Kay Norton, president, University of Northern Colorado
Thank you all for joining us tonight. You make me proud to be part of our campus.
It is hard for me to believe a week has passed since the shootings at Virginia Tech. I—like many of you, I’m sure—can still remember that peculiar feeling I had in the pit of my stomach as I saw the news on Monday morning. It was a feeling that was all too familiar, and yet it was a shock.
I felt, as a mother, the way I felt when they brought the children out of the collapsed day care center in Oklahoma City, where I grew up. I felt the way I felt when Columbine happened, so close. I felt the way we all felt on September 11, 2001.
I felt for the parents who had entrusted their children to a university in the quiet hills of Virginia, with no reason to imagine such a tragedy.
Then, as a university president, I thought of you—the students, faculty and staff who arrive at the University of Northern Colorado each day trusting that this is a safe place.
I feel a tremendous responsibility to keep all of you safe, and we have terrific police and people here who are sworn to do that. But the fact is that as a campus community, we share that tremendous responsibility for keeping each other safe.
As a society, we tend to distance ourselves from the most horrible things. We spend a lot of time setting up rules and laws intended to keep bad things from ever happening again. We point fingers and file lawsuits about who should have done this, and who failed to do that.
This week on our campus and campuses across the country, we have also been looking at our safety procedures, and thinking about what we could do better.
At UNC, we have stepped up the presence of our professional campus police force; we are continuing to work at refining our emergency procedures; we are looking at enhanced technology; and we are clearly seeing that we must engage the entire campus in emergency response training.
But procedures and technology and rules alone will not keep us safe—and they will not help us heal.
We are here tonight to commemorate—to celebrate—the resilience of the community at Virginia Tech, which today picked up the pieces and began the process of healing.
This weekend in the news, I saw a picture of an art project being created at Virginia Tech—a huge canvas covered with handprints of people who have visited a memorial to those who were killed. Did you see it? It’s called “Hands That Heal” and it struck me that all of those hands in that picture are open—no clenched fists or pointing fingers.
That picture is about reaching out with an open hand to a stranger. It’s about building community—a community that offers help rather than passing by.
Our society celebrates freedom and individualism—and justly so—but if there’s anything to be gained from looking at Virginia Tech it is that we know that with all our freedoms, we don’t have the freedom not to care.
We are here tonight not out of fear, not simply out of grief, but because we understand somehow that we need each other; and that need is the foundation of a community in which these things, perhaps, if we reach out to each other, may never happen again.