Students in the Spring 1999 section of the UT Tower and Public Memory course invited -- assigned! -- me to contribute a piece of writing to their group project, a tabloid-sized magazine called Our Tower, which they mysteriously got printed and placed in every copy of the 30,000-circulation Daily Texan.
I need to say first that I am a Yankee. So there are some things I just don't understand.
One thing I didn't understand a few years running was this: Why were people here in Austin calling local talk radio stations every August 1 to narrate at length what they had been doing when Charles Whitman started killing their friends, family members, and fellow citizens from the top of the Tower?
I've learned that these people made those calls because their memories had no public place to go other than talk radio, even 30 years after the shootings. Their memories were like roaming ghosts, showing up from time to time in conversations on the street, in bars, on local radio. But they had never been heard collectively, in public. And still they have not been.
That the events of August 1, 1966, are remembered -- at least by individuals -- first became clear to me as I listened to local talk radio on August 1, 1995, the 29th anniversary of the shootings. What I heard on KLBJ's "Paul Pryor Show" that day began to persuade me that the events of August 1, 1966, and how those events are remembered by individuals, institutions, and publics deserved serious study and deliberation.
If the Tower course has a single point of origination, that "Paul Pryor Show" is it. I'm glad Paul is back in town again; he was on Sam and Bob the other morning and I fought the urge to call and ask him what he thinks of the re-opening of the observation deck. Paul Pryor is in many ways as much Austin's everyman as is his tale-spinning father, Cactus.
Another thing I don't understand is this: On the afternoon I am writing this particular paragraph -- May 28, 1999 -- I received a phone call from someone in downtown Austin, alarmed and spreading the word: "There's a sniper in the Brown Building." As it turned out, thank God, it was not a sniper and no one was harmed. But a gun incident in Austin, Texas, for one reason or another, was rewritten as another "sniper in the Tower."
Another thing I didn't understand was this: A few weeks ago, in the process of planning a proposed memorial garden to the victims of the Tower shootings, an assistant to the university president asked me if I had a diagram of where the victims fell. I told her that Life magazine had run a diagram a few days after the shootings and that I would loan her mine. Did she have no one else to ask but some Yankee assistant professor born in 1962 who teaches a course on the Tower and public memory? Not that I minded at all. But geez.
So much for institutional memory -- or even a sense of direction for locating it. But, then again, this is the institution that just demolished the Public History Center at the Center for American History. Are we so deeply into progress and the bright lights of the new millennium that we are risking losing any sense of collective memory or shared history?
The Tower Course
Another point of departure for understanding the course I teach comes from Cicero's De Oratore:Early on the second day of conversation at Crassus' villa, Antonius, dissertating about invention and imitation, complains that his countrymen have not yet begun serious writing of history. "Do you see how far the study of history is the business of the orator?" he asks. "By what other voice than that of the orator is history -- the evidence of time, the light of truth, the life of memory, the directress of life, the herald of antiquity -- committed to immortality?" (230).
From the first day we meet as a group, most students in the Tower course begin to figure out that if public history is to be written, publics -- they -- are the ones to do the writing. A larger context for this is the changing face of memorialization in this country. Increasingly, people in the United States are demanding a role in the memorialization process after tragedies happen.
I invented the Tower course as a way to get undergraduate students from all majors and all areas of the state excited about talking and writing with each other. In common. In a classroom space that I have come to understand as, in its most powerful moments for my pedagogical goals, a protopublic space.
Those are fragments: I admit it. My students and I discuss that intentionally breaking the rules of standard written English is a move that relatively few writers can execute without losing credibility. Ethos. But those fragments also allow you to hear my voice, and I want this to read like radio, like conversation -- as though we could talk about it afterward.
Students at The Largest Public University In The Country do not get much of a chance to talk to each other. They certainly are not encouraged by the structure of the university to interact with people who are different from them -- people with whom they would find infinite and enduring commonalities. Since I see interacting with and being able to reason with people different from you as a necessary foundation of participatory democracy, I try to teach those practices as part of my beloved subject matter: rhetoric. Rhetoric provides, among many other things, a place for the coming together of difference.
The Tower course, as many rhetoric courses do, widens to embrace public issues of the moment. The Greeks called "the moment" kairos, and, with khronos, explicitly understood two different senses of time. This semester, our class discussions of the school shootings in Littleton, Colorado, prompted students to ask whether the UT Tower shootings might not have been one of the first bulletins sent out about our increasingly violent culture. If we had studied more about the shootings, might we have learned how to prevent such violence?
With what they learned in the Tower course from me and each other about memory, one of the canons of rhetoric, students also have consistently written about public and private memories of their own families, their own home towns, their own processes of memorialization and memory. I am honored to read and learn about the rich histories of my students, their families, and their communities.
Texas is a Big Place
As I finish this rambling missive for this publication, I am on the road.
Josh Fischer and his fellow students are the fundamental reason I will probably keep teaching the Tower course. Josh is already the kind of teacher I hope I will someday become. Students generally argue that the course itself exists as an educational memorial to the victims of the shooting -- a memorial to what was lost. I'm not sure, but they have persuaded me to consider this.
I am On the Road in Texas, and already this morning I have fallen in love with Art, a town west of Llano on Highway 29. I have seen the sights in Brady and will just miss Sweetwater, alas, which sounds like heaven. I am writing from the places and paths of Texas, feeling the hill country rise and widen into Llano Estacado.
Austin and the Tower sure look different from way up here.
