Editorial Making sense of the senseless

Author: Editorial Board

The shooting rampage that occurred Monday at Virginia Polytechnic Institute shocked and horrified the nation. As college students, the images of our peers being terrorized, on a sprawling campus not so unlike our own, was both painful to witness and impossible to comprehend. Although the incident is too fresh in our collective memory to fully understand, already we see lessons and wisdom as the story unfolds.

In the face of a crisis, the writers, photographers and editors of Virginia Tech's student daily, The Collegiate Times, transcended their roles as college journalists to not only inform their community, but to inform the world. With many local news sources shut out, only limited comments coming from Virginia Tech officials and an entire campus on lock-down, the importance of these students' work was heightened to an extreme. The written, photographic and video posts to The Times website throughout the day were among the most vivid and honest portraits of the campus available. Working from computers outside of their offices, the students held nothing back, and produced a raw, emotional narrative of the tragedy. Their reporting was effective, critical and in every sense, brave.

While the editors of the student newspaper went about their work with inspiring leadership, internal communications by Virginia Tech administrators showed the University was less than fully prepared. As more and more details about the sequence of events have been released, it has become clear that administrators did not notify the entire campus or order a full lockdown until more than two hours after the first round of shooting began. Whether or not any of the deaths in the second round of shooting could have been avoided, we should realize the need for all institutions to prepare for the unimaginable. And in the face of this shooting, college administrators everywhere should recognize the need to share information with their communities quickly and clearly, even as the full extent of a crisis may remain unknown.

Finally, as American news media have told us again and again, what happened at Virginia Tech was the deadliest shooting rampage in our nation's history. On Tuesday, President Bush declared the tragedy "the worst day of violence in college history." But as an institution committed to exploring and understanding peoples and places around the world, we should realize that for all too many, the fear that struck America on Monday was a fear known day in and day out. Across the globe, in Chechnya and Sudan and Iraq and other conflict zones around the world, schoolchildren and young adults have been robbed of their lives at the height of their potential. As we seek to understand why these tragedies occur, we should recognize our role as an international institution, and avoid the temptation to consider ourselves lonely victims.

While we continue to reflect on the events of April 16, our most profound respect goes out to the staff of The Collegiate Times. Our hearts are with the students of Virginia Tech, their friends and their families. And our hopes are with people everywhere - that we might learn from tragedy, however senseless it may be.