So here we are, nearly at the end of the first week back in full swing. So far, things seem to be going well. Or well enough, anyway. It's definitely good to have the students back on campus, to see (and hear) people walking around, driving, chatting as they pass to and fro in the halls. It was about a week ago, I think, that I walked out of my building on my way to a meeting and heard...absolutely nothing. Not a single sound--no cars, no footsteps, not even a distant hum of machinery. And that was freaky.
The media has gone away, most of the counselors are on their way back to their homes and regular routines, God love them all, the police and security guards have more or less dropped out of sight (though I've no doubt they're still around), and everyone is doing his or her level best to pick up the pieces of the routines that we all dropped hastily two weeks ago.
People continue to be wonderful. The students and faculty at Virginia Tech have begun to send us cards expressing their condolences and offering their support. Members of the DeKalb and Sycamore communities donated something like 20,000 cookies to welcome the students back to campus this past Monday and Tuesday, and many volunteered to come and pass them out in person. We have a whole team of "crisis dogs" on campus, whose job it is to stand or sit or lie someplace and let people pet them and say admiring things about them--and it was wonderful to get the chance to do so.
I'm on a campus-wide search committee this term, and we were in the process of interviewing a candidate when the shootings took place--not a hundred yards from Cole Hall, and nothing between the candidate and the members of the campus community who were at that particular forum but a pane of plate glass and a slight hill. That candidate came back to campus and finished the remaining part of the interview yesterday. All the other candidates we invited either rescheduled their interviews or agreed to come when we contacted them. It did feel a little strange, though, to see both of the candidates we've interviewed so far wearing the cardinal-and-black ribbons that have become the latest fashion accessory on campus. I'm not sure why it felt strange to me--perhaps because they aren't quite members of our university community yet--but it did.
And, of course, the governor came back to campus yesterday, to announce that he was going to ask the state legislature for $40 million to demolish Cole Hall and to construct a bigger, better edifice somewhere else. For once, I find myself in agreement with the editorial board of the student newspaper, who opined today that with Blagojevich, talk is cheap. I'm waiting until I actually see the money before I take that as a done deal. I concur with the university president, the governor, and the editorial board that demolishing Cole Hall is the right decision--I'm just not as sanguine as the governor is that he's going to be able to pry that amount of money out of the legislature when we're already nearly a billion dollars in the hole for the next fiscal year. Not to mention the fact that as long as he's finally interested in giving us some money, it would be wonderful if he'd ante up for our lengthy--and ever-growing--list of capital needs that have been going begging for want of funding, in some cases for a decade and more.
It's too early to tell just how the campus as a whole is going to respond to this situation. Right now, the standard greeting is still "How are you doing?" and people do seem to be going the extra mile to be friendly and supportive. Will that continue as part of the "new normal," or is that attitude going to fade away as the semester wears on and the stresses of exams and job hunting and the like start to kick in? Are we going to be able to keep up the sense of comity and community that has been in evidence the last two weeks, or will that give way to the more usual wrangling over resources, fighting over privilege, sniping, and innuendo?
The signs are generally positive right now--but the shock is just now starting to wear off, and people are starting to get back in the usual groove again. Check back in a month and we'll have a better idea.
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