9/19/00 12:25 p.m.
The Race War in Little Rock
The truth behind the University of Arkansas murder.

By Naomi Schaefer, assistant editor at Commentary

couple of weeks ago, James E. Kelly, a graduate student recently dropped from a doctoral program at the University of Arkansas, shot English professor John Locke and then killed himself. But if you didn't read last week's Chronicle of Higher Education, you wouldn't know why. A number of newspapers and television stations have reported on the incident and some have run human-interest stories about the effects of this tragedy on the university community — particularly the students who had, only days before, returned to campus for the start of classes — but little has been said about the killer himself. According to most, the case is simple: Kelly, whose academic career had been on the rocks for years, was finally dismissed from the graduate program and came back to take his revenge.

But it is clear that more was going on in the mind of this student, who some former teachers call "brilliant." According to the Chronicle, "Over the last couple of years, Mr. Kelly, who was black, had become increasingly bitter about what he claimed was discriminatory treatment he had received in the English department." One of his former professors explained his "disillusionment started" when his request for credit to study a village in Costa Rica (inhabited by descendents of Africans who had escaped slavery when their boats ran aground) was denied.

While Kelly seems to have left no trace of formal complaints at the university, he sent one former professor an e-mail complaining that he was "deep in the throes of the struggle for intellectual and academic freedom at this Confederate institution," and, according to the Chronicle, "likened his battle to a race war."

A. Yemisi Jimoh, the first tenure-track black faculty member in the English department, says that Mr. Kelly resented the small number of black faculty and students in his program. But she believes that his feelings were understandable. "It was probably quite stressful as a black man to be in an environment where he wanted to study pan-African literature and found himself feeling isolated in his desires." In fact, Ms. Jimoh goes so far as to say that she "worr[ies] about James Kelly being portrayed as a weirdo. He wasn't." He wasn't?

It is hard enough to imagine the size of the New York Times headline were this story about a white man who, having had a research proposal turned down, decided he was fighting a race war, acquired a .38-caliber pistol and almost 100 bullets, and shot his professor in the hand, the face, and the heart. But can anyone begin to fathom the outrage that would (and should) result from a university professor then defending his actions as those not of a "weirdo" but of someone who was justifiably stressed out. Yet, this is precisely the story that has not been covered by any newspaper in the country.

Ms. Jimoh's expert testimony notwithstanding, the university has taken Mr. Kelly's case to be the terrible reaction of an unbalanced person to some personal disappointment. And like a number of other universities in recent years, Arkansas has undertaken a study to determine whether through earlier intervention such tragedies can be averted. This is a reasonable course of action, but it should be noted that James E. Kelly did not live in a vacuum. In fact, he may have been the logical, if extreme, product of so many years in academic environments where the refrain that minorities are victims of deliberate oppression is constantly repeated. It's hardly surprising that someone finally took this mantra to heart.