The costs of enlightenment

On Saturday, August 28, at 9:30 in the morning, 15-year-old high-school student Waheeda Amiri noticed a strange smell in the air of her Kabul classroom. Shortly thereafter she and her classmates fell ill with headaches and sore throats, and many of them lost consciousness and turned blue. Ultimately 45 students and four teachers ended up in the local hospital. Three days before, the hospital had treated 74 students from a nearby school with identical symptoms. Officials initially chalked the episodes up to “mass hysteria”, but chemical analyses of blood samples taken in similar cases indicated the effects of organophosphates. You chemistry majors know what that is: a family of compounds used in insecticides and herbicides, as well as in chemical weapons. The rest of us can just call it poison gas.

The victims of the attacks share a common trait: they lack the Y chromosome. Getting an education in parts of present-day Afghanistan is a hazardous enterprise if you happen to be female. Toxic gas, incendiary devices, skin-eating acid—gruesome concoctions that most of us in North Carolina know only from horror films—lurk in back alleys around girls’ schools across Afghanistan. Sixty schools have been burned down or destroyed this year alone—a frightening statistic that does not include the number of individual girls who have been intimidated, attacked or even murdered. But the students pick themselves up, dust themselves off and head back to class. Waheeda, for example, said: “Whatever they do to us, we are going to keep coming.”

Does anyone around here possess that kind of courage? I’m not sure I do. Politics in the academic world can be unpleasant, but fortunately no one has ever given me an ultimatum: stop teaching Russian literature or be shot. Characters in the books I read—fiction and non-fiction—do face this sort of choice. Their stories—and Waheeda’s—shadow our lives. What if we knew that invisible enemies were hovering, canisters in hand, in the dark alcoves behind Griffith Theater or in the labs in Bio Sci? Do you feel perfectly safe near those windowless cubicles in the Language Building basement?

From where we stand, these questions feel like a class exercise: hypothetical, abstract. A bit of probing, though, and things start to hit a little closer to home. Obstacles to education here are generally bloodless (or at least they have been in the years since the civil rights movement), but they exist nonetheless. The economic crisis has led to teacher layoffs everywhere, including in the Durham Public Schools. Ignorance waits at the gate, ready to slip through the cracks of those vacated teaching positions. 20% of the United States population is functionally illiterate. 24% of Americans believe that their own president, a church-going Christian, is a Muslim, and an even higher percentage seem to think that such a fact, if true, would be somehow relevant to our national security. Fully a quarter of our population is convinced that President Obama is not a United States citizen. Not coincidentally, many of these people, citing one of the few provisions of the Constitution that they seem to know, possess firearms. For the most part, that’s not us. I had a student a few years ago who was kicked off campus for shooting a BB gun out his dorm window on East. And there’s the occasional incident where people fly off the handle. We had one of those this past January. But generally Dukies are sentient, literate, non-violent and culturally sensitive people who believe that differences can be resolved through conversation.

Outside, though, even right down the street, that is not necessarily the case. And ignorance leads to violence; those who stand up for education and the pursuit of truth are easy targets, whether they are innocent, trustful schoolchildren or tough, seasoned educators and professionals. As always, Russia provides an instructive example—and not just because they did their time in Afghanistan. Most of the Russian writers you’ve heard of suffered for telling the truth as they saw it. The list includes Dostoevsky (prison), Tolstoy (excommunication), Solzhenitsyn (exile) and countless Soviet-period writers—Mandelstam, Babel, Pilnyak among them—who were executed outright or died in cold Siberian prisons, just for writing down their thoughts. Readers, too, paid the price; they could be thrown in jail for simply being caught with the wrong sort of book—and yet they accepted the risk. These days Russian fiction writers can write pretty much anything they want to, and obstacles to reading are primarily economic. But even now the press is under fire: since 1993 some 300 journalists working in Russia have lost their lives in the call of duty.

Honest intellectual activity has always threatened small-minded people, and not just in places that lack superhighways. What class are you taking right now that would you die for? Or is it one you have not taken yet?

Carol Apollonio is an associate professor of the practice in Slavic and Eurasian studies. Her column will run every other Friday.