Virginia Tech Vigil
April 18, 2007
Mark Workman
I would like to extend my personal condolences to those of you
here who have a direct connection to Virginia Tech. As a New
Yorker, and as someone with friends and family who live and work
in the vicinity of the former World Trade Tower, I know how
personally wounded I felt on the occasion of 9/11. For you—given
the deep, formative, and life-long identification we establish with
the places that we have inhabited—the attack at Virginia Tech
must have felt like it was an attack on you personally. And I don’t
doubt as well that many of you have relatives and friends currently
living in Blacksburg who were indeed directly affected by the
killings. Again, to the Virginia Tech community, please know that
the UNF community joins with you in your suffering and pain.
We do so in part because, while the massacre occurred on one
university campus, an event like the one that transpired there this
week is an event that affects those of us on campuses everywhere.
This is confirmed by the fact that the response to the attack has
been predictably and appropriately nationwide, as institutions
across the country have been moved by the horror and the
confusion surrounding the massacre to review their own
procedures for anticipating and responding to emergency
situations. I am confident that UNF will emerge from its own
review process as a safer institution for everyone who is a member
of our community. Indeed, we already have inventoried our
emergency resources and made a very preliminary determination
of where they must be improved upon.
As desirable as this outcome will be, however, it would be a shame
if our need for greater security became an occasion to restrict
access to or movement within our institutions of higher learning in
ways directly contrary to the spirit of higher learning itself. To a
significant extent education or learning occurs through the process
of dialogue, and that dialogue is never richer than when it is
vigorously engaged in by people from different backgrounds and
with different points of view. In other words, higher education
thrives on openness, a precious and fragile quality that must be
nurtured and preserved, and that would surely be lost if we were to
seal off our campuses from spontaneity, discourse, and candor.
As deeply tragic as the loss of life was earlier this week, it would
be more tragic still if those of us on college and university
campuses did not regard the massacre as something that demands
comprehension rather than as an event from which we permit
ourselves merely to recoil in shock and in sorrow. What cries out
for understanding is how it is that one person can feel so much hurt
that he could justify to himself hurting others to the point that he
denied them the lives that he apparently valued as little as he
valued his own. While grieving deeply for the dead and perhaps
especially for the living whose loved ones they were, I hope we
will also use this occasion to redeem that horrible loss of life, in
precisely the way that it is incumbent upon educational institutions
to do so: by reaffirming our obligation to gain insight—from the
glorious and the beautiful to the diseased and the horrific—into the
full range of what it means to be human.
I would like to conclude with a brief word to students, at the
University of North Florida, Virginia Tech, and wherever else you
might be enrolled. By all means grieve. This has been a grievous
event, and your grief is warranted. But do not permit yourselves to
be traumatized. Trauma arrests its victims in the moment. The
moment that occurred at Virginia Tech is one that you must find it
within yourselves to transcend. It is only by doing so that you can
help assure that another such moment will never occur again. My
heart—and my hope—go out to you.