Blog with Stuart Nachbar at
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Defending College Heights: A Novel by Stuart Nachbar
Why did you write Defending College Heights?
Please describe the setting for the story.
Why this setting?
There are several other issues in that setting too.
Talk about the hero in Defending College Heights.
But why did you make him an urban planner?
Then what made you uniquely qualified to write the story?
Would you like to use these characters in a new story?
Why did you write Defending College Heights?
I was curious to examine the events that might happen if a military recruiter was murdered, supposedly on a college campus. There was never such an incident during the Vietnam era, although students were killed during campus protests at Kent State. Thankfully, there has never been such an incident today.
I was also curious about the contrasts between the anti-war movement of the Vietnam Era and the anti-war movement today. College student protests were prominently featured on television and print media during Vietnam. Today, more of the leading anti-war activists are not students; in fact, I believe that parents and grandparents, as well as military veterans, play more important leadership roles.
In addition, destruction of military recruiting stations, while it has happened today, is not necessarily condoned in the media. However, reporters have expressed comments in opposition to military recruiting practices and we have also seen a Michael Moore documentary movie, Fahrenheit 9-11, that took a biased look at military recruiting, among its topics. Fahrenheit 9-1 1 grossed $220 million, so there must have been public interest in this issue, among others in the film.
And today, college career counselors, among other administrators, oppose military recruiting because of the "don't ask, don't tell" policies regarding gays and lesbians in the service. That was not an issue during the Vietnam Era because the policies did not exist.
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Please describe the setting for the story.
Defending College Heights takes place in what I believed to be one of the least likely settings for a military recruiter to be killed; a small, private, largely male, science and technology school that has been historically friendly to the armed forces.
The school, Hudson Technical University, is not an elite institution, nor is it located in a student-oriented college town. The town, College Heights, is aging and decayed; its appearance is enough to motivate parents to send their children elsewhere. But the school has a long history, and a dynamic president has raised sufficient funds to improve things on campus and keep Hudson Tech from closing. Until now. The murder has aided in the perception that the campus is not safe, students have expressed desire to leave, and therefore, the school should be closed.
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Why this setting?
I wanted a setting where the murder would have an impact on the school's future. During the Vietnam Era, protests might have led administrators and elected officials to temporarily cancel classes or suspend operations for a semester-Kent State closed for a summer, as one example—but no school was in danger of closing or losing considerable numbers of students.
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There are several other issues in that setting too.
Yes, town-gown relations and campus life and security in the aftermath of a murder. Hudson Tech is a school with some interesting, and very real, housing and security problems that are common to universities in an urban industrial setting.
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Talk about the hero in Defending College Heights.
Jack Donnelly is the uncle of the murdered recruiter. In his working life, he is an urban planning consultant. He is angry with the media coverage of his nephew's murder because it is heavily weighted towards opposition to army recruiting and he is also concerned that the U.S. Army cannot legally investigate a murder that has taken place on civilian property. He is not happy with the early progress in the investigation so he wants to take matters into his own hands. Although he was once a successful Golden Gloves boxer, he does not possess the tools of a trained investigator.
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But why did you make him an urban planner?
I wanted the character to have good reason to traipse around campus and downtown College Heights and to be in a position to describe the town and school to readers in good detail. I had originally considered making him a newspaper reporter, but there would be conflicts of interest; he is related to the deceased, yet he's covering a murder for an out-of-town paper? I didn’t believe that would fly with readers.
I also wanted to put Jack in a position where he would be close to the university president at all times. She doesn't want him to hurt the school or inhibit the progress of the murder investigation by going to the media for satisfaction. And I also wanted to use his planning expertise to expose a larger plot.
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Then what made you uniquely qualified to write the story?
I was an urban planner in a Northeastern industrial city for several years before I went to business school, and I worked with the city's university community on economic development, land use, transportation and security issues. After I graduated from business school, I managed marketing, product development and sales for a software company that does business with over 500 colleges and universities. I must have visited approximately 200 college campuses of all types, small and large, two-year and four-year, liberal arts and professionally specialized. I also went to many job fairs during my time in the job.
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Would you like to use these characters in a new story?
I would. There are many issues in town-gown relations, and inter-campus relations-dialogue and activity between students, faculty and administrators-that make for good stories.
For instance, after 9-11, the news media revealed that the Bin Laden family had previously endowed an Islamic studies institute at Harvard. What if the Hudson Tech administration was offered a major gift, one that could propel the school into a more elite academic status, but the gift came from the relatives of a deceased global terrorist, one who had died as a martyr? Imagine the complex issues of accepting or rejecting that gift. Then tell me if you believe that enough suspense could be injected into a story around those issues.
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