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Living In Tech Tragedy's Shadow

April 14, 2008

By Frank Green

The bright mood inside Ezra A. Brown's McBryde Hall office was darkened the morning of April 16 last year by events outside his window.

A shooting on the other side of campus had forced a lockdown. But something was also terribly wrong at nearby Norris Hall, where officers with assault rifles watched groups of students run out a door, their arms high in the air.

Brown was allowed to leave around 11 a.m. At home he turned on CNN.

"I'm a mathematician, and maybe I'm just particularly affected by numbers," he recalled.

"There I was a couple of hours earlier, sitting there in my office with a couple of bright students," he said, "and all the while these unspeakable horrors were going on not 150 yards from my left shoulder."

Brown, 64, at Virginia Tech since 1969, is one of more than 1,600 faculty members at the school, five of whom did not survive that day along with 27 students.

Students graduate. The faculty and staff remain. Professors contacted recently said they may have been affected differently than students, but they, too, have had to deal with the events of a year ago.

"It's there," Brown said. "You can't live in New York City and ignore the fact that the twin towers aren't there any more. You can't live in New Orleans and ignore the fact that more than half the city's gone, and you can't be in the Virginia Tech community and fail to realize that this was a very tragic event.

"We didn't cause it; it happened to us," he said. Nevertheless, "it can't help but change how you look at the world."

E. Scott Geller, a psychology professor, says tragedy can certainly alter one's perspective. "The significance of this one, however, is that it was so close to home, and we are reminded every day of the loss of important people," he said.

Geller said after April 16 he felt shock, confusion and anger, emotions that grew as the media told the stories of the victims, personalizing the tragedy.

He told a colleague, Jack W. Finney, associate dean for the College of Science, that he was going to dedicate his next book to the 32 fallen Hokies. Finney corrected him: "'We lost 33 Hokies on Monday.'"

Finney told Geller that it wasn't a matter of forgiving Seung-Hui Cho but recognizing he was mentally ill and that his family also grieves.

After the shootings Geller said that, for the most part, the only shooting-related discussion he hears among colleagues is "'How are we helping the students deal with it?'"

"We just go on about our business, and maybe that's a good thing," he said. On the other hand, "We do need to talk about it, and we do need to express our feelings and help other people deal with it."

Geller has conducted some group interviews with students, asking what the tragedy meant to them. Some say: "'I'm still grieving. I'll never get over it. I will never forget.' And other students say, 'Leave it alone.'"

"And, of course, there's a lot of people in between," he said.

If he had asked the same questions to colleagues, Geller believes he'd hear the same sort of answers, but "maybe at a little more mature level."

"There's different levels of grieving, of course, and us faculty, we've been through events like this in our lives. We've lost loved ones, we've been through emotional tragedies."

"Many of the students have not. This is like a reality check for the students, so I think their level of grieving was in some cases much deeper," he said.

Mike Ellerbrock, an economics professor and a Catholic deacon, says he pays more attention to his surroundings at times.

"I teach large classes here at Tech and always in the back of my mind now is could something erupt in class, like what happened at Northern Illinois [University]," where a gunman killed five students and himself in February.

After the Tech shootings, Ellerbrock spent the day and evening helping with the arriving relatives of Tech students.

"Ironically, [the tragedy] brought out truly the best in humanity. Virginia Tech is a large place, and you can work your whole career and not even get to know all the professors in your own building, much less all around campus because of the disciplinary silos."

However, Ellerbrock said, "Since that moment, this place is different. Faculty look at each other differently, they don't argue about the intellectual and cultural wars nearly as vigorously because we all know now there's more important things in life."

Rachel Holloway, head of the department of communication, said no two people reacted the same. "Each time you talk to someone, you hear a slightly different experience simply by where they were, who they knew, what they had to do that day and the next day."

As far as her colleagues are concerned, "I think we check in with each other about any way it's affecting class discussions or what's happening with our students."

"I think the tragedy really reminded us of what our work is here, in the classrooms with the students," she said.

"Now and then, when I get a little frustrated with a student — when they are doing the typical things that students have always done and always will — I do sort of say, keep your eye on the big picture, why are we here, what are we doing and how are we trying to help these young people grow and learn."

Peggy Meszaros, a professor of human development, said the focus on students helped them and the faculty. "But I think it's also a matter of focusing on our connections with one another, faculty to faculty . . . whether it's through informal gatherings or if it's a personal kind of just touching base daily."

"I think we have all found more ways to connect with one another — that would be faculty to faculty, and faculty to students and students to students," she said.

"The reverberations around our campus, and the community, and the state and the nation, if not the world, this Hokie spirit, this belief that we will support one another, that we will survive this tragedy that we will, if we can, even become stronger — that's been a real unifying theme in all of this."

Geller sees things much the same as Meszaros. "Last spring, the whole world reached out to us," he said.

"The common statement I get from all over the world is: 'We are proud of what you guys did.' . . . People were amazed that we came through it as we did, as a Hokie nation."

Contact Frank Green at (804) 649-6340 or fgreen@timesdispatch.com.