This U of T course is MURDER
Jooyoung Lee tries to lure students away from social media to study what drives people who kill
Jooyoung Lee feels sick to his stomach some days. Not because he’s ill, but because of what he’s been reading.
Lee is teaching a course at the University of Toronto called The Sociology of Murder. It focuses on serial killers and perpetrators of genocide.
“For whatever reason, today I felt very nauseous,” he says, sitting in the back of a coffee shop at Bloor St. and Spadina Ave., a 10-minute walk from his classroom. “I think it was because I did a lot of background reading last night on Dennis Rader.”
Rader, better known as the BTK Killer (short for bind, torture, kill), murdered 10 people over the course of two decades in the Wichita, Kan., area.
Rader was recently the final case study in Lee’s lesson on why people commit heinous acts of violence — the theme of the entire course, really.
As a sociologist, Lee has been studying violent crime and its fallout for years, a fascination that comes from deep personal experience. But immersing himself in the mental life of psychopaths is a new, and taxing, endeavour.
“It does take a toll,” he said. “You have this kind of vicarious trauma, almost. Seeing, thinking about very dark things . . .”
He keeps himself sane with Brazilian jiu-jitsu and walking his dog.
Abigger challenge is getting his students to think about the material with the same moral seriousness he applies to it. With social media feeds increasing the rate at which people are exposed to horrific images of death and carnage — and at the same time, juxtaposing those images with fluffy celebrity news and cat pictures — the task is perhaps harder than ever.
During a recent lesson, Lee announced that there would be a midterm the following class, consisting of three or four short-answer questions and one longer essay.
Then he cued up a video of Rader’s courtroom testimonial. Discussing his first murder, a home invasion in which he strangled four members of the Otero family, he quite earnestly claims that he “tried to make Mr. Otero as comfortable as I could.”
After about five minutes, the video ended and Rader’s sinister, hawkish face disappeared from the screen. Lee switched on the classroom lights.
One student turned to the girl sitting next to her. With an expression of abject horror, she whispered, “I didn’t know we had a midterm next week!”
Lee was raised in Eureka, Calif. — “an idyllic town in the Redwoods” — the son of a nurse and a blue-collar labourer, both Korean immigrants.
His childhood was comfortable and relatively sheltered. College was different. While working toward his un- dergraduate degree at Berkley, Lee was badly beaten when he tried to intervene in a fight between a group of friends and some strangers who accosted them on the street one night.
His assailant broke Lee’s orbital bone and gave him a fracture around his mouth with a flurry of punches. The attack traumatized Lee for years.
After getting his degree, Lee moved to UCLA and began writing his graduate thesis on the local battle-rap scene.
As an adolescent, Lee was introduced to a world entirely different from his own through the West Coast hip hop of the early 90s. The universe of Ice Cube, Dr. Dre and Ice Twas dense with violence and political unrest.
“I think there is a danger of being desensitized, especially when you’re constantly bombarded with events that get a tweet, and then they sort of pass away.”
Lee’s thesis came to focus, in part, on an MC named Flawliss. Lee and Flawliss grew close as the one documented the other’s attempt to “blow up,” or make it in the music industry.
In 2006, while the rapper was calling his friend from a pay phone, a member of a Latino street gang shot him in the back with a .44-calibre revolver. He survived, but sustained injuries to his internal organs and still lives with a colostomy bag.
“His experience of living wounded was really a turning point for me in the project, but also as a scholar,” Lee said.
In 2009, Lee began a post-doctoral project at the University of Pennsylvania on victims of gun violence. Immersing himself in that level of suffering naturally made him wonder about its violent source.
“For so many years, my work has been based on the experience of victims,” he said. “And I think after like seven or eight years of studying that, I came back to the question of why do the offenders do what they do?”
Lee has been at U of T for four years now; he has taught courses on urban gun crime and hip-hop culture, among others. The Sociology of Murder concept was his idea.
Lee is an engaging, if somewhat earnest, lecturer. He could be a Sunday school teacher — square-jawed, with a gentle, slightly nasal voice, wearing a crisp navy-blue shirt, discoursing on evil.
His goal is to make undergraduates think. Last Monday he gave a lucid, erudite lesson on competing theories about the causes of physical brutality: Are offenders warped by society and harsh upbringings, or are they drawn to the inherent appeal of violence? Is there such a thing as evil — and if so, does it lurk in all of us, or just a twisted few?
“I try to encourage students to always place things in context and think critically,” he says. “One of the things they take away from my class and other classes is a larger sociological imagination that gets them to kind of want to dig deeper than clicking on a ‘like,’ or retweeting someone’s tweet.”
In Lee’s case, the challenge of reaching the hearts and minds of undergrads — always daunting — is compounded by his subject matter. Material that should be riveting, and horrifying, can land with a thud in a mind oversaturated with Facebook posts about the Islamic State group or Charlie Hebdo.
Last Monday, Lee was playing audio footage of cult leader Jim Jones’ last sermon before the deranged “pastor” induced his followers to drink Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.
Even this failed to grab the class’s attention. Many students stared vacantly into their computer screens. One young woman sitting in the back of the class gazed at her screen, absently clicking on Reddit links with titles such as “Just a few inches longer” and “The Time Badass Queen Elizabeth II Gave Saudi Arabia’s King a Lesson in Power.”
Later, Lee tried to get students involved by asking them to think of ways they could design a society that encourages altruism. A long silence followed, filled only by the drone of the college heating system.
“It’s a tall order,” Lee finally said. “I’ll let you mull that over a bit and if you think of anything in the next 20 minutes or so I’d love you share that with the class. Or to tweet it.”
(There’s a Twitter hashtag for the course, #SOC386Murder, that allows students to discuss about the material outside the classroom.)
Not every student in his course is checked-out and blasé. One girl did the recommended reading recently — rare in his class — which that week was Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt’s endlessly debated account of evil and agency during the Holocaust. During the following lecture, the student astutely connected Arendt’s essay to their textbook, The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo.
“Those students give me hope that they’re digging deep,” said Lee.
In the age of “clicktivism,” Lee is struggling to get students to really care about the moral darkness in the world.
“I think there is a danger of being desensitized, especially when you’re constantly bombarded with events that get a tweet, and then they sort of pass away,” Lee said, in his slow, careful voice. “A lot of people are uncomfortable looking at the face of evil. They’d rather not know about really terrible things that are happening. Like, I have really close friends and colleagues who’ll even tell me, ‘Your Facebook post about Boko Haram . . . was really depressing. I had to unfollow you.’ ”
JOOYOUNG LEE U OF T PROFESSOR