A drama instructor at the University of California at Davis was arrested last week and jailed for several days after some students thought he was going to set off a bomb in class, The Sacramento Bee reported Thursday.
The instructor, a graduate student in the university’s theater and dance department who taught acting, referred to his students’ end-of-semester instructor evaluations as a “bomb” before throwing the papers on the floor and running out of the classroom, according to a statement issued by the campus police.
“I have a bomb, this is the last time I am ever going to see you,” said the instructor, James Marchbanks, according to the statement. “I am going to leave class before the bomb goes off, but you are all going to stay here until it’s done.”
One student subsequently reported what was considered a threat to the campus police, who said two other students corroborated the first student’s account of the incident.
Thirteen other students in the class, however, signed a letter in protest of the arrest, saying the instructor was making “a humorous correlation between the evaluations and the figurative bomb it was probably going to be for his teaching-assistant career.”
Mr. Marchbanks was released on Tuesday after prosecutors said they didn’t have enough evidence to charge him with a crime, the Bee reported.It was not immediately clear what effect the melodrama would have on Mr. Marchbanks’s career at the university. —Simmi Aujla
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7 Responses to When the Instructor’s Joke Truly Bombs
greeneyeshade - December 11, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Wait, wait…these students felt threatened by a stack of papers that the TA said were evaluations? Because he called them a bomb? I’ll bet these kids scored really low on their SATs.Maybe they had just come from one of UC-Davis’s famed vintner science classes having sampled too much product.
ksledge - December 11, 2009 at 10:22 pm
no, they didn’t feel threatened. They just didn’t like the TA (hence the bad evals) and tried to get him in trouble.
lawman11 - December 14, 2009 at 5:31 am
At first, I agreed with greeneyshade’s comment. But then I reread the words that the fellow is purported to have said: “I have a bomb.” Albeit the TA was holding a stack of papers, but to a member of the audience, that is, to a student, I am not at all sure that that is very relevant. When one says ‘I have a bomb’ this does not mean he is carrying it, as opposed to ‘I have a gun.’ Even in the latter situation a student may well feel (quite) threatened. Especially in the wake of various shooting incidents. It is also reported that the TA threw the papers. Can one be sure they are papers as they are thrown to the floor? I would not be sure in such a situation, I think. I do not think that the matter is call for a criminal investigation. But it does seem that indeed the TA exercised very bad judgement. It is unfortunate, but this sometimes happens in life. One must watch oneself, and even then, stuff happens.
11147726 - December 14, 2009 at 10:13 am
Everybody’s stupid; the TA and the students. Everbody loses.
dank48 - December 14, 2009 at 10:59 am
Just a thought: forty years ago, this would never have happened. Of course, forty years ago, students could actually smoke cigarettes, a really dangerous habit that’s guaranteed to kill them all by thirty, so why am I still here? Is it possible that cigarette-smoking, while it’s injurious to one’s health and of course the equivalent of the Black Death for all innocent bystanders in the same township as the smoker, yet compensated in some way for its ill effects . . . by keeping us from being as stupid as we could perhaps possibly have been? Or maybe nicotine deprivation leads to humor atrophy; I don’t know.Heaven knows we were no geniuses in the ’60s, and I’d be the first to admit we’re still living with the fallout from some of our dumber ideas, but, Good Lord, how dense can one be?
bekka_alice - December 14, 2009 at 11:15 am
You know, we’re constantly pushing the students to be aware of potential emergency situations – we’re instituting campus threat notification systems, we’re making sure everyone is aware of safety after various campus shooting incidents. On the outside, people are hearing messages to be alert for terrorist actions. Partially thanks to our own messages to the students, yelling bomb on campus is now the equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater. It was a bone-headed move, and the students’ concern isn’t invalid given the environment they live in.
johntoradze - December 14, 2009 at 1:04 pm
It was a freaking drama class. He was dramatic. He said it and dumped the stuff out and it was obviously paper – not a bomb. Anybody but an idiot would know at that point there was no threat. But the police department is clearly run by somebody with an IQ of about 50, and the chancellor’s office is occupied by a responsibility shifting nebbish. So, we have idiocy like this. I mean, come on people! There was an incident a few years ago when an ROTC student brought his fake rifle to a class to save time. Even though it was obviously fake to anybody who has seen a real rifle, there was some justification for students to be afraid somebody had a gun, despite the fact he was just sitting there reading in the hallway. But this? Give me a break. Within a couple seconds of his declaration, it was obvious it wasn’t true. The TA had “poor judgment”, I’ll grant that. But everyone else had way worse judgment.