VT shooting: black mark on an otherwise growing reputation

Before Monday's shootings, Virginia Tech had won honors with its influx of foreign students.

By Patrik Jonsson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the April 19, 2007 edition

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BLACKSBURG, Va. - The student shooter was from South Korea. The professor who died while trying to stop him was a Romanian-born Jew. The man who captured some of the deadly pistol shots on his cellphone was a Palestinian.

One reason Monday's massacre at Virginia Tech university has become such an international incident is that the university itself has been transformed from a small college populated by what founding president Charles Minor called "plain lads" into a diverse and increasingly international institution. Last year, some 565,000 foreign students attended US colleges and universities. Even here at Virginia Tech, nestled in the deep folds of the Appalachian lowlands, 7 percent of the nearly 28,500 students come from abroad. In some departments, 60 percent of the graduate students are foreign-born.

At stake now is the reputation of the university, set in what faculty call a "social island" in the Scotch-Irish enclave, and in some ways, of Virginia itself.

"Before I came here, I thought this was the safest town in the US," says Turkish graduate student Mehmet Dasiyici, wearing a maroon VT hat.

The rampage on Monday, in which South Korean-born Cho Seung-Hui shot 32 people on campus and then killed himself, has changed all that,

University doubles its size

With its neat granite downtown connected to a sprawling campus encircling a military drill field, the university has become a formidable force in the last 30 years, more than doubling its size and bolstering its reputation, especially in architecture and engineering. Its engineering school is ranked 18th in the nation among public universities, and its human-computer interaction lab is considered one of the world's best.

Despite Virginia Tech's dramatic shift in mission and culture, its hometown of Blacksburg retains a traditional Southern character. But there are problems with violence in this community of 40,000. Last year, a police officer and a security guard were killed by an escaped convict, who was captured a day and a half later. And the university has instituted a "Hokie Respect" campaign to defuse reports of hooliganism at football games.

Fueled by the growth of northern Virginia, Virginia Tech today has a relatively easy time recruiting foreign-born students. For example, some 40 percent of northern Virginia's population lives in Fairfax County, and a quarter of Fairfax County is made up of recent immigrants. The children of those immigrants, often born abroad but raised in the US, are now flowing into state schools such as Virginia Tech. One draw is the low in-state tuition – $5,450. Another is the school's curriculum, which emphasizes career skills – good conduits for assimilation into the American mainstream.

Today, the Corps of Cadets, the once-mandatory military drill team, still dominates campus events and ties the university to the past. A cadet was one of Mr. Cho's victims on Monday. But the student body has gone from being overwhelmingly white 20 years ago to 70 percent white today, with Asians becoming a driving force behind its academic achievements.

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