How One Department Is Coping

By ROBIN WILSON

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A large poster with the words "We are with VT" sits flanked by red and yellow roses at the main office of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering here. The department lost one of its professors, seven graduate students, and an undergraduate student in the massacre on Monday inside Norris Hall.

Those eight students -- plus another who was not a civil-engineering major -- and a professor, G.V. Loganathan, were killed in Norris 206, the classroom where Mr. Loganathan was teaching Advanced Hydrology. Five other students in the classroom survived, although some were injured, said William R. Knocke, chairman of the department.

Mr. Knocke looked tired and drawn during an interview late Tuesday afternoon in the department's conference room on the second floor of Patton Hall, which is next door to Norris Hall and is where the department has its offices. He and other faculty members had shepherded about 20 of the students who had been studying in various locations around Patton Hall into the conference room after the shootings began. The room was still littered on Tuesday with half-drunk bottles of water, empty cans of caffeine-free Diet Coke, and a basketful of Dum-Dum suckers.

Mr. Knocke described his deceased colleague as "pure of heart" and personable, but also quiet. Mr. Loganathan wasn't the kind of colleague who would come by to chat and drink coffee; he was all business. But, Mr. Knocke added, "some of the most complimentary e-mails I've gotten as department head came from G.V."

Mr. Loganathan was known for his diligent work with graduate students. He often did research in Patton Hall until late at night, and undergraduates voted him the department's best teacher four times in the last dozen years. Mr. Loganathan, who was from India, had been a professor here for about 25 years and had a wife and two daughters.

William E. Cox, another civil-engineering professor, said Mr. Loganathan didn't blink when the department asked him to take on the thankless job of teaching a large sophomore-level class in surveying and measurement after its syllabus had been revised a few years ago. Mr. Loganathan was teaching that class as well this semester to 125 sophomores, and three of the students who died in the Advanced Hydrology course were working as graduate teaching assistants in the surveying class.

Mr. Cox was working in his office in Patton Hall on Monday morning when he heard commotion outside and looked out his window to see police hiding behind trees and lying on the ground with their guns pointed at Norris Hall.

Two of the students who survived the shootings in Mr. Loganathan's classroom were also taking Mr. Cox's course on water law this semester. Mr. Cox spoke to one of them, Nathaniel Krause, after the massacre. Mr. Cox said the student had told him that the gunman had fired at students' heads, and had left the room twice and returned. Mr. Krause escaped being shot only because he fell to the floor and pretended to be injured.

Mr. Krause's father sent an e-mail message to Mr. Knocke Tuesday, saying his son planned to withdraw from the master's program. Mr. Loganathan was his graduate adviser. Mr. Krause came to Patton Hall on Tuesday afternoon to take a break in one of its empty classrooms. He told a reporter he wasn't interested in talking about the shootings.

Two other engineering professors in the department of engineering science and mechanics were also killed.

Mr. Knocke said his department planned to stop teaching Mr. Loganathan's graduate course in which the nine students died. There are still two weeks left of classes.