SALEEL ADARKAR MENON
Rutgers University (USA)
JULIET HESS
Michigan State University (USA)
December 2025
Published in Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 24 (7): 90–110 [pdf]. https://doi.org/10.22176/act24.7.90
Abstract: Following a school shooting that left three students dead and five critically injured, Michigan State University (MSU) deployed the expression “Spartan Strong” in response to this violence to signal resilience and the desire for “normalcy.” As a faculty member and graduate student at MSU, we were troubled by this expression. In this paper, we interrogate it for its embeddedness in neoliberal resilience discourse. We explore our unease with Spartan Strong after the violence and then consider what metonymy might offer this conversation. Subsequently, we turn to music and examine the complicity of music and music education in resilience discourse following violence. We then explicate a powerful reframe of Spartan Strong offered by MSU social worker and resilience educator Lisa Laughman and share a counterpoint musical experience offered by the university carillonist in response to the trauma. We close by considering the importance of reclaiming problematic expressions thereby revising the work that they do.
Keywords: Resilience, trauma, neoliberalism, metonymy, music, healing
Setting the Context
Words and expressions are situated in a time and place and can ultimately come to signal a particular moment. On February 13, 2023, Michigan State University (MSU) experienced a school shooting that left three students dead and five critically injured. As a faculty member and graduate student in the College of Music, we felt the losses deeply and struggled alongside the rest of the school population with lingering trauma and post-traumatic stress. The school response, however, compounded the distress. The shooting occurred on a Monday evening and the shooter was at large for several hours before being apprehended. During that time, campus was in lockdown. Students were barricaded in dorm rooms, classrooms, as well as in our concert hall, where a faculty member took charge of community safety as best he could. Some support staff were under their desks, all while helicopters roared above for hours on end. When the shooter was apprehended, the university notified its population that school would not be in session on Tuesday or Wednesday. That suspension of classroom activities extended through the rest of the week. Various healing sessions and community events and a large memorial for students lost and injured took place over the next two weeks. Community members came out to support the MSU population at a weekend event meant to boost the spirits of Spartans (a reference to our sports teams and the term that is used to describe the MSU population both internally and externally). In the days that followed the violence, MSU deployed an expression seemingly intended to promote resilience: Spartan Strong. This expression came to signal the events on February 13, 2023, and its aftermath. Both of us were troubled by this message and will interrogate it here for its embeddedness in capitalism, neoliberalism, and resilience. Spartan Strong invokes a time and a place. It also signifies the papering over of severe trauma.
In this paper, we interrogate the MSU deployment of the expression “Spartan Strong” as a neoliberal institutional response to the fatal gun violence that occurred on our campus. We acknowledge that many individuals and groups within the institution acted against the type of responses we critique. We center these specific neoliberal and capitalist resilience discourses, however, as a microcosm of systemic recursion in the aftermath of community violence. We begin by exploring both authors’ personal unease with Spartan Strong following February 13, 2023. We then consider what the concept of metonymy might offer this conversation. Subsequently, we turn to music and examine the complicity of music and music education in resilience discourse following violence. We then explicate a powerful reframe of Spartan Strong offered by MSU social worker and resilience educator Lisa Laughman in the days following the violence and share an experience of music in response to the campus trauma that felt healing in contradiction to how music is often deployed following trauma. We close by considering the importance of reclaiming problematic expressions thereby revising the work that they do.
Our Unease with “Spartan Strong” Saleel
In the aftermath of this tragedy, I felt that the communal concept of “Spartan Strong” was deeply dehumanizing. While I understood the impulse to band together during hardship, MSU’s emphasis on strength through a swift return to normalcy felt reductive. This narrative prioritized resilience—“we will overcome this tragedy”—but, in doing so, martyred the victims to bolster communal identity. Instead of allowing space for grief and rest, the university’s response demanded a return to classrooms outfitted with revised syllabi and seating charts that resembled support-groups, suggesting that moving forward was the most human response. Yet I believe that pausing to honor the victims, unbound by ideological or institutional agendas, is a deeply human act.
Our return to classrooms highlighted another layer of Spartan Strong’s philosophy: the imposition of resilience on both faculty and students in ways that strained genuine connections. Faculty “temperature checks” aimed to demonstrate care but felt procedural, as though assessing students’ capacity to perform academically was more important than their well-being. I felt there was a neoliberal emphasis on productivity and “shaking it off” (Newsinger and Serafini 2021). It felt like the expression Spartan Strong reduced people to their institutional roles—students, faculty, contributors to a system—rather than recognizing them as individuals navigating grief. This approach undermined genuine relationships and emotional authenticity, reinforcing a capitalistic call to duty that sidelined the creation of meaningful tools for coping with trauma.
Spartan Strong tells a neoliberal resilience narrative that raises concerns about perpetuating broken systems rather than dismantling them. While some forms of resilience are valuable, the Spartan Strong ethos demanded a resilience in service of reconstructing normalcy rather than fostering meaningful change. Marginalized communities, including people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals, often develop trauma-coping mechanisms that challenge systemic norms (Comas-Díaz 2016). For instance, following the Pulse[1] nightclub shooting, the response in LGBTQ+ spaces emphasized solidarity and systemic change over mere symbolism. In contrast, deploying Spartan Strong seemed preoccupied with symbolic gestures like religious vigils, which consecrated the grounds as sites of recovery while deflecting calls for structural reform.
I saw this as a hierarchical approach to people management reflecting a broader capitalist framework. As educators, we were positioned as project managers tasked with regulating students’ emotions while neglecting our own needs. Trauma-informed practices, while valuable, cannot substitute for authentic human engagement. I question whether Spartan Strong, as both a philosophy and a practice, can break cycles of trauma when it discourages the development of tools necessary for systemic transformation.
To truly honor the victims and address collective trauma, we must adopt a more nuanced, human-centered approach. This requires prioritizing emotional needs over performative resilience (Newsinger and Serafini 2021), creating spaces for grief, and fostering systemic critiques that challenge the status quo. By embracing the complexities of healing, we can move beyond resilience as a tool for institutional continuity and toward transformation rooted in solidarity and care.
Juliet
I was on my first sabbatical the semester of the shooting and had taken a step away from MSU responsibilities. When the violence occurred, I felt isolated from the community and took steps to connect to people on campus I cared about. When the Spartan Strong messaging began, I was deeply troubled, having spent significant time on a project critiquing the neoliberalism embedded in resilience discourse (Hess 2019). Spartan Strong felt to me as though it erased the pain and trauma that people were experiencing, urging us instead to push through. My work on trauma has taught me that failing to acknowledge the trauma usually leads to further harm such as the development of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) (Caruth 1996; Walker 2014). As Bessel van der Kolk (2014) has famously noted, the body keeps the score. Spartan Strong instead compelled our community to suppress the trauma, grief, terror, and other emotions to continue with business as usual. Spartan Strong is a “bounce back” approach to trauma. It called on Spartans to recover quickly and give no outward indication of post-traumatic stress. This “bounce back” approach is reminiscent of the “grit” discourse popularized by Angela Duckworth (2016) which encourages individuals to persevere in the face of difficulties and trauma. Indeed, grit and resilience are both embedded in neoliberalism (Brunila 2012; Evans and Reid 2013; Pollard 2014), which broadly converts all things into economic terms. For me, Spartan Strong signaled neoliberalism via a return to “normal” or a “bounce back” approach that ultimately ignored all underlying pain and trauma. Bouncing back requires tolerating and adapting to adversity. In work on trauma, I (alongside my co-editor Deborah Bradley)[2] encountered an approach to disaster resilience that described a “bouncing forward” (Manyena et al. 2011). Unlike bouncing back, which expects normalcy without any healing, bouncing forward acknowledges that “normal” is forever altered after devastating trauma. We therefore begin from an acknowledgement that everything is different and move from there rather than expecting a return to “normal” in order to facilitate the university’s bottom line. Spartan Strong erased the pain and demanded resilience at any cost.
Considering the Role of Metonymy in the Deployment of “Spartan Strong”
Metonymy is a rhetorical figure of speech in which a term closely associated with a concept replaces the concept itself (Merriam-Webster n.d.). Instead of naming the subject directly, metonymy relies on a logical or contextual connection between the subject and the substituted term. For example, the phrase “the crown” serves as a metonym for monarchy, while “Hollywood” represents the American film industry. This figure of speech emphasizes proximity, causation, or conceptual association rather than direct identification (Preminger and Brogan 1993). Unlike simile, which compares distinct concepts using terms such as “like” or “as” (e.g., “he was as irate as a raging bull”), or metaphor, which ascribes similarity between unrelated entities (e.g., “he was a raging bull”), metonymy substitutes a related term, such as using “The White House” to signify the executive branch of the U.S. government. It differs from analogy, which explains an idea by drawing a parallel to another concept to enhance understanding, and from synecdoche, which involves a part-to-whole or whole-to-part substitution (e.g., “all hands on deck” to refer to sailors). Instead, metonymy relies on contextual association, such as “the pen is mightier than the sword,” where “the pen” signifies writing and “the sword” signifies warfare.
As a rhetorical concept, we believe “Spartan Strong” operates as a metonymic device that encapsulates a neoliberal ideology of resilience. Through its emphasis on collective strength and perseverance in the aftermath of trauma, Spartan Strong substitutes the multifaceted and deeply personal processes of grief and recovery with an ideology tied to productivity and resilience. Like other examples of metonymy (e.g., Riad and Jones 2023), Spartan Strong reduces the complexities of individual and communal healing to a singular, digestible narrative. This rhetorical shorthand is both comforting and coercive; it unites individuals under a shared banner while simultaneously demanding adherence to a dominant narrative that prioritizes returning to the status quo.
Spartan Strong is effective as a metonymic device in its ability to suggest proximity to the qualities it represents. Building on Jill Matus’ (1988) rhetorical analysis of metonymy, Sally Riad and Deborah Jones (2023) explain this tight relationship of proximity as operating as a proxy itself. This close relationship between the substituted term and the concept it represents often conceals the act of replacement, making it subtle and easy to overlook. For instance, on road signs, an image of a wheelchair is often used to signify accessibility for people with disabilities. The wheelchair (a specific object) represents individuals who may use it, and, by extension, all people with disabilities, even though not all individuals with disabilities use wheelchairs. Similarly, the term Spartan Strong is substituted for the process of recovery itself, rather than implying an imaginative parallel between resilience and strength. This kind of substitution elides the complexities of individual and collective healing, framing resilience as an uncritical return to normalcy.
Historically, scholars have used metonymy to analyze political rhetoric, particularly in shaping collective perceptions. Bryan Meadows (2007) demonstrates how the metonymic framing of the Iraq War positioned the United States against Saddam Hussein, transforming the latter into a symbol of tyranny and terrorism. This created a dichotomy of “freedom vs. tyranny,” which became “us vs. them,” and obscured the nuanced relationships between the US and the Middle East, reducing complex geopolitical realities to a simplified binary (Meadows 2007). Similarly, we assert Spartan Strong signifies a collective resilience that masks individual experiences of grief and trauma. While it provides a sense of community in the face of tragedy, it also imposes a narrative that equates strength with productivity, sidelining alternative forms of healing that might disrupt institutional norms. For example, when MSU halted instruction for a week, faculty members were called immediately into action as they revised their plans for instruction and crafted a path forward. Many of these efforts sought to reduce learning loss (like concerns after the collective trauma during COVID; see Donnelly and Patrinos 2022) and created accommodations for students to produce their work, rather than heal.
Spartan Strong demanded a particular demonstration of strength as a resilience that ultimately aligned with neoliberal frameworks that valorize resilience as a means of sustaining existing systems of power (Hall and Lamont 2013). Similarly, Arjen Boin et al. (2010) define resilience as the ability of a social system, such as a university, to recover from disruptions outside of the range of expected disturbances. In other words, resilience involves the relationship of individuals to their environment in which they reconcile a disturbance within a system while retaining its function and structure (Walker et al. 2004). At MSU, the rapid return to productivity following tragedy exemplified resilience framed this way. This response both bolstered institutional structures and slowed momentum of resistant efforts, like those of minoritized communities working against structural oppression. Kevin Clay (2019) critiques how narratives celebrating personal resilience—such as those valorizing Black Americans’ strength during the civil rights movement—frequently glorify endurance overcoming structural racism, rather than resistance or coalition-building. Such depictions align with a neoliberal ethos that prioritizes individual grit over structural reform, perpetuating systemic inequities (Clay 2019).
In contrast, movements like Black Lives Matter (BLM) provoke divisive responses precisely because they disrupt the systems that metonyms like Spartan Strong seek to uphold. BLM, for instance, directly challenges systemic racism and police brutality, advocating for structural reforms that address inequities in law enforcement and the justice system. Individuals and institutions invested in maintaining the status quo may view BLM as a disruption. Alicia Garza (2014) highlights how the counter-phrase “All Lives Matter” emerged to universalize and depoliticize BLM’s specific focus on anti-Black racism. Similarly, the collective unity signified by Spartan Strong can deflect attention from necessary structural critiques, channeling energy toward symbolic gestures of healing rather than substantive change. At MSU, the pressure to “return to normal” in the name of collective healing exemplifies this dynamic, neutralizing systemic disruptions and prioritizing institutional continuity over addressing the root causes of trauma.
A metonymy’s dual and contradictory significations also offer opportunities for subversion. Sally Riad and Eero Vaara (2011) suggest that metonymy can be deployed in “subversive irony” to address competing social realities and challenge dominant stereotypes. In the case of Spartan Strong, recognizing its limitations as a neoliberal device opens the possibility of reimagining strength as a form of “bounce forward” with full acknowledgement of the trauma rather than “bounce back.” Below we provide insights into how some individuals and units at MSU participated in some subversion of Spartan Strong. This shift required embracing the messiness of individual and collective healing, fostering spaces where grief and vulnerability are not subordinated to productivity. By acknowledging these complexities, we can begin to challenge the hegemonic frameworks that shape our responses to tragedy. We start by interrogating how music contributes to resilience and healing discourses.
The Complicity of Music (Education) in Resilience and “Healing” Discourse
“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”—Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein’s famous declaration following the assassination of John F. Kennedy has become an emblem of music’s redemptive potential in times of crisis. While this sentiment may inspire hope, it also warrants scrutiny. Music, far from a universal balm, has also historically been entangled in systems of violence and oppression. By critically examining Bernstein’s ideal, we argue that music, when framed as a performative response to violence, can reinforce the very systemic inequities it seeks to transcend. To disrupt cycles of trauma, music must shift from symbolic labor toward a tool for systemic critique and meaningful change.
Bernstein’s statement positions music as a force of resilience and healing, yet it implicitly shifts the response to violence from structural analysis to aesthetic production. This focus risks obscuring the material conditions that perpetuate harm. As Alex Ross (2017) observes, “not only are intensity, beauty, and devotion insufficient to halt violence, they can become its soundtrack” (2). Music’s capacity to inspire catharsis is undeniable (Conrad 2010), but it has also been weaponized to reinforce hegemonic power, such as during the Nazi regime’s orchestral propaganda (Potter 2011) or in the co-opting of anti-apartheid music in South Africa to undermine social resistance efforts (Ballantine 2012). These examples challenge the assumption that music’s inherent beauty can counteract violence; rather, they highlight its role as a social tool just as capable of upholding oppressive systems as it is of resisting them.
Music’s dual capacity as both a balm and a weapon underscore its complexity in the aftermath of tragedy. On one hand, making music can foster community and provides a means for processing grief (Myers-Coffman 2024). On the other, it risks prioritizing symbolic gestures over substantive action. Bernstein’s call to “make music more beautifully” illustrates this tension, situating music within a framework of emotional catharsis rather than political critique. Similarly, MSU maintained focus on aesthetic responses to violence within the “Spartan Strong” narrative, which emphasized resilience and a return to normalcy without addressing the structural conditions that perpetuate harm, such as gun control or mental health. Whether we consider music as a balm or a weapon, the call to “push through” serves to reinforce the status quo rather than critique or transform it.
In the immediate aftermath of the MSU tragedy, some institutional responses prioritized continuity over genuine emotional engagement. Revised syllabi, new seating charts, and campus vigils symbolized resilience but also pressured some individuals to conform to a communal ideology of strength. These efforts imposed a top-down schedule of healing which conscripted many into facilitating healing experiences, regardless of their own needs for processing. Juliet Hess and Alyssa Hadley Dunn (2024) describe such narratives as imposing performative roles on those affected by tragedy, prioritizing communal healing over personal recovery. For instance, mere hours after the shooting, MSU’s College of Music (COM) proceeded with graduate auditions just steps away from the crime scene. This decision, framed as respecting the schedules of prospective students, exemplified the Spartan Strong ethos. Moving forward as such suggested that resilience—and by extension, institutional productivity—took precedence over the well-being of current students, faculty, and auditionees. This approach reflected a capitalist logic in which individuals are valued primarily for their roles within an institutional system (Newsinger and Serafini 2021).
We apply these capitalist expectations of resilience through music to Christopher Small’s (1998) concept of “musicking,” which encompasses all practices of music-making. While musicking can foster solidarity, it can also serve neoliberal ends by channeling collective energy into symbolic labor that reinforces existing hierarchies. This is another version of “subversive irony,” but deployed by dominant groups in pursuit of reframing resistance to maintain status quo. For example, the anthems of the Civil Rights Movement, such as “We Shall Overcome,” unified activists but were often diluted in mainstream contexts, reducing their radical messages to symbols of vague goodwill (Perry 2004). Similarly, songs like “God Bless the U.S.A.” were widely embraced as expressions of national unity and resilience. However, as John Street (2003) contends, this patriotic music also suppressed critical discourse about the United States’ foreign policies and the rise of Islamophobia, essentializing “America” to reinforce a hegemonic ideology of patriotism similar to “us vs. them.” In these cases, music embraces neoliberal resilience, emphasizing emotional expressions of unity and assimilation directed toward capitalist agendas to assuage pain for productivity.
We saw similar aesthetic responses positioning music as a balm in our COM. Following the shooting, members of the COM helped to facilitate a university-sanctioned vigil designed to honor victims, yet to many it signified a return to normalcy. While perhaps the intent of the vigil was to provide comfort after the tragedy, some students and faculty felt that the impact of the vigil exemplified performative resilience, shifting focus from systemic intervention to symbolic acts (Newsinger and Serafini 2021). Hess and Dunn (2024) critique this “second responder” role often assigned to artists, who are expected to facilitate communal healing through their work. This expectation not only amplifies the trauma of artists directly affected by tragedy but also instrumentalizes their labor in service of institutional stability.
Instead, institutions might prioritize structural critique over performative resilience. At MSU, this could involve reallocating resources to support trauma-informed education, creating spaces for genuine emotional processing, and engaging with students and faculty in developing systemic interventions. Additionally, artists should be empowered to use their work as a means of critique rather than being co-opted into narratives of resilience. By shifting the focus from symbolic gestures to systemic change, music has potential as a transformative force in the aftermath of violence. In doing so, we can move beyond resilience as a performative act and toward a vision of resilience that dismantles the conditions that make it necessary.
A Note on Resilience
Thus far, the kind of resilience we have critiqued is that which is embedded in neoliberalism—a “bounce back” approach that does not necessarily make space for the complex emotions that people may experience that may include grief, anger, sadness, indifference, and beyond. We have also shown ways that music too can be implicated in these neoliberal impulses. The embeddedness of resilience discourse in neoliberalism has a long history (see, for example, Evans and Reid 2013; Mayor 2018; Pollard 2014; Saltman 2015; Schott 2013; Tierney 2015) including in music education (see, for example, Hess 2019; Scrine 2021). Because the impact of trauma disproportionately affects the most minoritized of students (Evans and Reid 2013; Hess 2019; Mayor 2018), the type of grit and resilience model that often appears in schools typically promotes the kinds of individualistic and “bouncing back” or “pushing through” ideologies present in the deployment of Spartan Strong, without addressing the sources of the oppression or violence (Hess 2019; Mayor 2018). We are interested in a both/and for resilience—a type of resilience that provides individuals with resources for coping with violence and adversity while addressing, or, at minimum, acknowledging the systemic implication in the need for resilience in the first place. Following Christine Mayor (2018) and Michael Ungar (2008), we seek a frame for resilience that is culturally specific and resource-rich. We now wish to highlight an approach to resilience on the MSU campus that departed from neoliberalism to make space for the full range of human complexity that one might anticipate following brutal violence. As such, we reconceptualize, reframe, and reclaim Spartan Strong toward systemic critique, building upon similar efforts we observed from Lisa Laughman.
Reconceptualizing, Reframing, and Reclaiming Spartan Strong: The Work of Lisa Laughman
We have shown the ways that we feel that Spartan Strong and its embeddedness in neoliberal and capitalistic resilience discourse ultimately potentially caused emotional harm to much of the MSU population. In the aftermath of February 13, 2023, there were also people on campus working to ensure that our MSU community did not suppress our emotions or leap into resilience and so-called normalcy without doing the emotional work necessary to move through the trauma and bounce forward (Manyena et al. 2011) as opposed to bouncing back. Indeed, responses were multifaceted and not the least bit monolithic. Students in the Honors College pushed back against Spartan Strong in an Instagram post and this post was elevated by the College of Arts and Letters. A campus support expert work group was formed with the intention to allow trauma-informed staff to intervene with the system’s response. A wide range of people at the institution actively sought ways to respond differently than the neoliberal “bounce back” approach.
Lisa Laughman, social worker and resilience educator at MSU, founded the Spartan Resilience Training Program. Laughman is a social worker with over thirty-five years of clinical social work experience. She has spent time working as a counselor for MSU faculty, staff, and graduate students and has taught and studied principles and concepts across various modalities that she has crafted into a model for resilience training. The model draws upon somatic healing, self-compassion, mindfulness, acceptance and commitment theory (ACT), shame resilience theory, courage building, and emotional literacy, intelligence, and resilience. Laughman was thus well-positioned to support the campus community following the gun violence and facilitated about a dozen virtual sessions geared toward different MSU populations to support the difficult work of healing.[3] Juliet experienced her work as profound in the aftermath of the violence and we thus choose to highlight her work as a counterpoint to the capitalistic and neoliberal resilience discourse. While Laughman centers resilience in the courses she teaches, hers is not a resilience embedded in neoliberalism and therefore provides a basis for a powerful reframe of the mobilization of a “Spartan Strong”/bounce back mentality.
In the sessions that followed the violence, Laughman differentiated between what Resmaa Menakem (2017) called “clean pain” vs. “dirty pain.”[4] “Clean pain is pain that mends and can build your capacity for growth. It’s the pain you experience when you know, exactly, what you need to say or do; when you really, really don’t want to say or do it; and when you do it anyway. It’s also the pain you experience when you have no idea what to do; when you’re scared or worried about what might happen; and when you step forward into the unknown anyway, with honesty and vulnerability” (iBook location 57). Clean pain, for Menakem, “enables us to engage our integrity and tap into our body’s inherent resilience and coherence” (57). Dirty pain, conversely, “is the pain of avoidance, blame, and denial. When people respond from their most wounded parts, become cruel or violent, or physically or emotionally run away, they experience dirty pain. They also create more of it for themselves and others” (58). Laughman endeavored to help the campus community work toward experiencing “clean pain” and, as such, offered a powerful reframe of Spartan Strong in the days following February 13, 2023.
The expression at MSU that predated Spartan Strong is Spartans Will—a sentence starter that can be used in any and all situations to describe the strength of Spartans. Spartans Will, like Spartan Strong, can and has been easily coopted into neoliberalism as well as resilience discourse. With the goal of clean pain and ultimately resilience in and through experiencing clean pain, Laughman offered an important rethinking: Rather than “Spartan Strong,” Laughman (2023) reminded our community that “Spartans need to be strong enough to let themselves feel the full range of emotions it would make sense for a human to feel when sudden and shocking gun violence occurs.” She also helped our campus understand that “Spartans will make space for people to feel the full range of human emotions.” Rather than the suppression that Spartan Strong conveyed—the bounce back toward normalcy without deeply processing traumatic events, Laughman urged the campus community to acknowledge and honor our feelings about the violence and experience clean pain before attempting to move forward. She also asked our community to challenge dominant cultural messages about emotional expression and entertain a “new kind of strong.” Juliet witnessed this powerful reframe of the problematic mobilization of Spartan Strong, and, in doing so, recognized what it might mean to reclaim an expression that has been deployed in a particular (and possibly harmful) way and use it in ways that acknowledge and honor the needs and emotions of all. Unfortunately, only a small percentage of our campus community attended these sessions.
The reframe Laughman provided was an important reminder for our campus community about how one might process a major trauma. It also holds a lesson about reclamation of problematic expressions that have been deployed for neoliberal ends that promote the kind of avoidance inherent in dirty pain. In the days that followed February 13, 2023, both authors witnessed people across our campus respond negatively to the widespread promotion of Spartan Strong. Laughman taught us that reframing expressions that promote dirty pain and a quick return to normalcy constitutes both a refusal to move on with business as usual and a deep engagement with our human emotions. Moreover, her work on the campus support expert work group successfully provoked reflection among institutional leaders that led to more trauma-informed decisions. These decisions included lighting Beaumont Tower in green following the event, a trauma-informed renovation of one of the sites of the shootings, and a long pause before the reopening of the sites of the shooting. Throughout these events, community members had the opportunity to provide feedback for the permanent memorial efforts in remembrance of the victims of the campus violence. Indeed, once MSU leadership attended to the concerns of trauma-informed advisors, the institution itself moved away from the Spartan Strong language.
Vignette: A Counterpoint Musical Response to Trauma
Although some musicians in the College of Music were conscripted into the role of second responders (Hess and Dunn 2024), we point to a series of concerts given by MSU carillonist Jon Lehrer, which we believe exemplify a more trauma-informed approach to the possibility of music as balm. Days after the gun violence on campus, Lehrer offered a concert to the public which showcased music spanning a range of potential emotional responses. He framed the concert with the school song, then moved to music which were organized by sets: mourning, reflection, beauty, and comfort. Before each set, a bell was tolled eight times to honor the wounded and deceased. One year after February 13, 2023, Lehrer offered another program of music in remembrance of those affected by the tragedy. He wrote the following program notes, which we believe align with Laughman’s reframing of strength away from a neoliberal approach:
We remember and reflect in our own ways and not always how we think we ought to. This program was chosen to be a spacious container, rather than a scripted arc of emotions, and it tends towards the slow and contemplative. Rage and righteous anger are real, valid, and welcome along with all emotions (including feeling nothing in particular), and they’ll come when they come, not necessarily on musical command. I’ll be holding the space as gently and openly as I am able. There is value in casual outdoor music, so we needn’t make a concert hall of the circle. Arrive and depart when and how you wish. Listen, sit, walk, gaze, reflect, focus, drift, tune in or tune out; there is no one right way to attend and the music is here to serve you, not the reverse. I hope you’ll find something of value along the way. (Lehrer
2024
)
Community members were able to participate in both of these events on their own terms. Additionally, these concerts created a space where the community could share and reflect with each other to better understand their needs and responses to this violence.
In Closing
Spartan Strong, as a concept, valorized neoliberal resilience which compelled music students and faculty to work as second responders (Hess and Dunn 2024) who facilitated community healing directed towards reintegration and “normalcy.” The performativity and deployment of music in response to tragedy can reinforce existing structures of power by diverting attention from systemic change to symbolic gestures. Bernstein’s ideal of making music “more beautifully” echoes the Spartan Strong narrative in its focus on resilience as an end in itself, rather than tending to the music makers and their journey of emotional reconciliation. At MSU, musicians were compelled to be Spartan Strong and mobilize at a moment’s notice to provide services for campus-wide vigils, auditions, and performances. Instead, what if community members and musicians engaged with music on their own terms, without serving neoliberal agendas? Lehrer’s careful programming for the carillon over the time following the violence provided a beautiful window into what music might offer.
This ACT call for papers asked authors to consider how words and expressions come to signify a particular time and a place. Unfortunately, Spartan Strong now means something very specific to those of us who survived the violence of February 13, 2023. Laughman, however, showed us that problematic expressions can be reframed, reclaimed, and reconceptualized. Moreover, her leadership, and the leadership of other trauma-informed individuals on our campus, ultimately facilitated a shift away from the language. We wish to apply this learning specifically to music education. We therefore suggest (re)conceptualizing music spaces as community healing spaces that do not have interventionist underpinnings, as occurred in the vignette above. Lehrer (2024) offered an emotional “container” for the broad range of emotions people on campus were experiencing. “Music as a balm” has powerful potential but can be used as a tactic for emotional manipulation when oriented towards neoliberal goals. Instead, we conceptualize musicking as an exploratory space—a “spacious container” (Lehrer 2024). We, as COM faculty and students, found that we did not have adequate time to consider our feelings or assess our needs when called into action after the tragedy. Perhaps community music spaces can facilitate an emotional exploration where individuals can assess their needs and pursue resources which might help. Instead of moving toward a Spartan Strong resilience which seeks to minimize disruption, we move toward a reclamation of Spartan Strong which embraces a very different and multifaceted connotation of strength that extends far beyond what the Spartan machine deployed. Indeed, true strength, following trauma, involves engaging with clean pain, feeling the full range of feelings that a person might experience following violence, and resisting the neoliberal turn toward “normalcy.”
Acknowledgments
We wish to acknowledge the careful readings of this work provided by Lisa Laughman and Jon Lehrer who offered invaluable insights toward strengthening this manuscript.
About the Authors
Saleel Adarkar Menon (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Music Education and Choral Studies at Rutgers University. His research centers on the experiences and persistence of First-Generation Indian-American music educators, theorized through DesiCrit for Education (DCE)—a critical framework that illuminates racialization, cultural hybridity, and generational dynamics in U.S. music education. Drawing on decolonial, feminist, and critical race perspectives, his scholarship interrogates how race, belonging, and pedagogy intersect in music teacher preparation and choral practice. Menon has published in several important journals, contributing to emerging conversations on anticoloniality, diasporic identity, and epistemic justice in music education research and practice.
Juliet Hess (she/her) is a professor of music education at Michigan State University, specializing in anti-oppression, critical pedagogy, trauma-informed pedagogy, and disability and Mad studies. She authored Music Education for Social Change: Constructing an Activist Music Education and Madness and Distress in Music Education: Toward a Mad-Affirming Approach, and co-edited Trauma and Resilience in Music Education: Haunted Melodies. Her research explores the intersections of music, social justice, and critical pedagogy, with particular attention to minoritized communities across all sites of identity. Hess’s forthcoming monograph, Cultivating Epistemic Justice in Music Education: Honoring Minoritized Knowers, focuses on ensuring that minoritized knowers across the full range of identities receive uptake in music education. Hess earned her Ph.D. in Sociology of Education from the University of Toronto and previously taught public school music in Ontario. Her publications appear in leading journals, contributing to discussions on anti-oppression, ethics, Madness, and disability in music education.
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Notes
[1] In 2016, Pulse, an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Orlando, Florida, was the target of a mass shooter who claimed the lives of 49, plus injured many others because of the shooter’s discomfort with queer displays of affection. Orlando’s Mayor, Buddy Dyer, responded to this hate crime saying “we will not be defined by the act of a cowardly hater. We will be defined by how we respond, how we treat each other” (see Zambelich and Hurt 2016). Nationally, as LGBTQ+ individuals and allies mourned the losses at Pulse, local community members and survivors advanced gun control advocacy campaigns and scheduled gatherings in the area to honor the victims and survivors (Zambelich and Hurt 2016). Every proposed bill for gun control, all four of them, was voted down in Washington D.C.
[2] See Hess and Bradley (2022).
[3] Lisa Laughman is cited with permission. Juliet attended her sessions.
[4] Menakem cites David Schnarch and Steven Hayer as sources on these terms.