Even as they struggled to digest the news that a shooting had devastated the biological-sciences faculty at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, professors stepped up this weekend to offer support in a way that only they could: They volunteered to teach classes so students could complete the courses they need to graduate on time.
The offers, from faculty members at the other two campuses in the University of Alabama system, are clearly welcome. As the Huntsville campus prepares for a memorial service on Friday for three slain biology professors, it prays for two more professors and a department assistant who were wounded and deals with its shock at knowing that yet another professor is accused of pulling the trigger. But the arrangement is a stopgap measure for a university that will soon have to focus intensely on all the tasks that go along with rebuilding a 14-member department nearly cut in half.
Devising a Plan
Ki Moore, director of the division of nursing practice at the University of Arizona, where a student gunned down three nursing professors in 2002, says it's hard to resume normal operations in the wake of such slayings. "You're so stunned," she said. "There's clearly that emotional numbness in doing the tasks that need to be accomplished to get things back on track."
It's extremely rare for violence to affect multiple professors in a single department. But when it happens, departments must meet near-term challenges (such as covering classes or finding new advisers for students) and challenges that emerge further down the line, such as recruiting new faculty members. And the work at hand is often fraught with emotion.
Arizona suspended classes in the days immediately following the shooting, Ms. Moore said. But about a week later, nursing students were back in classes, and the college had a plan for covering the courses taught by the three professors who were killed.
"We had amazing support from nurses across the country, although the most tangible support was from the university medical center," Ms. Moore said. "We had several clinicians who helped us cover our nursing courses."
Loss of Wisdom and Advice
Finding a way to cover classes may be one of the earliest—and easiest—problems for Huntsville to solve. But other issues are likely to arise. Among them, says Joann J. Otto, professor and chair of the biology department at Western Washington University, are helping graduate students and undergraduates left without advisers and research mentors to adjust.
"I'm sure the students knew those faculty members very well, and they were thinking of getting letters of recommendation from them," said Ms. Otto. Research on which Huntsville faculty members collaborated is now in the balance. Committee work in the department is also likely to grind to a halt for now, she said, and when it resumes, "it's going to be hard to take that on in the face of that tragedy. Having that kind of accumulated wisdom lost is really hard for that department."
Coping With Bereavement
Although its loss was not on the scale of Huntsville's, Michigan Technological University had to rebuild a department after two unexpected deaths. In the fall semester of 2008, a faculty member in the department of geological and mining engineering and sciences died in an accident a week before classes were to end. The following semester a second professor in that department died an accidental death—again before classes were to end.
Wayne D. Pennington, the department chair, who is now on a fellowship in Washington, met with students to talk about the first professor's death— a geologist who was "hands down the most popular instructor among the students"—and then "we talked about what to do with his course now," he said.
A teaching assistant took over the class, structural geology, for the final week and Mr. Pennington unearthed drafts of the final examination as well as the grades students had accumulated up to the point of the professor's death from a fall. The following semester, a professor offered to modify a course he taught in another department to fit the needs of students, Mr. Pennington said.
The death of the second professor, in a kayaking accident, brought about some additional challenges. He was an atmospheric scientist who had research grants from the National Science Foundation and from NASA, and all of them needed to be reassigned to someone else, said Mr. Pennington, a geophysicist.
The agencies "were both extremely accommodating, and they said, 'Take your time to find out what it is you need to do,'" Mr. Pennington said. The professor's students, postdoctoral fellows, and newly minted Ph.D.'s, and people with whom he had done research gathered at a memorial service for him one day, and the next day came together again for a meeting that lasted about nine hours to "figure out what to do with those contracts," Mr. Pennington said. "He had three of them, and we found three different principal investigators to take them."
Meetings to discuss details of that type will be needed at Huntsville in the days and weeks ahead, said Kevin D. McCaul, dean of the College of Science and Mathematics at North Dakota State University. Last year, just after Christmas, part of a building at his institution collapsed. Though no one was harmed, it was a place where several courses were held. Administrators gathered early each morning to discuss plans to get the building back into commission, among other things. At Huntsville, such daily meetings could serve another purpose, said Mr. McCaul, who is a professor of psychology.
"I could see that department having brief meetings each morning just to ask, 'How is everyone doing?," Mr. McCaul said. "That's a first response that could last for a while."
Filling Positions
Rebuilding the biological-sciences department at Huntsville will also mean hiring new faculty members.
The specter of the tragedy may make the task uncomfortable at first, but other universities have found that applicants are not deterred. At Arizona, the university was able to fill the open faculty positions by the following fall. Finding interested candidates wasn't difficult, said Ms. Moore, who led the search committee for the new professors.
At Michigan Tech, searches for professors to replace the two faculty members who died are nearly over, Mr. Pennington said. "It's overwhelming, and you have to take it one step at a time," he said. "You handle the things that need to be done immediately and then you go from there."
A spokeswoman for the University of Alabama system, Kellee C. Reinhart, wrote in an e-mail message that the focus right now is on Friday's memorial service and supporting the victims' families. But along with relying on professors from the system's Birmingham and Tuscaloosa campuses who will drive back and forth to Huntsville to teach, the system is also considering the options of having recently retired faculty members help out, or having classes taught in real time from either of the other two campuses using the system's interactive videoconferencing facilities and lab instructors on site in Huntsville, Ms. Reinhart wrote. All classes are canceled this week.
Mr. McCaul added a small note of optimism, saying that "there's the possibility that the people in this department can become even closer."
Joseph D. Ng, an associate professor of biochemistry at Huntsville, has shown that such a mind-set is already in place among his colleagues. In a widely published e-mail message that he wrote to a former professor about the shooting and its aftermath, Mr. Ng ended with: "We will attend a bunch of memorial services and funerals in the next two weeks and try to rebuild a department in the months ahead."
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