PROFILE: Trying to unearth the psychology of genocide
As published on page one of the November 13, 2010 edition of The Keene Sentinel, and online.
Professor James Waller paces as he lectures. His hands jump around in front of his torso, spatially acting out ideas as he speaks. He makes eye contact with his students and calls on them by name.
The projector screen displays the flow charts and bullet points of a social psychologist, and deals in abstract academic language of group identity, cultural constructions and socialization. Speaking to this roomful of undergraduates, however, Waller alternates between lighthearted anecdotes and calm, detailed scenes from some of the most violent and heartbreaking events in human history.
The course title is "Genocide."
Waller holds the Cohen Chair for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State, and is an internationally recognized expert on the psychological basis of mass atrocities.
"Most of the perpetrators of genocide are ordinary people like you and me," he says to the class. "Why does this idea make us uncomfortable?"
Waller came to the Monadnock Region just two months ago, after he was awarded the Cohen Chair, the first endowed position in Keene State's history.
Waller was chosen for the position because of the breadth and depth of his scholarship and his personal and professional integrity, according to Henry "Hank" Knight, director of the Cohen Center. But describing him now, Knight emphasizes Waller's infectious open-mindedness and curiosity; his willingness to ask hard, probing questions and bring multiple academic perspectives to bear on a problem.
"He makes our work bigger and better by being part of it," Knight said. "And if you think about the study of atrocity, it's about people's worlds being too small."
Another valuable quality Waller brings to the department, Knight says, is his ability to laugh.
"If you talk about something this serious, you can't take yourself too seriously," he said.
Waller doesn't joke about genocide, but he does poke fun at himself and his students throughout the class.
"He has a sense of humor," said student Levi G. Gershkowitz. "It's not there to sugarcoat anything, but it does seem to bring humanity into the classroom when what we're talking about can be so grotesque."
Gershkowitz, 23, is a senior who transferred to Keene State from Marlboro (Vt.) College this fall specifically to enroll in the program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Most Americans, he said, are unaware of a lot of the reality of human history.
"We're not told things the way Jim Waller tells them to us," he said.
Waller, 49, grew up in the South during the civil rights movement.
"I still remember as a very young child taking a vacation with my parents in the back roads of Georgia and seeing the signs for white drinking fountains and colored drinking fountains, white restrooms and colored restrooms, and just asking the childish, naive question of 'why?' " he said. "And really, I guess I've just never grown out of that question."
He went on to be the first person in his family to go to college, he says, ultimately earning a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Kentucky in 1988.
He specialized in race relations and conflict resolution. It wasn't until he traveled to Germany as a visiting professor in the early '90s that he began to see how the psychology of race and identity is relevant to understanding the Holocaust and other genocide.
"I taught courses on inter-group conflict, and the students there made all the connections to the Holocaust," he said. "It was what they were trying to work their minds around, what their parents and grandparents were doing."
Upon return to the United States, the question stayed with Waller.
"I began to realize, one of the most perplexing questions in Holocaust studies was about perpetrators, and how they do the things that they do," he said.
Today, in addition to his teaching duties, he travels to Rwanda to interview perpetrators of the 1994 genocide, and to Auschwitz in Poland to lead politicians from around the world in seminars that take place in the former barracks of a concentration camp.
When he was offered the position at Keene State, he says, it fulfilled an idea he thought existed only in his head.
"My perfect position was one that would be full-time in Holocaust and genocide studies, an endowed chair of some type, and at a small, liberal arts-type institution that would have a focus on undergraduate education," he said. "Two years ago when I laid this out in my mind, I thought ... I'm going to have to pick two of those and give up one of them."
But this position hasn't come without sacrifice. Waller's wife and children still live in his previous home in Washington state, where his daughter is finishing her last year of high school. They plan to move east next year.
"With them not being here, it's harder for me to find ways to keep balance," he said. "I think what I do is important and I want to keep doing it, but I also want to maintain a balance in my life so that this doesn't become me."
Waller acknowledges other scholars who think it's wrong to attempt to understand the psychological roots of genocide. But, he tells his students, he respectfully disagrees.
"Just because we can understand how perpetrators are made doesn't mean we're excusing their behavior," he said. But, he added, "if we want to stop genocide, we have to understand how perpetrators are made."
Within the next few years Waller plans to offer students study trips to Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina, to visit the sites of atrocities and learn from people who were present at the time of the killings. But not everyone can have that kind of first-hand experience.
"In some ways, that's the easiest thing to do -- to take them elsewhere," he said. "The teaching challenge is how you bring elsewhere here."
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