 My workplace can exasperate me at times — if your workplace never exasperates you, they’re paying you too much — but not today.
Everyone at the Daily Press, Desert Dispatch and Hesperia Star received a Virginia Tech “in remembrance” button today, and the Daily Press is accepting donations for the Virginia Tech memorial fund.
One of my biggest regrets when I was at Tech was that I didn’t get to study with Nikki Giovanni, or “Nikki,” as everyone who had studied under her called her. Her classes were in high demand, as she was new to the campus, and as a double-major, I was listed as a Communication Studies major first, so my English classes choices were put in the pile with all the non-major students. Still, it’s always been a point of pride that such a noted writer was teaching at my alma mater.
And now I have even more reason to be proud of my indirect association with her, based on her relationship with Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter in the Virginia Tech massacre:
The mood in the basketball arena was defeated, funereal. Nikki Giovanni seemed an unlikely source of strength for a Virginia Tech campus reeling from the depravity of one of its own.
Tiny, almost elfin, her delivery blunted by the loss of a lung, Giovanni brought the crowd at the memorial service to its feet and whipped mourners into an almost evangelical fervor with her words: “We are the Hokies. We will prevail, we will prevail. We are Virginia Tech.”
Nearly two years earlier, Giovanni had stood up to Cho Seung-Hui before he drenched the campus in blood. Her comments Tuesday showed that the man who had killed 32 students and teachers had not killed the school’s spirit.
“We are strong and brave and innocent and unafraid,” the 63-year-old poet with the close-cropped, platinum hair told the grieving crowd. “We are better than we think, not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imagination and the possibility we will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears, through all this sadness.”
In September 2005, Cho was enrolled in Giovanni’s introduction to creative writing class. From the beginning, he began building a wall between himself and the rest of the class.
He wore sunglasses to class and pulled his maroon cap down low over his forehead. When she tried to get him to participate in class discussion, his answer was silence.
“Sometimes, students try to intimidate you,” Giovanni told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Wednesday. “And I just assumed that he was trying to assert himself.”
But then female students began complaining about Cho.
About five weeks into the semester, students told Giovanni that Cho was taking photographs of their legs and knees under the desks with his cell phone. She told him to stop, but the damage was already done.
Female students refused to come to class, submitting their work by computer instead. As for Cho, he was not adding anything to the classroom atmosphere, only detracting.
His work had no meter or structure or rhyme scheme. To Giovanni, it was simply “a tirade.”
“There was no writing. I wasn’t teaching him anything, and he didn’t want to learn anything,” she said. “And I finally realized either I was going to lose my class, or Mr. Cho had to leave.”
Giovanni wrote a letter to then-department head Lucinda Roy, who removed Cho.
When she and Giovanni learned of the shootings and heard a description of the gunman, they immediately thought of Cho.
Roy wonders now whether things would have turned out differently had she continued their sessions. But Giovanni sees no reason for people who had interactions with Cho to beat themselves up.
“I know that there’s a tendency to think that everybody can get counseling or can have a bowl of tomato soup and everything is going to be all right,” she said. “But I think that evil exists, and I think that he was a mean person.”
Giovanni encountered Cho only once after she removed him from class. She was walking down a campus path and noticed him coming toward her. They maintained eye contact until passing each other.
Giovanni, who had survived lung cancer, was determined she would not blink first.
“I was not going to look away as if I were afraid,” she said. “To me he was a bully, and I had no fear of this child.”
Just got this by e-mail from a fellow alumni (well, alumna):
Virginia Tech family members across the country have united to declare this Friday, April 20th, an “Orange and Maroon Effect” day to honor those killed in the tragic events on campus Monday, and to show support for Virginia Tech students, faculty, administrators, staff, alumni, and friends. “Orange and Maroon Effect” was born several years ago as an invitation to Tech fans to wear orange and maroon to Virginia Tech athletic events. We invite everyone from all over the country to be a part of the Virginia Tech family this Friday, to wear orange and maroon to support the families of those who were lost, and to support the school and community we all love so much.
Time to figure out what I still own in the old school colors. Virginia Tech has a tricky pair of them.
Writer recalls time at Virginia Tech
It’s a piece I wrote for the Daily Press, but which they ended up deciding not to run. I added the name of the now-identified shooter to the piece as edited by Daily Press Managing Editor Keith Jones. (No point in wasting a good edit.)
It’s ironic, but the fact that it’s now the #10 most-read story across Freedom Communications today makes me irrationally angry and frustrated. I’m tired of hearing familiar names like McBride or WUVT or Ambler-Johnston or Norris Hall or the Duck Pond or Smith Mountain Lake in the national media associated with this sort of thing. I don’t want to see Blacksburg in the AP video crawl on the bottom of the Hesperia Star site or hear NPR calling for reports from WUVT (which they never refer to as “woovit,” as those of us who worked there did).
The longest I’ve lived anywhere in a continuous stretch was my six years in Blacksburg, and it feels like a violation to have this be what my school will be known for forever. It must be how Kent State students must feel.
To me, Norris Hall is where my college girlfriend (an industrial engineering student) studied and it was the building across the Drill Field from my original dorm, West Eggleston. It was at Norris Hall that I heard that my friend Aislinn had died, when I was waiting for my girlfriend to get out of class.
Ambler-Johnston is where I went to study and get away from the chaos of the fraternity house, but ended up making good friends. It was the place that I first heard Nirvana, Mother Love Bone and Pearl Jam and where I first logged onto a BBS in those primitive days before the World Wide Web.
This is probably an awful admission, but I’ve never cried for 9/11, although thinking about the passengers on Flight 93 calling their loved ones always brings me to the brink. But I keep crying about what’s happened in Blacksburg and getting angry at everyone and everything, rebuffing my family when they call me on the phone.
I know the real victims are those who have been shot and their families, but this is going to stick with me for a long time to come, I think.
Of all the stories to come out of Blacksburg this week, perhaps the most remarkable has been the life and death of mechanical engineering professor Liviu Librescu.
When Cho Seung-Hui came to his classroom in Norris Hall, looking for more people to kill, Librescu, a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust, put himself between the shooter and his students, and told his kids to run for it.
“My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee,” Joe Librescu said in a telephone interview from his home outside of Tel Aviv. “Students started opening windows and jumping out.”
Inside Norris, the attack began with a thunderous sound from Room 206 – “what sounded like an enormous hammer,” said Alec Calhoun, a 20-year-old junior who was in a solid mechanics lecture in a classroom next door.
Screams followed an instant later, and the banging continued. When students realized the sounds were gunshots, Calhoun said, he started flipping over desks to make hiding places. Others dashed to the windows of the second-floor classroom, kicking out the screens and jumping from the ledge of Room 204, he said.
“I must’ve been the eighth or ninth person who jumped, and I think I was the last,” said Calhoun. He landed in a bush and ran.
Calhoun said that the two students behind him were shot, but that he believed they survived. Just before he climbed out the window, Calhoun said, he turned to look at his professor, who had stayed behind, apparently to prevent the gunman from opening the door.
The instructor was killed, Calhoun said.
Erin Sheehan, who was in the German class next door to Calhoun’s class, told the student newspaper, the Collegiate Times, that she was one of only four of about two dozen people in the class to walk out of the room. The rest were dead or wounded, she said.
What an amazing final lesson to teach his students, whether they had the Monday 9 a.m. class with him or not.
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