On My Dear Friend, The (almost?) Mass Shooter: A Social Dissection of Dr. Matthew C. Harris
Trigger warning: In the text below, I discuss a 2022 mass violence threat against UCLA, Boulder, CO, and others; drug abuse; severe mental illness; and other sensitive topics.
Matthew Harris and I had a plan. This was not it.
While he is entitled to the presumption of innocence, it sure as hell looks like my friend Matt Harris threatened a mass violence event aimed mostly at UCLA in late January 2022. He also wrote and released an 800-page dumpster fire of a “manifesto” (if we can call it that, more on this below) where he issued scores of racist, classist, sexist, and homophobic threats and remarks. The document includes a strange, thinly veiled threat to me. It also contains explicit calls for physical violence — including bullets in skulls — directed towards my friends.
Matthew Harris is like a brother to me. We played in the same high school band, lived together in college, supported each other through emotionally difficult times, etc. When Matt’s sanity slipped beyond a sustainable point in 2018, I helped coordinate his move from North Carolina to Ithaca, New York so we could finish our PhDs together at Cornell. I had no clue that his condition had deteriorated so drastically until I was watching him unravel on my living room couch after his 600 mile move. I felt horrible when I told him I could no longer see him in person weeks after he relocated. We had been climbing the same mountain together for damn near 15 years, but I no longer felt safe in his presence.
We did, however, stay in contact through December 2021, mostly via text messages and FaceTime.
This piece is not an attempt to explain Matt’s actions. Presently, I have so many more questions than answers. Hell, I don’t even know if he intended to commit a mass shooting, another type of mass violence, or if he was just losing his mind out loud with no real intention of doing anything. My purpose in sharing this is simply to provide an additional layer of context to a type of situation where central figures tend to be reduced to monoliths. I also intend to raise a red flag: without meaningful systemic and cultural changes, particularly in our university system, similar situations will continue to occur. Matt is a lot of things, but a simple person is not one of them. Dr. Matthew Harris is a complex person who is suffering desperately from a mental illness over which his control is severely limited. Despite being indescribably disappointed and concerned by my friend’s actions, I still consider him family. I am admitting this up front because I want to be transparent: I am not an objective observer of this situation. I have done my best, however, to maintain an empathically neutral viewpoint and to be mindful of all the people who were terrorized by Matt’s actions. From the bottom of my heart, I wish you all peace and the opportunity to fully heal. That said, I do intend to make a few controversial points: a person can be both brilliant and deranged and, in cases like Matt’s, toxic systems can break people in ways that threaten everyone’s safety.
It would be extremely difficult to explain Matt’s capacity as a philosopher in this short space. The simplest way I can convey my respect for his abilities (when he is in right mind) to a broad audience is this: he is a better philosopher than he is a guitar player. Here is a clip of us playing in a high school talent show at age 17:
Matt’s ability to philosophize is, in my opinion, at least on par with his ability to shred over a twelve bar blues. In other words, I think Matt is academically gifted. However, it is difficult to maintain this opinion when reading through his trashcan manifesto, which has appropriately been scrubbed from most places on the internet. Some media has correctly pointed out that he uses the N-word over 10,000 times and that, in a separate email, he threatened to “hunt” a female professor who he was terrifyingly obsessed with. There has been less focus on his incoherent ramblings, lack of any real depth of argument, and overall presentation that appears more like something created by a random text generator than a serious statement from a credentialed academic. The work of scholars like Matthew Harris deserves serious consideration, but that document is truly F-level stuff.
The only way I can make sense of how somebody so smart could write something so laughably amateurish is to come to terms with the documented reality that Matt has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and that his condition is severe. This is a very tough pill for me to swallow. I have found myself wondering over the last few weeks if some of the activities we took part in together helped trigger his condition. The late night study sessions where we chased Adderall with Red Bulls. The mutual encouragement to push through the very real stresses of being a working-class person of color navigating elite academic institutions. The trays of pot brownies we would eat just so we could get some sleep or escape the existential dread of the simultaneously high-octane and mundane lives we were living. We encouraged each other to reach as high as we could without reservation and at any cost. Over the years, it broke us both.
During my time as a graduate student, I ended up displaying symptoms of a trauma-based disorder — extreme and inexcusable mood swings and reactions, dissociations, social withdrawal, and so on. In hindsight, I am almost certain that my academic experiences were a central driver of these feelings and behaviors. In 2021, I chose to leave academia. In the months after I switched careers, my mental health drastically improved. It was like night and day. I do not think this was coincidental.
Matt’s mental health broke too. It just broke differently — something he had no control over. We both lost friends. We both lost ourselves. And, to a large extent, we lost each other. We chased a dream and we lost. That part is okay. The downstream consequences of our losses for ourselves and others, however, should have never happened.
There are a few things about the media coverage of Matt’s situation that have upset me, but nothing more than the idea that he left a trail of “breadcrumbs” of his potential to be a danger at elite universities. Matt did not leave breadcrumbs. He was sounding blow horns. For the last half-decade, Matt’s mental unhealth has been vividly apparent to anyone willing to observe. He could not hide it if he wanted to. University settings, however, tend to be full of professionals who are too busy to notice what is going on under their noses let alone do anything meaningful about it. The academic culture is absurdly cut-throat and, consequently, people tend to end up wearing blinders to focus on themselves and little else. I am not taking a shot at anyone by making this statement — and there is a chance the failure to get Matt help earlier was a series of accidental oversights — but damn universities make these kinds of oversights a lot. The suicides. The acts of violence. The pervasive mental illnesses. So many of these episodes could be caught and compassionately addressed. Perhaps not all. But many. This one could have been caught, for sure.
Matt Harris has always been an extreme person. I do not think I would put it past him to write a manifesto even if he was free from all mental illness. But the Matt I know was an infinitely better writer in middle school than he was when producing that flaming bag of crap the media is referring to as a manifesto. As a political extremist, the Matt I know would have been dangerous — the kind of person who could persuade entire crowds to believe in his points. His recent writings, however, are wholly pathetic. They aren’t persuading anyone. A manifesto is a declaration of policy objectives. There is no policy here. Only the ramblings of a man who is losing his mind.
My biggest fear about this entire situation is that it likely has caused people harm that they might never fully recover from. My biggest fear for my friend is that he might at some point open his eyes to the extent of the terror he caused. If I understand correctly, the human brain is entirely capable of having psychological breaks that cause people to do strange and unfortunate things while also being entirely aware that these actions are wrong. And in cases where people are unaware of the damage they’ve caused in the moment, they are often capable of having a realization at a later point. I have experienced the former and the latter. They are hellish realities to confront. If that is a road that Matt has to travel in order to recover, I hope he does so with a ton of support that he accepts. I doubt he will make it otherwise. And, if you are of the mind that Matt (and people like him) should be pushed out of society, locked away forever, or left to die — if you are okay with eliminating people from civilization simply because you deem them unworthy — then, in some ways, you might be just as sick as him. We all deserve a chance to recover.
“No person ever steps into the same river twice. For it is not the same river and they are not the same person.”
-Heraclitus
One of the hardest conversations I have had about this situation was when I called a friend after I came across Matt’s threats towards him in the manifesto. We saw that he had uploaded hundreds of rambling Youtube videos in the 24-hours leading up to his arrest. These videos (and the manifesto) contained naked displays of a man who had become completely divorced from reality. I couldn’t watch for more than a few minutes. It was heartbreaking to see Matt in that state. I found myself wondering out loud whether it would be easier to deal with the situation if he had died in a car crash. At least then there would be closure. Instead, I am left dreading the reality that my friend might be gone forever, even if his body is still here. My hope is that the justice system sees this mental health crisis for what it is, that medical advances are sufficient, and that Matt is fully supported on his journey towards recovery. I also hope we choose to use this situation as a reason to make significant efforts to bolster university mental health systems. Now is as good a time as any to (re)commit to seeking the therapeutic solutions and cultural change necessary to limit these kinds of episodes in the future.
I feel bad thinking about whether it would be easier to see my friend in a coffin than in handcuffs, and even worse knowing that the topic wasn’t far from Matt’s mind either. Around Spring 2021, text conversations with Matt started getting weird. Weirder than usual. Matt has always been extreme and oftentimes inappropriate and socially awkward, but exchanges like this one were a different level of strange:
After a few months of these kinds of hard-to-interpret communications, he told me he wanted to die:
I responded by asking if he would listen to an audiobook with me. I felt so helpless and inadequate and so confused that I didn’t know what else I could do. In hindsight, I wish I did more, but I still don’t know what that should have been. Matt stopped responding to my text messages at this point. I continued to reach out to him periodically and briefly heard back from him in December 2021. Presumably, he had started work on his book of ramblings by this point. 800 pages is a lot of writing, even if it’s gibberish. I wonder if he told me to “move on” because he didn’t want me looped into the mess he was planning. Or maybe he thought I would try to stop him:
I feel vulnerable publishing this. Much of the reporting on Matt’s situation is based on accounts from anonymous connections who have, understandably, chosen to obscure their identities in fear of retaliation. I worry that sharing without hiding my face could put me at odds with Matt and his family and draw the ire of entire communities who were legitimately harmed by his actions. But I think being able to document who I am and my relationship to Matt is important to the story and the ultimate reason I chose to publicly share this piece: without intervention, this kind of situation will happen again. Perhaps it will be a graduate student suicide. Or another mass shooting carried out by an overburdened undergrad. Or, maybe it will be another quiet mental health hell that doesn’t make news headlines, much like the one I experienced.
My point is that academic culture stimulates these kinds of extreme behaviors and experiences and it needs to change before more people get hurt. I won’t make suggestions about what I think needs to be done here. It likely varies by university and requires careful attention to make any meaningful statements. For now, I think it is sufficient to say that at least some universities aren’t doing enough to combat toxic cultures that catalyze or encourage extreme behaviors and they often provide inadequate professional and social supports. I understand that a lot of people want to view Matt as a demon of a human right now and I won’t try to stop you. But I saw my friend get crushed by a cultural weight and I was one of the people who didn’t take his very loud calls for help seriously enough. Perhaps that is partly because I was under a similar weight at the same time, but I am not writing this to make excuses for myself. I failed my friend. Full stop. There was at least a half-decade long window where interventions could have taken place. How much lead time would we have needed to realize that the responsibility to avoid the situation was not squarely his? Perhaps implicitly, our public resolution to the situation is that the guy diagnosed with schizophrenia simply should not have done what he did, even though we know his condition is characterized by a lack of control over his actions. We are paying less attention to the fact that Matt was surrounded by literal super geniuses — Ivy League professors, researchers, policymakers, and the like — who also did not do enough over the years leading up to this event. I am not a super genius, but I am smart enough to know we could have done more.
It is a stock response to tell people at the fringes of a tragedy that there is nothing they could have done to prevent it. Perhaps in some cases that is true. It is not true in this case. I failed. Other colleagues and mentors failed. The system failed. There was almost blood on lots of hands and mine feel dirty regardless. I never want to feel this way again.
I hope that at least one person who reads this responds differently when they see similar signs displayed by a friend or themselves. If you hang around the university system long enough, it is very likely you will see these kinds of things. It might not lead to a multi-state terror threat like it did with Matt, but the signs are indicative of a personal hell that is just as bad for the person experiencing it. If presented with a similar situation in the future, I hope I respond differently too. I am doing the work to make sure I am prepared. We owe it to each other. We owe it to ourselves. From the bottom of my heart, I am sorry this happened. It shouldn’t have.
