On the afternoon of Oct. 5, 2022, Dr. Thomas Meixner, the head of the hydrology department at the University of Arizona, was shot and killed in his office by a deranged former graduate student.
Because it happened soon after another campus murder in Indiana — a Purdue student stabbed his roommate to death — and around the same time as 36 children and adults were massacred at a child care facility in Thailand, Meixner’s murder didn’t get much national attention.
Nor did the university see the need to cancel classes the next day. Instead, the president sent around an email saying it felt “surreal” to be on campus. He offered condolences, announced a candlelight vigil and directed the traumatized community to take advantage of counseling resources.
“The show must go on,” anthropology professor Victor Braitberg wrote in an op-ed critical of the university’s response, or lack of it. “It’s all just part of life in the 21st century, where instead of flying cars we have the normalization of workplace murders and mass killings.”
Unfortunately, the University of Arizona’s response to Meixner’s murder is typical of the way America fails to deal with the problem of gun violence, on campus and elsewhere. The alerts sent to students at Michigan State University during the latest school shooting on Feb. 13 — “Run, Hide, Fight” — are yet another example of how our society has apparently abandoned any pretense of protecting students and teachers from being murdered at school.
The problem is particularly acute in Arizona, with its lax gun laws, near lowest-in-the-nation school funding and student performance, and a state legislature that’s more concerned about students threatened by critical race theory than by gun violence.
In March, the state’s Republican legislators sought to make schools even more dangerous by passing bills to legalize silencers and allow parents with concealed-carry permits to bring guns onto K-12 campuses. Thankfully, as long as Democrat Katie Hobbs sits in the governor’s chair, these bills are unlikely to become law.
But Tom Horne, who was recently elected to a third term as Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction — when Horne was superintendent from 2003 to 2011, he waged a battle against Mexican-American studies in Tucson schools — is also taking steps to put more guns on campus. “They don’t shoot up a police station,” Horne said, after announcing plans to transfer money previously directed toward hiring more counselors to hiring more school safety officers instead.
Unfortunately, more cops and fewer counselors aren’t the only problems with public education in Arizona. The state legislature has repeatedly underfunded public schools, tried to block public initiatives to raise school funding and established one of the most generous and minimally monitored school voucher programs in the nation.
As for preventing violence by identifying and stopping dangerous individuals, it has subsequently come out that the University of Arizona police and other authorities knew Meixner’s killer was making numerous threats of violence for nearly a year before the murder. But other than expelling him, barring him from campus and reporting the threats to the Pima County attorney’s office — which also failed to act — they did little to protect the targets of his rage.
One assistant dean was so afraid she worked from home after being threatened by this person. Another professor who had made the mistake of befriending him went so far as installing a home security door and buying a bulletproof vest. Witnesses said Meixner’s last words were “I knew you were going to do this.”
Those fighting for education in Arizona must wage a constant battle on several fronts, including to fully fund public schools, make it harder for unhinged people to get access to lethal weapons and demand protection for the threatened.
In the meantime, all public officials can offer is advice to run, duck and cover, seek counseling for your trauma, and if someone threatens you, get a bulletproof vest. At your own expense, of course.
____
ABOUT THE WRITER
Miriam Davidson is author of "The Beloved Border: Humanity and Hope in a Contested Land" (University of Arizona Press, 2021). This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, which is run by The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.
