‘We Are NIU’

Experts tell us the emotions will run the gamut. Some students will not want to talk about it. Others will want to talk about little else. Be ready, they tell us, for just about anything. Be flexible. Be patient.

Soon after the shootings on the DeKalb campus, a tall man with a white beard arrived in town. Christopher Flynn had come to help in any way he could. He is the director of counseling at Virginia Tech University. Dr. Flynn sat down with me after one of many sessions with faculty, the latest with people in the history department. People talk about the six degrees of separation. On a college campus, it's a lot closer than that, he said. We're much more closely linked than we realize.

"You might not know anybody who was killed or injured," he said. "But you know someone who knows somebody. You're a large university, but a small community."

It hits home. My daughter worked on the high-school paper last year with a student who was shot and wounded. Surveys at Virginia Tech after the massacre there last year found that 50 percent of students knew a victim.

Teachers will make sure students know about places to find counseling services. But they are not trained as counselors, and the experts tell us not to try to fill the role. "The classroom is not the place for group therapy," Dr. Flynn said. "I had an organic chemistry teacher ask me, 'I don't know what to talk about?" And I told him, 'Talk about organic chemistry'."

Dr. Flynn reminded us that, contrary to the popular notion, targeted shootings on American campuses have been declining in the last 10 years. That's little comfort, of course, if you were sitting in the lecture at Cole Hall a week ago Thursday, or if your son or daughter, your sibling or your friend, was sitting there.

It has been brutally cold on the DeKalb campus, with winds whipping off the icy cornfields. Plastic has been put over the bouquets of flowers left in tribute to the victims. In some places, five crosses have been erected to symbolize the victims. At one church, a sixth cross stands, marking the loss of life of the gunman, too. There are hand-scrawled signs, one of them saying LOVE ONE ANOTHER.

I walked across the campus Thursday, precisely a week after the shootings, and saw a huge banner that proclaimed WE ARE NIU. I took out my pen and signed my name.

© 2008