Nikki Giovanni Had Virginia Tech Killer Removed From English Class
Acclaimed poet Nikki Giovanni teaches at Virginia Tech, the site of the worst school shooting in U.S. history. Nikki had the gunman, Cho Seung Hui, in her class and was very disturbed by his behavior and personality. He was so disruptive and so scared the other students that Professor Giovanni had him removed from her class. Nikki was named as one of Oprah's 25 Living Legends and is also an acclaimed prose writer. She's also tough enough not to allow a disruptive student to destroy her popular creative writing class.
Cho (whose full name is pronounced joh sung-wee) appears first to have alarmed the noted Virginia Tech poet Nikki Giovanni in a creative writing class in fall 2005, Giovanni said.
Cho took pictures of fellow students during class and wrote about death, she said in an interview. "Kids write about murder and suicide all the time. But there was something that made all of us pay attention closely. None of us were comfortable with that," she said.
The students once recited their poems in class. "It was like, 'What are you trying to say here?' It was more sinister," she said.
Days later, seven of Giovanni's 70 or so students showed up for a class. She asked them why the others didn't show up and was told that they were afraid of Cho.
"Once I realized my class was scared, I knew I had to do something," she said.
She approached Cho and told him that he needed to change the type of poems he was writing or drop her class. Giovanni said Cho declined to leave and said, "You can't make me."
"Yeah, I can."
And she did. She went to the head of the English Department and wrote a letter demanding his removal from her class. Then, Ms. Roy continued to tutor him. But he terrified her, as well.
"I was willing to resign before I would continue with him," she told CNN. "It was the meanness."
Professor Roy started teaching him in a one-on-one workshop, and it didn’t take long for her, too, to worry for her own safety, working out a secret alarm with her assistant. "If she mentioned the name of a dead professor, her assistant would know it was time to call security," The Times reported today.
Later in the CNN interview, Professor Giovanni said that reports on Monday that that the gunman was Asian left "no doubt" in her mind who did it. Her interviewer's shock led her to make something very clear.
"But I'm not prescient," she said.
It is fascinating that a renowned poet was easily able to tell the difference between a normal student writing about suicide and murder and a mentally disturbed student writing about the same subjects. You can read an interesting (pre-shooting) inteview with Nikki, in which she discusses her work,
here. You can find out more about Nikki and her work here.
