bullied bus monitor

I was just reading about THIS CASE, in which an elderly-looking woman was bullied by students on board the bus.

It reminded me of a similar incident in Spring Semester of 2000. I went out to Rosemont to see DePaul play Cincinnati in basketball. DePaul had a big second half lead before blowing what would have been a major national-profile win at the time. Afterward the bus (filled with rabid student fans, and I as a season ticket holder was among them) was in a foul mood, which became even fouler as we grew stuck in a parking lot traffic jam that made it take a very long time to get out of the lot.

For some reason, a few of the students started verbally abusing our bus driver, also an older woman. The taunting was brutal, and included plentiful sexual innuendo. After a couple of minutes of this, I realized that I was the only faculty member on the bus (it was my one-year gig as a Visiting Assistant Professor at DePaul), and I also remembered the psychological studies which show that just one person standing up in a situation is often enough to turn things around completely.

So, I turned around and told those people that they were a disgrace to the university. Immediately about 12 of these guys were taunting me, and they did so for the rest of the ride, but at least they weren’t taunting the poor woman driving the bus anymore.

I was near the front of the bus, and after the end of that horrible ride, decided that I needed to stand by the door and look each person in the eye as they came off the bus, just to make everyone think twice before they did such a thing again. (For whatever reason, I felt that a physical altercation was unlikely at that point, and since I had identified myself as a faculty member, figured that no student -however drunk- was likely to take a punch at me, especially now that we were back in the heart of campus.) A few students made a point of coming up and saying that they totally agreed with me that what had happened was unacceptable.

The next day, I hand-delivered a complaint letter to the Athletic Director’s secretary, and also wrote a letter to the university newspaper (which was printed) explaining in basic terms what had happened.

My goal was that there would be some sort of investigation and some sort of change in bus policy for those events. But to my lasting disappointment, nothing seems to have happened, and the DePaul Athletic Department never contacted me for a follow-up discussion. That driver was probably my grandmother’s age, and the things they were saying to her were outrageous.

I’d forgotten that incident for awhile before reading this latest story. In itself it might seem like a minor local Chicago incident with one primary victim (the driver). But I found it to be a chilling taste of how more serious political bullying of certain groups might easily get started, and how eyewitnesses and officials might do nothing at all to stop it.