In the wake of the shootings at Virginia Tech, we asked a number of scholars, college presidents, and writers to answer this question: If you were giving the commencement address at Virginia Tech this year, what is the core of the message you would like to leave with the graduates?

Amy Gutmann | Michael Eric Dyson |Ariel Dorfman | Lionel Shriver | Edward J.W. Park | Donna E. Shalala | Barry R. Glassner | Sissela Bok | Robert Coles | Karla Jay | Bobby Fong

April 20, 2007

Barry R. Glassner, professor of sociology and executive vice provost at the University of Southern California, and author of 'The Gospel of Food' (Ecco, 2007) and 'The Culture of Fear' (Basic, 1999)

Protect Your Perceptions: If you haven’t already done so, start a diary — not a blog but an old-fashioned diary that you write for yourself to preserve your private observations, feelings, and questions about what you have experienced these past several weeks. No one else possesses these, and they will slip away from you faster than you can imagine.

As time passes, even just a few months, and certainly within a few years, those insights, emotions, and perplexities that are so close at hand will almost certainly be redrawn, if not utterly supplanted, by whatever becomes the official set of images and interpretations from the media and politicians.

And they may be altered by the higher meaning that you yourself come to assign to the tragedy. Over time you are likely to find routes away from the overwhelming sense of anger, fear, and pain that have occupied you since the shootings. You may replace those burdens with a sense of purpose. As hard as it may be to imagine today, the tragedy will inspire many of you to grander ambitions than you knew you had.

Some of you will switch your career goals and become grief counselors or medics. Others will commit their lives to finding ways to keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have access to them. Others will devote themselves to identifying and deterring troubled young people before they get to the point of violence.

Each of these future passions is for the good, but it comes at a price. What you know and feel now may well become a faint memory, distorted through the lens of your new pursuits.

Protect those valuable perceptions while you can. Historians and other scholars in the future will need them to truly understand what happened in Blacksburg in the spring of 2007, beyond the received and settled accounts.

So will you cherish your diaries when your children and grandchildren learn that you were at Tech on that tragic day and ask what it was like.

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