'We Weren't Going to Let the Events Define Us'

Virginia Tech recasts 'Hokie Spirit' as a triumph of resilience

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By ROBIN WILSON

The day after a Virginia Tech student gunned down 32 people last April, a young alumnus named Johnson Wagner donned a baseball cap with the VT logo. Then a rookie golfer on the PGA Tour, Mr. Wagner wore the hat while competing in a tournament in South Carolina. There, he voiced a concern shared by many people in Blacksburg, Va.: "I simply hate the fact that Virginia Tech will be remembered like Columbine High."

But a year later, Virginia Tech has not become synonymous with tragedy. In fact, by many measures the university is doing better than ever before. It enrolled a record-breaking number of students this academic year, and applications for next year are at an all-time high. The university raised $83.8-million in gift income last year — 11 percent more than the year before — and it expects to bring in an even heftier amount in 2008. The campus's sense of pride, which galvanized sympathy from the entire nation, has never been stronger. And whereas Columbine has come to stand for disaffected teenagers turning violent, Virginia Tech has managed to bypass negative connotations.

Ask most people what they think of when they hear the name Virginia Tech and they'll say things like "resilience," "strength," and "resolve."

"We were very afraid of being stigmatized because that's the equivalent of extinction," says Ishwar K. Puri, chairman of the department of engineering science and mechanics. The department was among the hardest hit, losing two faculty members in the shootings. But this spring it is hiring three new professors, and creating a biomechanics laboratory for the new faculty members inside Norris Hall, the building where most of the shootings occurred.

"If we were going to transcend, we weren't going to let the events define us," Mr. Puri says.

The idea that the campus is moving on, and possibly upward, offends some people, including Gordon K. Davies, a member of the state review panel that harshly criticized the university's response to the killings. He believes Virginia Tech is embracing its recovery while ignoring some problems the tragedy uncovered.

"They've made it a public-relations coup," says Mr. Davies, a former director of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. "They've turned it into a positive."

It is insensitive to relatives of the victims to even discuss ways in which the campus has not only recovered but is thriving, says Janice M. Abraham, president of United Educators Insurance, which provides risk-management services to colleges. "The entire education community is still struggling with the tragedy," she says. "The idea that in just a year anyone is thinking about the good that's happened would just seem to add more agony to those involved."

A $1-Million Check

In the days and months after the shootings last April, everyone wanted to help Virginia Tech grieve. The water over Niagara Falls was bathed in orange and maroon lights. NASA flew a black ribbon with a maroon VT logo on one of its Pegasus rockets. And professional athletes — football players, baseball stars, and Nascar drivers — wore Virginia Tech colors and logos. The New York Yankees even asked Charles W. Steger, Tech's president, to throw the ceremonial opening pitch in Yankee Stadium last May. Then they gave him a $1-million check.

In the wake of the tragedy, alumni chapters held special gatherings across the country that attracted people with no connections to Virginia Tech. The largest was in San Francisco, where more than 400 people showed up, including Silicon Valley executives. They donated $110,000, even though the gathering was not designed to raise money.

"People just wanted to express their support," says Tom Tillar, vice president for alumni relations at Virginia Tech.

All the money from alumni gatherings and professional and collegiate sports teams went to the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund. By last summer, the donations totaled $9.5-million. About $8.5-million went to injured students and relatives of those who were killed. The rest went into a scholarship fund.

The outpouring of support buoyed the campus, and revealed that people around the country sympathized with Virginia Tech, rather than blamed it. "At that time, everyone wanted to be a Hokie," recalls Adeel Khan, a junior and president of Tech's Student Government Association.

Indeed, it was Virginia Tech's strong sense of "Hokie spirit," fueled over the decades by its rabid football fans, that led the campus swiftly through the tragedy and out the other end, observers say. "The strength of the culture there is what became understood right away, and continues," says Tom Abrahamson, managing director of Lipman Hearne, a marketing company that works with colleges.

Just a day after the shootings, Hokie spirit came through loud and clear during a convocation on the campus. Nikki Giovanni, a poet and an English professor at Tech, read a poem to the 10,000 people gathered in Cassell Coliseum. It ended this way: "We will prevail. We will prevail. We will prevail. We are Virginia Tech." People sobbed and held each other as she recited the words. But when the poem was over, students erupted in a gigantic cheer you hear in football stadiums: "Let's go, Hokies!"

Scott Cheatham, who is earning his master's degree in education at Virginia Tech, believes such out-loud expressions of unity helped the campus recover. "We always knew Hokie spirit as something that carries on throughout the university, it's just that the rest of the world had never seen it," says Mr. Cheatham, who helps coordinate a service organization on the campus called Hokies United. "Hokie spirit existed long before April 16. It existed when my grandfather went here."

'The Loyalty Gets Stronger'

While many campuses can boast plenty of school spirit, Virginia Tech's brand is especially loud and loyal. It has been built over the generations by legions of proud alumni, who troop back to the bucolic campus, nestled in the mountains of southwest Virginia, to cheer on their teams. On game days it is not unusual to see toddlers and old people — not just students — with their faces painted maroon and orange.

The university's remote location fosters its school spirit, says Lawrence G. Hincker, a Virginia Tech spokesman. The design of its campus, with all the buildings arranged tightly around a drill field, he says, gives the 28,000-student university a close-knit, small-town feel. And most of the students share a common background: Three-quarters of them are white and from Virginia.

Traditionally, the campus has stood in the shadow of the state's elite public institution, the University of Virginia, a fact that has given Virginia Tech an underdog quality that many of its students embrace.

All aspects of Hokie spirit helped protect the university's image in the aftermath of the shootings, say marketing officials who work for colleges. "When you do a good job in branding, people who are among your stakeholders do not see what happened in a crisis as a problem that reflects everything that's wrong with you," says Teresa M. Flannery, assistant vice president for marketing and communications at the University of Maryland at College Park. "They stick with you, and the loyalty gets stronger."

Students and donors have indeed stuck with Virginia Tech. A record 27,840 students enrolled at the university this academic year, including about 5,150 freshmen. That's 150 more first-year students than the university expected. And applications for next year stand at 20,700, about six percent more than for the current academic year.

The trajectory of both enrollment and donations was already headed upward before the tragedy occurred, so it is not clear if or how the crisis affected those numbers. But at least the shootings did not drive students away, a possibility that initially concerned some campus officials. "We're doing as well as any organization could be expected to be doing," says Mr. Hincker.

Indeed, the crisis has inspired students and professors to develop innovative ways to remember the victims. Hokies United, a student group that coordinated volunteers to help in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11 and Hurricane Katrina, turned its attention on the university after the shootings. The group has asked everyone associated with Virginia Tech to do 10 hours of community service in the names of the April 16 victims.

Jerzy Nowak, chairman of the university's horticulture department, lost his wife — a French instructor — in the killings. He has started the Hokie Spirit Garden Trail, a project that will create six new gardens on the campus with donations of about $20-million he hopes to receive over the next 10 years. "There was momentum," says Mr. Nowak, "for creativity."

Other colleges have seen that same momentum after devastating incidents. Cynthia J. Lawson was in charge of communications at Texas A&M University in 1999, the year 12 people died in a bonfire accident on the campus. Like Virginia Tech, she says, A&M overcame its hardship amid a wave of school spirit.

"What happened didn't have a negative impact. It might have had just the opposite effect," says Ms. Lawson, who is now assistant to the chancellor for marketing and communications at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. "Enrollment continued to rise, and millions poured into A&M."

Donald Munce, who is president of a nonprofit educational-research organization, says virtually anything that gets a college's name in the news every day can bolster its image. "It normally ends up being good news for the campus even though the event is a horrible tragedy," says Mr. Munce, whose organization is called the National Research Center for College and University Admissions.

Debate continues inside higher education over whether Virginia Tech responded appropriately to the shootings. But regardless of mistakes the institution might have made, it did some things right. The university quickly embraced its students and alumni, as well as the relatives of the victims.

"Yes, you can be critical about how Virginia Tech handled this, but at the same time, who would have done it better?" asks Rae M. Goldsmith, vice president for communications and marketing at the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. "They did a masterful job very quickly of pulling their community together."

Joe Hice, vice president for public relations and marketing at the University of Florida, says that even in its own grief, Virginia Tech has tried to help higher education learn from the tragedy. "They wanted to share the experience so nobody else would have to go through it," he says.

When Northern Illinois University did have to go through it in February, after a former student opened fire in a lecture hall and killed five people, Virginia Tech administrators led workshops to help Northern Illinois administrators deal with the crisis.

Image Over Safety?

Some people outside higher education accuse Virginia Tech of being more concerned with protecting its image than with ensuring that its campus is safe from a repeat offense.

Mr. Davies, for instance, says the university has failed to back bills before the Virginia legislature that would restrict private gun sales and require more background checks on gun purchasers. "They are staying as far away from this issue as they can because of the image," he says.

Mr. Hincker, a university spokesman, says President Steger did not attend hearings on the gun bills because he believed parents of the victims who testified could provide the most "powerful and poignant voice."

Over all, Mr. Hincker says, Virginia Tech officials have tried to be sensitive to relatives of the victims, and have devoted themselves to fixing problems that the tragedy pointed out. "The university," he says, "has tried really, really hard to do the right thing."

Vincent J. Bove, a security expert who represents families of some of the victims, says his clients have mixed feelings. "These families love Virginia Tech, and they want it to succeed and be resilient and to thrive," he says.

Yet they also want accountability. Ultimately, while Hokie spirit may have strengthened Virginia Tech's brand and helped pull the campus through a terrible tragedy, it can't take away the pain of parents who are still grieving.