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The Speech I Wish Nikki Giovanni Could Have Given at Virginia Tech
Distinguished Professor Nikki Giovanni gave the most celebrated speech of the day, wildly applauded by the audience and subsequently published and praised in thousands of news reports and blogs. The speech ranks among the year's most notable. It was fitting that Giovanni was asked to speak at the convocation, not only because of her fame as a poet, but also because she had been the instructor in Seung-Hui Cho's creative writing class in the fall of 2005. Deeming him "an evil presence," she had clashed with him over his dress, sunglasses, and writing, berated him repeatedly in front of the other students, and eventually threatened — both verbally, in front of the class, and in a letter to her department chair — to resign from her position at Virginia Tech unless Seung-Hui Cho was removed from her class. She got her way. The department chair tutored Cho privately for the remainder of the term. It is hard to imagine more extreme humiliation of a student than what Seung-Hui Cho experienced in Nikki Giovanni's class. That he provoked it is beside the point. It need not have been inflicted on him. The evidence provided in official reports and the press does not compel the conclusion that Seung-Hui Cho was an "evil presence" in that class, only that he was odd and uncommunicative. Some students in the class thought Giovanni overreacted in her treatment of him. The evidence suggests that Cho was a capable but insecure and terrified student with a pathological fear of public disgrace — the fate he met in that creative writing class. With the benefit of hindsight and the research literature on academic mobbing, the way Giovanni treated Cho can be recognized as a mistake, an inept exercise of classroom authority, an event that probably contributed — unintentionally, of course — to the Virginia Tech massacre. Cho might, of course, have committed his murders anyway. But if he had done so, and if Giovanni had then been invited to speak at the memorial convocation, she could have given the speech shown below on the left. It is my same-length revision of the speech she actually gave, reprinted below on the right. |
| What I Wish Giovanni Could Have Said He was in front of me. The student who would destroy precious lives. Not this academic year but last, he was in my own creative writing class: silent, behind sunglasses, his cap pulled down. At each successive class meeting, the number of vacant chairs surrounding him increased. I heard his fellow students’ whispers, saw their smirks and rolling eyes. “In this class we respect different manners and learning styles,” I announced, my generality aimed at lessening his humiliation without drawing attention to it and exacerbating it. I wish I had done more to lift him from his evil-breeding aloneness. Others now also wish they had done more – or otherwise. We are Virginia Tech. He was ours, just as were the oh-so-many victims of his wickedness. We do not understand this mass murder-suicide. We know it was not by our intention or design. Neither were those at the University of Texas in 1966, at Concordia University in 1990, at the University of Iowa in 1991, at Columbine High School in 1999, at the University of Arizona in 2002, and at Case Western in 2003, by the intention or design of faculty and students there. But we will not weep or mourn, much less move on, without learning from this tragedy. We are a university. We are strong and brave and unafraid. We will never say there was nothing we could have done. We will continue to invent the future through our sweat and blood and tears. We will prevail. We will prevail. We are the Hokies. We are Virginia Tech.
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What Giovanni Actually Said We are Virginia Tech. We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning. We are Virginia Tech. We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly, we are brave enough to bend to cry, and we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again. We are Virginia Tech. We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy. We are Virginia Tech. The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong, and brave, and innocent, and unafraid. We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imaginations and the possibilities. We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through all our sadness. We are the Hokies. We will prevail. We will prevail. We will prevail. We are Virginia Tech.
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