‘We Are NIU’

"How long was it," the woman at the front of the room asked us, "before you believed this really happened?"

I am sitting in a workshop at Northern Illinois University, devoted to preparing faculty and staff for the return of our grief-stricken students on Monday.

"Not yet," a plaintive voice called out.

That seemed to speak for most of us, from the gray-haired teachers, like me, to the young instructors who could fit in on Greek Row.

Though it seems like an eternity to us at NIU, it's been a little over a week since the unfathomable, when a gunman killed six, including himself, and injured 16 others during a lecture in a geology class at Cole Hall.

Now time is nearing to turn back to the textbooks, to greet and embrace our students who will surely be returning with the question we all have: why?

Nobody pretends to have any magic answers.

Dave Ballantine, a chemistry professor, stood in the vestibule at the Newman Catholic Center, and shook his head. "I'm not sure how I'm going to handle it," he says, "It's something we're all struggling with."

A trained counselor will be in each classroom. The school has notified those of us who have students who were eyewitnesses to the horror. We have been encouraged to address what happened, and to watch out for signs of stress in the students--"the kids," as many of us call our students.

I'll be going back to room 209 in Reavis Hall, right next door to Cole, where I teach creative nonfiction in the English department. I took a walk Thursday through the building. It was eerily quiet. I peeked in the window at my empty classroom. It looked the same, but somehow it looked very different.

In some ways, it will seem odd returning to the subject matter of English 303, dwelling on things like syntax and grammar, narrative voice and imagery. It will seem a bit strange to talk, as I usually do, about the absolute imperative of getting the facts straight at a time when the truth seems all wrong.

Like everyone else here, I worry about my students. Are they all going to come back? Will they be able to go back to what college life is supposed to mean, whatever that is for them?

My colleague, Aimee Larry, who teaches in the communications department, has been e-mailing with her students, as many of us have been doing. "I'm assuming they're going to come back pretty shaken," she said. One of her students has a sibling who was shot and wounded. "But as far as exactly what to expect? I'm kind of at a loss."