1 20 3 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Adriana Seagle Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ewen MacAskill Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007-08-12 Description An account of the resource Ewen MacAskill in Blacksburg Tuesday April 17, 2007 <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2059205,00.html">Guardian Unlimited</a> Alec Calhoun, an engineering student at Virginia Tech, described today an individual act of bravery by one of his professors that saved his life. Mr Calhoun, 20, had been in Room 204 in the college's Norris hall taking a class in solid mechanics. "We heard what sounded like an enormous hammer. We though it was construction. The scream told us it was something else." The killer, having murdered two people two hours earlier, had started a shooting spree in the classroom next door. "I thought pretty early on that I was going to die. I started knocking desks over [to make a barricade]. Others were pulling the windows down. It is lucky someone thought of the windows." The class was on the second floor and the first students to jump were hurt. "I was the eighth to jump. I hung onto the ledge. I saw the professor. I think he was trying to hold the door closed. "I was the last one out that was not wounded. The two behind me were shot. I jumped onto a bush and fell onto my back. It was about a minute between hearing the shots and jumping out of the window." He said his professor had been killed. After reaching safety, he immediately phoned his father, James, a teacher, to tell them he was safe. Special report <A HREF="/usa/0,,759893,00.html">United States of America</A> World news guide <A HREF="/worldnewsguide/northamerica/0,,618255,00.html">North American media</A> Media <A HREF="http://nytimes.com">New York Times</A> <A HREF="http://washingtonpost.com">Washington Post</A> <A HREF="http://cnn.com">CNN</A> Government <A HREF="http://www.firstgov.gov/">US government portal</A> <A HREF="http://www.whitehouse.gov/">White House</A> <A HREF="http://www.senate.gov/">Senate</A> <A HREF="http://www.house.gov">House of Representatives</A> Copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd 2007 -- Original Source:<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2059205,00.html">http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2059205,00.html</a> Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Guardian Unlimited Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In consideration of the fee of GBP 0.00 ("the Fee") Guardian News & Media Limited ("GNM") grants the Licensee the right to: publish on its website for 10 years. Contact info: Eve Thompson; permissions.syndication@guardian.co.uk Title A name given to the resource Virginia Tech professor 'died saving students' act bravery professor Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Brent Jesiek Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Aspazia / Mad Melancholic Feminista Blog Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007-06-09 Description An account of the resource Thursday, April 19, 2007 I had nightmares about the VT massacre last night. It was on a two day delay. I knew that eventually the horror of what had happened would start to eat away at me. In part, I think my dreams haunted me precisely because I didn't talk, or rather listen, to what students thought about this. I didn't check in to see if they were suffering, in shock, afraid . . . I had to think a lot about why I didn't, especially after the Provost sent us a thoughtful email encouraging us to do so. What it comes down to is that I didn't want to think about it. I didn't want to actually confront the horror of this event. I wasn't prepared for hearing any vitriol, anger or racist statements either (not that students would've made such statements, but I worried). I am scared and frightened by what happened, and in my selfishness, I didn't want to hear anything about it, or how it affected my students. I started to realize how frightened I was by the events yesterday while talking to my colleagues in the Philosophy lounge. I had been studying the faces of the dead at the NYTimes website. But, more importantly, I had been studying the faces of the dead professors. One of them, Jamie Bishop, looked like the sort of colleague I have here. He was young, married, and well-loved by his students. Don't get me wrong, I paused on pictures of young women and men, who could've been my own students, and found myself speechless over the loss. But, seeing the pictures of dead professors haunted me the most. And, it is precisely that which I dreamt: being hunted by a former student, being called to protect my class from an armed assailant. These are not tasks that one signs on for when he/she becomes a college professor. <a href="http://subversivechristianity.blogspot.com/">Kerry</a> reminded me of a student we both had a few years ago, who I am convinced was schizophrenic. He was the right age and gender for the onset of schizophrenia. His papers were long, stream of consciousness writings full of references to disturbing sexuality. The more I was around him, the more frightened I became of him. I would shudder if he came to my office and I never had any idea of what to do with his papers. During his senior thesis presentation, I think we all just sat, aghast at what nonsense had been uttered and scrambled to figure out what to do. I think that one of the hard realities that we, as college professors, have to face in the wake of the VT massacre is our responsibility to get troubled students serious help (even if they frighten us). Many of us like to just avoid this responsibility (me included). After all, we're not therapists! And, I am not claiming we should start acting like therapists either. But, I do think we have a serious obligation to pay attention to our students who seem deeply troubled, and figure out ways to get them help. If we just try to get them out of our class, or ignore them, or rationalize to ourselves that they are just lazy, mean or insubordinate, then we may find ourselves deeply regretting that we didn't do something to stop them from hurting others or themselves. The story of Cho Seung-Hui is not an anomaly. We know that there are lots of disaffected, troubled young people in our schools. And while the news reports are starting to show that his professors, at least, tried to take action, what stands out to me is how most people just ignored his behavior. Everyone knows the loners on their campus. And, most of the time these loners are the butt of jokes. Allowing such a disconnected community to exist is no longer safe, forget the moral concerns. So, the lesson I draw from the VT massacre is that I can no longer afford to ignore the students who are manifesting very troubling behavior; I am responsible to them as well as my community. Posted by Aspazia at <a href="http://melancholicfeminista.blogspot.com/2007/04/on-being-college-professor-after-vt.html">Thursday, April 19, 2007</a> -- Original Source: <a href="http://melancholicfeminista.blogspot.com/2007/04/on-being-college-professor-after-vt.html">http://melancholicfeminista.blogspot.com/2007/04/on-being-college-professor-after-vt.html</a> Licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/">Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License</a>. Language A language of the resource eng Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License Title A name given to the resource On Being A College Professor after the VT Massacre blog commentary professor Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Brent Jesiek Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Benjamin Cohen Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007-05-11 Description An account of the resource The Morning News - Personal Essays It stunned the nation that the Virginia Tech murders took place; it shocked Virginians that they occurred in Blacksburg. A former longtime resident, BENJAMIN COHEN traces his connections to the tragedy. -- I drove home from Charlottesville in confused panic after cancelling my afternoon class. Noah Adams was on NPR talking about the stark clash of nature and humans, setting and event. It was the visual, sensory contrast between Blacksburg, the bucolic valley town in southwestern Virginia, and mass murder news story. That this human tragedy could happen there, in that natural majesty. From all the 11 scattered years I lived there, before moving to the University of Virginia last year, the bucolic descriptor is one that sticks. It’s exaggerated, I know, but it works. And it’s the one the media evoked all week: Blacksburg, a quaint, off-the-beaten-track bucolic college town nestled in the mountains of southwest Virginia. Being nestled also seems key, the town cradled by the mountains, the students by the valley. I walked that nestled town too many times to count, and ever after have the image of my son cruising down Draper Road sidewalks wearing his red Keds and pushing his toy lawnmower. Adams apparently had written about the New River a few years agoa river paradoxically named, since it’s in fact one of the oldest in North America, if not the worldand thus knew the area. He was speaking in the first phase of tragedy, when people confront the fact that senseless things don’t make sense. This was before the pre-spin spin phase, when people talk about what people will soon be talking about: too many guns, not enough guns, no Bibles in schools, too much God in schools, moral decay, media glorification, video games, actual worldwide wars, daily death in Iraq, numbness, surveillance cameras will save us, mental illness is awful, failure of health-care system, campus judicial systems, parents, society, it’s society’s fault, and however else Nancy and Greta might try to understand it. After 9/11, they gave us, what, a three- to four-day opening phase? The duration is apparently proportional to death count; this time it lasted three to four hours. I didn’t know any of the victims, but everyone I know knew one or more. From this, I found there is only one direction with things like violent tragedy: It isn’t that I was fortunate not to know any of them directly, but that it was unfortunate so many did; you can’t feel better, you only feel worse or more worse. I went to Virginia Tech because its application didn’t require an essay. When I graduated, I had no idea why I’d chosen my major (chemical engineering), and I wasn’t even particularly fond of the school itself. But Blacksburg was significant to me. In this way, I have always been critical of an institution that has also come to define me; I placed the natural setting of Blacksburg as one thing, the human institution of Tech as another, as if they were separate, which they are not. So yes, I finally admit it, my adult identity was born there. There’s that. My biography’s tightly intertwined with the town, the valley, the school. I met my wife there. She had been a freshman in West Ambler Johnston Hall. Three months after graduation, we got married in the chapel on the Drill Field at the center of campus. I played wiffle ball out there all afternoon on my wedding day, getting a slight sunburn in the calm afternoon sun. The sunburn shows in the wedding pictures. The Drill Field is that seemingly fabricated collegiate setting, the only one admissions folks want you to seefrisbees, wiffle ball, rugby, picnics, sunbathers, dogs and tennis balls, kites. It’s also a good place to hold candle-light vigils. If anything, Blacksburg was known in the mid-’90s because of <a href="http://www.cni.org/tfms/1995b.fall/BEV.html">the Blacksburg Electronic Village</a>. (It was the first wired town. Soon, obviously, everyplace was a wired town, so I guess it didn’t really matter anymore.) Yes, Axl Rose supposedly once stopped by The Cellar after a concert in nearby Roanoke, but I never found out if that was really true. When we, my wife and I, came back for graduate school later in the decadefor something called science studies, something explicitly not engineeringBlacksburg had become a football school. Plus, <a href="http://outside.away.com/outside/destinations/200109/200109towns_10.adp">one year Outside magazine said it was a great place to live</a>. So much hiking; the Appalachian Trail close by; lots of mountain biking; did you know they filmed Dirty Dancing in a mountain retreat just miles away? Yes, everyone does; rolling hills; serene sunsets; a great vegetarian restaurant downtown; cows, horses, sheep, farms; tubing on the same New River that enchanted Noah Adams. One summer I lost a T-shirt in that river, and my keys and a shoe. It wasn’t until reading the New York Times last weekend<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/us/22norris.html">Students Recount Desperate Minutes Inside Norris Hall</a>that I remembered my classes had been in Norris Hall that summer. Once when my wife was an undergraduate, there was a peeping Tom incident at the dorms. It was unsettling. That such a thing could happen in that little town. By the time we returned for our graduate stintliving the next county over, a few mountains to the west, in fact, not even in townBlacksburg was a football school, and there had been a shooting at a local bar, several stabbings, and other violent incidents downtown. This added to my ambivalence about the school and the town and my place there. I didn’t see how I was tied to the area in the way I do now. My graduate department was likely the most liberal-leaning one on the generally conservative campus. Our offices were in the middle of the ROTC quad. We’d be talking about ethics and technology and social structure and the military-industrial complex inside; they’d be doing roll call and formations and hut-hut-huts outside. In further contrast to this, a fellow graduate student friend was an activist organizer in town. Her friend, another grad student and probably the most visible and active of the activists, was murdered by yet another peace activist, an unstable married man who was having an affair with her. His subsequent suicide kept the motive unclear. Unsettling, in that case, is a disrespectful understatement. It was horrific. Our children were born in Blacksburg. We lived there for 11 of our first 15 post-high school years: adulthood, education, dating, marriage, education, jobs, family. So it’s not only my biography that is interlaced with the town and the school, but my children’s as well. During the third week of my first semester teaching, after a lecture about the U.S.’s history of involvement in the domestic affairs of other nations, I walked back to my office and was stopped along the way by a friend who said only that they hit the towers, they hit the buildings. I had no idea what that meant. Sitting on the front porch of our building, the one facing the ROTC quad, on an amazingly crisp, clear, solid blue-sky day, someone else was the first to quote FargoAnd it’s such a beautiful day, she said, in disbelief. In such a placid town, nestled in the mountains of Virginia, we watched New York and the Pentagon burn. All of this, three months before our son was born. We had a lot of those what kind of world conversations, all set against the backdrop of bucolic Blacksburg. <a href="http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2004/8/12cohenphish.html">When we moved into Blacksburg for our last year of studies</a>, as a way to be closer to campus and friends and to live by foot more than car, we walked the mile from our house to downtown many times a week. Then we were true Blacksburg residents, with all the trappings, including first-name greetings at the coffee shop and that vegetarian restaurant and the credit union and the bookstore and the Greek restaurant and the farmer’s market. Our son pushed his toy John Deere lawnmower in front of him every time we walked downtown. He became that adorable kid, the one with the lawnmower in the red Keds. At the coffee shop, I recognized, though didn’t personally know, all the regulars. The one we called Stay-at-Home Dad always seemed odd, and my wife didn’t think he was really a father for the first year. (He was; we eventually saw his children.) Weird-Kid-Who-Should-Probably-Have-a-Job was always there too, usually playing backgammon with Stay-at-Home Dad. Unfriendly-Hippie Couple saw us every day for years, never once saying hello. Scowling peaceniks always confused me. A year after we moved to Charlottesville in 2005 after all that time in Blacksburg, <a href="http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/79080">that weird kid at the coffee shop was arrested, then escaped from jail, killed two people, and caused a lockdown on the Virginia Tech campus on the very first day of the semester</a>. We watched the news from afar, absolutely stunned, completely silent that this was actually in, as the now-well-worn moniker has it, bucolic Blacksburg. College kids were being interviewed on CNN, terrified that this was their greeting to their new world. I still work with colleagues from Blacksburg. I spoke to my doctoral adviser, himself in the history department at Tech, days before the massacre last week, and had heard there’d been bomb threats over the past month. That’s eerie. Because of my own biography there, I knew what others there were already going through before this happenedanother adviser was dealing with her husband’s death last year; a classmate had a devastating miscarriage a little while back; another friend’s younger brother had unexpectedly died in February. And then, as I was leaving my second of three classes Monday afternoon, here at the University of Virginia, someone asked if I’d heard about Virginia Tech. Yes, I’m from there, I said, misunderstanding what she was asking me. I fast-walked to my office and saw all the news. After I called my wife, hurriedly cancelled class, found my car to drive home, heard Noah Adams on the radio, scolded myself for being irritated by trivialities like CBS’s calling it Virginia Tech Universityafter that, I got home to find my family in the yard, the kids wanting to take a walk around the block. Though he hadn’t given it a second look for several years, my son grabbed his old toy lawnmower from the shed. Then my daughter got her baby stroller, and we walked around our peaceful violent American society. -Published April 24, 2007 Benjamin Cohen is an assistant professor of science, technology, and society at the University of Virginia. He also helps out at the McSweeney's web site. <a href="mailto:benjaminrcohen@yahoo.com">You can email him here.</a> -- Archived with permission of the author. Original source: <a href="http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/personal_essays/blacksburg_and_biography.php">http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/personal_essays/blacksburg_and_biography.php</a> Language A language of the resource eng Title A name given to the resource Blacksburg and Biography blacksburg charlottesville commentary professor the morning news