Final farewells at Virginia Tech?

Current and prospective students of Virginia Tech struggle with the decision of whether to stay put or go to another college in the fall.

from the April 30, 2007 edition

Page 2 of 2

The school has urged students to come together to cope with their shared grief through a convocation, a picnic, and e-mails encouraging to students to stay.

But students are expressing second thoughts about staying after the shootings perpetrated by a fellow student. Cho Seung-hui, a 23-year-old English major from South Korea, killed 33 people, including himself.

"In some respects, college students do live in an idealized environment, but they inevitably go through a transition – whether it's a difficult situation or something off the scale [like the Virginia Tech shootings] – when they realize that the ideal is a warped personal perception," says Matthew Woessner, a sociologist at Penn State University in State College, Pa. "It's often a shocking moment."

Some students, however, have decided to stay in spite of the initial shock. Jeff Leininger, who lives in the West Ambler Johnston dorm where two students were killed, says his first reaction was to flee campus, and never come back. But he has since changed his mind about leaving for good, though he is opting to take his current grade and leave early this semester. "As weird as this year has been, I'm ultimately going to come back," he says.

Other students cite the shared experience of dealing with the tragedy as a major reason for deciding to stay. An Lee had been planning to transfer to another college next year, because she disliked the school's fraternity-dominated social culture. But now she can't imagine being anywhere else. "You go through something like this together, and it would be weird to start over somewhere else," says Ms. Lee. "Here you can just sit and talk forever with people affected by the whole thing, which helps a lot."

Transfer and enrollment decisions may be influenced by how close students were to West Ambler Johnston and Norris Hall on the morning of the rampage, some say.

"A lot of students, especially those close to the tragedy, may find it too painful to return to the scene of the crime and pass that building every day," says Mr. Woessner. "But for many others, there is a strange sense of camaraderie ... that's not available to the average student."

Other schools that have been affected by tragedy near their campuses, such as New York University and Columbia University after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Baylor University in Waco, Texas, after a controversial off-campus shooting there, saw their enrollments increase partly as a result of solidarity.

Virginia Tech may experience something similar, some experts say. "It's entirely possible that Virginia Tech will be basically lifted up by the support of not only their region, but really the whole country," says Mr. Munce.