physiological and psychological, that might have influenced Whitman to do what he did thirty-three years earlier.
Like many of my classes, the Tower class was organized around the canons of rhetoric -- invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery -- as well as the stasis questions: fact or conjecture, definition, quality or value, cause and consequences, and procedure or policy or proposal. Gil's poster combined a focus on the stasis of cause with the canon of arrangement: how to put into some rhetorically effective order discourses about what caused Whitman's actions. Gil clearly had thought a lot about Charles Whitman. I learned years later why Whitman so captivated Gil's attention.
Contents Under Pressure
Have I mentioned that Gil served in the Marine Corps? It is a fact I am reminded of each time I open, in hesitant wonderment anew, the sixteen-by-sixteen-by-four-inch maroon Champagne Perrier Jouët gift box. When I lift the lid -- my palms and fingers parallel and flat against each side -- I see again the pink faux-satin fabric covering and am confronted immediately by a memory from my childhood: casket liners came in a few different fabrics, and before I was tall enough to see up and inside, I walked through the casket room holding one hand high enough to feel the fabric, my hand flat against the satin, the polyester, the crepe. War always comes home.
When I lift the lid on Gil's sixteen-by-sixteen-by-four-inch maroon Champagne Perrier Jouët gift box, I see pink fabric covering all the contents of the box save a laminated copy of a US Marine Corps Reserve Identification Card -- "NOT A PASS," the card cautions -- for CPL Gary G. Grabow II. Below the caption "ARMED FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES," there is a photo of Gil, his tanned face squinting dismissal of whatever it was he was looking upon at the time the photograph was taken.
Gil never mentioned in class that he was a Marine. "I withheld that information from you," Gil told me in a 2015 phone conversation when I asked his permission to share his work in this project. Gil had fought with the 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion -- "the tip of the spear" -- in 1990 and 1991 in Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. At war Gil turned twenty-one.
Have I mentioned the live ammunition in the sixteen-by-sixteen-by-four-inch maroon Champagne Perrier Jouët gift box? With the help of Lavergne's book and other sources, Gil identified and located eleven types of ordnance Whitman either took to the observation deck or left behind at his home and eleven types of ordnance police and civilians amassed in response to Whitman's barrage. Gil glued the twenty-two bullets to two sixteen-by-two-by-three-quarter-inch pieces of wood that stand to face each other, like some lethal chess set, when the box is fully open. As with his poster, Gil carefully cut photo captions, brief passages, and footnotes from Lavergne's book and pasted them below each of the bullets as well as on the front of the long side of the wood -- a brief narration:
Whitman's arsenal included (from left to right) a 35 mm Remington, an illegally customized Sears 12-gauge shotgun, a 6mm Remington bolt action, and a 30-caliber M-1 carbine. The carbine enabled Whitman to fire rapidly, but by far the most accurate and deadliest was the scoped 6mm Remington. Austin Police Department Files.
He would use almost all of the weapons in his arsenal, but the 6mm Remington pierced the heart of Austin.
Without a scope, targets 300 yards away are reasonable. Even an average shot should be able to hit a target at that distance within six and one half inches, and Whitman was no average shot.
On the reverse long side of the piece of wood, on both sides of two brass tacks embossed with tiny flowers, Gil cut and pasted these three more excerpts from Lavergne's book:
Charlie carried a card with these typed words:
YESTERDAY IS NOT MINE TO RECOVER, BUT TOMORROW IS MINE TO LOSE. I AM RESOLVED THAT I SHALL WIN THE TOMORROWS BEFORE ME!!!
He tried desperately to live by the creed; numerous handwritten and typed copies of the quote were found throughout his personal effects.
At the far right end of the piece of wood, next to the bullets, is a miniaturized copy of the photo printed in newspapers all over the world the following day: the black and white UT student photo of a crew-cut Charlie Whitman not in Marine garb but in a civilian's dark jacket, white shirt, and tie: the all-American boy, a UT psychiatrist had called him.
Gil similarly arranged the ordnance of the police and civilian response to Whitman, again tagged and narrated by captions and passages from Lavergne's book, among them, "In buildings, on rooftops and through windows, dozens of people, policemen and civilians side by side -- with varying degrees of accuracy -- fired at Whitman with pistols, shotguns and rifles…. From the English Building a civilian mumbled, 'I'm going to get the son-of-a-bitch.’” Gil also put in the box a four-power scope similar to the one Whitman used, with a white terrycloth headband tied to it by a slim leather cord, and a full 30-caliber automatic clip for an M-1, with this passage from Lavergne's book taped onto it: "Charles Whitman's body had been taken to Cook's Funeral Home for an autopsy. As layers of clothing were removed, APD Sergeant Bill Landis found several 30-caliber M-1 Carbine clips and a 25-caliber automatic pistol. The autopsy did not take place until 8:55 a.m. the next day, after Whitman had been embalmed." Gil also somehow found and ensconced in the sixteen-by-sixteen-by-four-inch maroon Champagne Perrier Jouët gift box a bottle of Hoppe's No. 9 Nitro Powder Solvent, still in its original burnt orange box, and a three-quarters empty box of Hoppe's No. 5 Gun Cleaning Patches, box red and burnt orange with a bullseye on the top.
Along with his military ID, Gil placed in the box additional passages, cut from Lavergne's book and laminated, about Whitman's military training, about his guns, and about the gun shop where Whitman bought, on the morning of August 1, 1966, additional ammunition and a can of Hoppe's No. 9 cleaning solvent.
Six final items in Gil's maroon gift box merit close description. First, Gil left a card with his family's address; it is that card that enabled me, in 2014, to talk with Gil's mother and find out that Gil is doing fine. Thankfully, his mother remembered Gil talking about the Tower class and was happy to hear from me and gave me an update on Gil's work in the nearly fifteen years since he was in my class. Second, Gil put a folded clipping of a newspaper photo of Texas writer, singer, and sometime political candidate Kinky Friedman surrounded by dogs at the Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch for stray and unwanted animals. Gil and Joshua and some of the other students in the Tower class very much wanted Friedman to visit class and perform "The Ballad of Charles Whitman," the chorus of which operates at the stasis of cause: "There was a rumor of a tumor nestled at the base of his brain.... Who are we to say the boy's insane?" (For my part, I remain ambivalent about the song.) Additionally, Gil put in the box a card for Red's Indoor Range, 6200 Hwy. 290 West in Austin, and wrote the following on the back of the card: "A special thanks to Red's for all of their help in finding the civilian weapons used, and in locating the rounds for the display. They showed much patience. -- Gil."
The final three items in the box were directly under Gil's military ID. First, a card with "The Marine's Prayer in small caps under the Marine Corps logo with the photo of a kneeling soldier with doffed helmet and rifle at sunset on the reverse. In the context of the rest of the contents of the sixteen-by-sixteen-by-four-inch maroon Champagne Perrier Jouët gift box, the text of The Marine's Prayer, in all caps, is particularly inventional:
ALMIGHTY FATHER, WHOSE COMMAND IS OVER ALL AND WHOSE LOVE NEVER FAILS, MAKE ME AWARE OF THY PRESENCE AND OBEDIENT TO THY WILL. KEEP ME TRUE TO MY BEST SELF, GUARDING ME AGAINST DISHONESTY IN PURPOSE AND DEED AND HELPING ME TO LIVE SO THAT I CAN FACE MY FELLOW MARINES, MY LOVED ONES AND THEE WITHOUT SHAME OR FEAR. PROTECT MY FAMILY. GIVE ME THE WILL TO DO THE WORK OF A MARINE AND TO ACCEPT MY SHARE OF RESPONSIBILITY WITH VIGOR AND ENTHUSIASM. GRANT ME THE COURAGE TO BE PROFICIENT IN MY DAILY PERFORMANCE. KEEP ME LOYAL AND FAITHFUL TO MY SUPERIORS AND TO THE DUTIES MY COUNTRY AND THE MARINE CORPS HAVE ENTRUSTED TO ME. MAKE ME CONSIDERATE OF THOSE COMMITTED TO MY LEADERSHIP. HELP ME TO WEAR MY UNIFORM WITH DIGNITY. AND LET IT REMIND ME DAILY OF THE TRADITIONS WHICH I MUST UPHOLD.
IF I AM INCLINED TO DOUBT, STEADY MY FAITH; IF I AM TEMPTED, MAKE ME STRONG TO RESIST; IF I SHOULD MISS THE MARK, GIVE ME COURAGE TO TRY AGAIN.
GUIDE ME WITH THE LIGHT OF TRUTH AND GRANT ME WISDOM BY WHICH I MAY UNDERSTAND THE ANSWER TO MY PRAYER.
AMEN.
The semester that Gil had the Tower class, Gary Lavergne's A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders was reissued as a mass market "true crime" paperback, A Sniper in the Tower: The True Story of the Texas Tower Massacre: The Charles Whitman Murders. Gil cut the front and back covers apart and chose two final passages from the book to include with the other items in the box. First, from the back cover:
THE FACTS BEHIND THE MYTH OF THE "ALL-AMERICAN KILLER"
On a sweltering afternoon in 1966, Charles Whitman ascended the University of Texas Tower with enough firepower to hold off an army. For the next ninety-six minutes he methodically gunned down forty-five strangers, killing fourteen. But as shocking as the rampage that made world headlines -- and the murders of his wife and mother the night before -- was the smiling photograph on the front page: a handsome, all-American Eagle Scout and U.S. Marine. A bewildered nation asked: How could this golden boy be a mass murderer?
And then, again, laminated, a passage in italics from Lavergne's book: "The sharp increase in crimes of violence against the person and in murder in recent years are likely to continue unless America stops teaching violence to her people. Every night T.V. programs stress homicide. Murder, sudden and quick, is piped into every home as 'entertainment'".
Finally, Gil chose to include the work of Star Gebser, a student in the 1996 version of the Tower class, in the sixteen-by-sixteen-by-four-inch maroon Champagne Perrier Jouët gift box. Star built one of her projects for the course around the Tower card of the Tarot deck, redesigning the image on the card to reflect details of the UT Tower. With the image of Star's Tarot Tower card, Gil included the following description -- source unspecified -- of the Tower card in the Tarot:
XVI THE TOWER
This is a card about electrical impulses. Look at your card. A bolt of lightning strikes the lid off the Tower. Two people -- knocked off by the shock -- are now falling headlong into the abyss. This card describes someone who is subject to fits of inspiration, mental lapses, or visions. Perhaps you work with computers or electronic equipment. Electricians, deejays, or paramedics may be involved. In the near future you can expect to pick up some static, to be shocked into your senses, or to witness a shocking event. An idea suddenly comes to you in the shower. One heck of a storm blows through your part of the world. Reversed. Someone attempts to light a fire under you. The "acts of God" clause in your insurance policy is invoked. You are shocked by what you hear on the radio or TV.
Educational Memorials or Memorials to Education
When I left UT to return to Penn State, it never occurred to me to leave behind the sixteen-by-sixteen-by-four-inch maroon Champagne Perrier Jouët gift box. From the vantage of fifteen years, the project strikes me as Gil's attempt to take all the possible causes and all the negative consequences of Charles Whitman's actions on August 1, 1966 -- Whitman's Marine training and media violence in particular -- and put them away in a lockbox, where they might do no more harm.
I don't know that Gil would see it that way. When I asked him in an email if he minds talking about his experience in the Persian Gulf, he responded, "I have no problem dealing with this. It is my past, and I should never forget about it. I am benefiting from the harsh experience still." Perhaps my interpretation has more to do with my first Austin and how his experiences in the Marine Corps affected our family.
The affective power of Gil's creation, even fifteen years after its invention and delivery, stands in stark contrast to the apparent lack of efficacy of the best proposal I have read for a memorial to the victims of Charles Whitman. And I have read many. Written by Erin Rae Osenbaugh in 2001, during the final section of the Tower course I taught before leaving for Penn State, the proposal -- an open letter to University President Larry Faulkner and the chair of the university’s Tower Garden Memorial Design Selection Committee -- suggests UT reverse plans for a physical monument and instead design a memorial devoted to educating students and wider publics about gun violence. I checked with Erin via Twitter in August 2015 -- just to be sure -- and she has still received no reply in response to her proposal.
The first time I taught the Tower course, in 1996, students raised the question of a memorial to the victims of the Tower shooting, something that by all accounts the University had, at that time, never considered. Given the “memory boom” and “memorial boom” that we were reading about in class, students consistently wondered why there was no memorial to the victims of the Tower shootings, and students in the first section of the course, led by Wesley R. Forni, developed the first web memorial to victims of the shootings.
Consequently, a recurring topos that we discussed in the course was how memorials and memorialization processes have changed over time, a subject Edward T. Linenthal treats at great length in his book The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory and that rhetorical scholars in particular have studied well and closely. Given the "cruel, cool" cultural memories of the Tower shootings, however, students wondered -- even worried -- that any physical memorial to the victims of the shootings might well have been repurposed, becoming an unintended shrine to Whitman.
At the end of every semester in which I offered the Tower course, I asked students to deliberate with one another whether the course should be offered again. Frankly, teaching it was, particularly before I was tenured, stressful. I had taken on the most embarrassing and traumatic event in UT's history and built a course around it in order to help students realize the power of studying and practicing rhetoric together. Students consistently argued that the course itself was a memorial to the victims of the shootings, a living educational memorial.
UT President Larry Faulkner created a Tower Memorial Committee in 1999 to study whether and how to memorialize the events of August 1, 1966. As if cursed, the university’s initial moves toward developing such a memorial -- dedicating on August 1, 1999, a section of campus known as the turtle pond as “The Tower Memorial Garden” and then somehow allowing the pond to fall into such disarray that all the turtles died -- were not encouraging. The good news: such relative chaos creates space for public deliberation and conjoint action. It was in that context of disarray that Erin Rae Osenbaugh sent her proposal on the question of an appropriate memorial to the committee. Erin chose memorialization as the topos she would stick with all semester. Thus, by the end of the semester, each of the papers she wrote, at each of the first four rhetorical stases -- fact/conjecture, definition, quality/value, and cause/consequence -- could be synthesized into a comprehensive policy argument at the fifth stasis, proposal.
In the cover sheet to her proposal, which Erin sent to both the Tower Garden Memorial Design Selection Committee and the news desk of The Daily Texan, Erin states her exigence: "the University has not included in its decisions regarding this subject sufficient public debate about the issue." Erin's syntax reminds me that for most students, this kind of writing activity represents the first time they have thought to address themselves to power. Erin continues, "as a student of the University, I am concerned about how the University speaks on my behalf.... I appreciate the opportunity to share with you my thoughts on the memorial." Erin's further exigence is, from her vantage in April 2001, the increasing number of what are not yet consistently called "school shootings" in the United States: "It is important to think about this now, not only because a design for the memorial will be presented soon, but also because there is currently an unfortunate wave of similar incidents occurring in our country. The opportunity to effect a change in this trend must be capitalized upon while something positive can still come out of the situation. The University has been blessed with such an opportunity."
Erin articulates her purpose in the seven-page letter this way: "I will first attempt to establish common understanding of the purpose of this memorial with you. I will then share my thoughts on the current design for the memorial, and I will conclude by presenting a few ideas of my own." Erin then delineates the eight specific areas of memorialization identified by the May 2000 report on the Tower Memorial by the Tower Garden Advisory Committee: the victims; the date; the effect of the event on the university, community, and nation; healing; bringing the community together; the Tower as a symbol of resilience and affirmation; heroism; and the restorative elements of a memorial garden. She then adds,
Before the Design Selection Committee can approve any submissions for the design of the memorial, the definitional criteria for those eight areas of memorialization must be fully developed and then agreed upon by the community. If my understanding of the areas of memorialization does not match the one the University has intended to present, I think I will have demonstrated that, before these eight areas can be memorialized, they must be scrutinized and carefully defined in order to avoid public confusion regarding the purpose of the memorial.
In other words, Erin is attempting to help the committee, through her expertise, avoid constructing a memorial that will be at best confusing and at worst a shrine to Whitman.
Erin understands memorials as one type of public communication. Among the fundamental messages any memorial would send is who is and who is not a victim, a question we discussed extensively each semester. "What does it mean to have been a victim of Charles Whitman's rampage?" Erin asks.
Obviously the 16 people who died are victims. In addition, however, are some very important groups of people. First, the families of those who died are victims. Parents lost children, children lost parents, siblings and spouses lost lifetime companions and friends lost soul mates. In addition, those who were directly involved in the event and whose lives were forever changed, but who may not have known any who were killed, are also victims.... People who cannot look at the Tower without a momentary sensation of terror are victims.... If the University is to memorialize Whitman's "victims," it must consider all of these groups of people.
But the complexity of defining "victim" pales in comparison to the question of effect.
Under the heading "The Effect of the Event on the University, Community, and Nation," Erin begins, "This area is so complex that it probably warrants its own museum." Erin goes on, citing Lavergne, to articulate the effects on public safety and security of the Tower shootings: "'Whitman forced America to face the truth about murder and how vulnerable the public could be in a free and open society.... He caused everyday Americans, most of those never affected by the horror of mass murder, to question their assumptions about safety, especially in public places. In other words," Erin concludes the paragraph in her own words, Whitman "led people to question their most basic notions of safety and truth." Erin mentions effects on the justice system and law enforcement, and ends this section of her proposal by suggesting that these are only a few of the consequences and that the magnitude of the incident's effects must somehow be reflected in any memorial.
Erin's informed and intelligent written ethos -- a model of "good sense, good will, and good moral character" -- enabled her to engage critically with and challenge the work of the committee she was addressing. Through the depth of her research and the quality of her writing, Erin became someone who could productively engage with the work the memorial and selection committees were doing behind closed doors.
Under the heading of "Healing," Erin writes:
"Healing" is a vague term. What does the committee propose to "heal" with the memorial? The wounds on Claire Wilson's abdomen have long ago healed, and no amount of memorializing will ever reverse Mary Lamport's paralysis.... Others would prefer to forget the whole thing ever happened.
So what does it mean to "heal" the wounds Charles Whitman left behind? It could be that the University is trying to heal the wounds it has inflicted (e.g., distrust, infidelity) by building a bureaucratic wall around the event for the past 30 years. The Committee must consider all of the above possibilities in forming its own definition of "healing," and that definition should be apparent in the design of the memorial.
Under the heading of "Heroism," Erin begins, "finding a hero in this situation is difficult." She discusses briefly the two men who together subdued and killed Charles Whitman, Ramiro Martinez and Houston McCoy, observing that "neither of them is necessarily proud of what happened on that observation deck; the whole thing sickens them.” Erin adds: "The students and faculty who helped wounded colleagues probably do not feel heroic; for many of them, the University campus was never the same after the event. They lost a sacred part of their souls that day."
Erin then moved from definition to evaluation to prepare for the first of her proposals: "The decision to memorialize the event with a physical structure in the Tower Garden should be reversed immediately." Erin supported her evaluation by discussing the nature of the university and how the proposed "physical structure" memorial would not advance the university's mission:
The University's mission statement includes the ideal of contributing to "the advancement of society through research, creative activity, scholarly inquiry, and the development of new knowledge." An inanimate object like the proposed memorial would fulfill the basic functions of teaching campus and social history, but it would not meet the standards of innovation and creativity of a flagship institution like the University. The ideal memorial would engage the University and utilize its resources to the utmost through "research, creative activity, scholarly inquiry, and the development of new knowledge."
Noting Robert Musil's observation that most monuments seem to have been designed to be overlooked (“Monuments”), Erin concludes, "Erecting a memorial in the form of a physical structure would not be an effective endeavor for the University because, presumably, few people would pay attention to it. It does seem unwise to spend upwards of $150,000, excluding ongoing maintenance, for something that will generally be forgotten."
Erin ended her letter by proposing a specific alternative use for the proposed $150,000 budget for a physical structure to memorialize the events of August 1, 1966: "I believe that the memorial to the victims of Charles Whitman should take the form of a renewable grant that can be used for academic study of subjects related to the event. An example of this approach," one we had studied in class along with Kristen Hoerl, then a UT graduate student in communication studies,
is the annual academic symposium held at Kent State University in Ohio to commemorate the events on that campus on May 4, 1970, when four students were killed during a confrontation with the Ohio National Guard. The most recent event, the “Multidisciplinary Symposium on Freedom of Expression and Order in a Democratic Society,” took an issue important to the 1970 incident (freedom of expression) and made it relevant to current policy in 2000.
Erin concluded, "This model of memorialization is creative, which is newsworthy. It is guaranteed to receive coverage not only when it is established, but also annually, when reports are presented or when symposia are hosted by the University. The university should consider this larger picture in the memorialization process."
Many of the activities students and I engaged in as part of the Tower course made news -- not public-relations coups but something more important: actual news. Courses that make news because they address common problems and generate plausible solutions should be a central way to communicate the daily magnificence that a public university can accomplish. I still regret that Erin's proposal did not make news. Perhaps in time Erin's work and the work of all the other students in each version of the Tower course will help to precipitate the creation of a digital educational archive to the victims -- widely defined -- of gun violence in the United States of America.
Public Memory and The Citizen Archive
While a few people had studied the tower shootings before I started offering the class, no one that I know of had intentionally tried to get discourse about the shootings and memories associated with the shootings generated, recorded, and published. In fact, quite the contrary: as a UT police officer who was quoted in a news story about my course said, "The University just wanted the whole thing to go away." It still amazes me, particularly given my experiences during my first decade on the faculty at Penn State, that I received so much support in inventing and offering the Tower course at UT.
Despite the national media attention that course would attract, I found myself after a few years unwilling to do television interviews about the course. Instead of more interviews with the likes of The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather or Dateline NBC -- a producer told me that the subject matter was too complicated for the twenty seconds they had to spare -- I quickly became more interested in discourse gardening: putting students in situations where they could choose to engage with each other and with wider publics via various media – and not for public relations but for news value and public deliberation.
Public memory studies and rhetorical education more generally provide means of inviting students to learn how to be practicing citizens, collaboratively deliberating bodies. Getting undergraduates interested in the processes of public memory -- getting them to use their agency to help shape and contest public memory -- is one means toward that end. While classrooms are not public spaces in that the professor has different kinds of power than have students, classrooms can be protopublic spaces where the habits of participatory democracy are studied and practiced together.
"We can talk together about difficult things. In fact, we have to. It’s the best hope we have." Since 1989 I've been saying this in my undergraduate classes. I never know when I'm going to have to say it. But one day or another, sooner or later in the semester, the going is going to get difficult, and someone -- sometimes even me -- is going to need encouragement about bringing a difficult fact or other kind of claim into the conversation.
5. UT did, however, move the statue of Jefferson Davis, part of the Littlefield Memorial, to the Briscoe Center for American History, where it is part of an exhibit called “From Commemoration to Education” (Herman).
