Would Demolishing Cole Hall at Northern Illinois U. Be a Mistake?

Steve Chapman, a columnist from Chicago, thinks it would be a mistake to demolish the Northern Illinois University building where a massacre took place last month. He points to the University of Texas at Austin—which preserved and eventually reopened the famous tower from which Charles Whitman shot passersby—as an example of how to deal with a building touched by tragedy.

“Don’t let a psychopath govern you from the grave,” he writes. “You don’t squander $40-million to erase a memory that can’t be erased. Lots of places have witnessed nightmarish events. But we normally don’t punish the building. We mourn, we remember, we use the site to help us understand and overcome what happened, and we press on.”

Recently, The Chronicle spoke with Mark G. McNamee, the provost at Virginia Tech, about how that institution planned to reuse Norris Hall, the site of the deadly massacre last year. Asked whether Virginia Tech had considered tearing down the building, Mr. McNamee said that doing so would leave an open wound on the campus. People would be reminded of that awful day every time they passed by the vacant lot.

These are not easy issues, as one Chronicle article from last year illustrated. Even the University of Texas struggled for years with how to memorialize its shootings.