Virginia Tech students and faculty, with the first anniversary of the massacre nearly behind them, on Wednesday began to face the question of how to honor their slain friends and colleagues in coming years.
What is likely in coming anniversaries, they said, is a largely student-driven process that could change as years come and go and as the shootings — in which 32 students and faculty were killed by a mentally ill student gunman — fall further into the past. School officials have had only informal discussions about future memorials.
“I think the trajectory that we’re talking about in terms of remembrance, will be informed not only by our culture, our traditions and our aspirations, but I would also say by the aspirations of the students who will join us in the future,” Ishwar Puri, a professor and Engineering Science & Mechanics department head, said Wednesday.
“It needs to be student-driven,” said junior Michael O’Brien, an industrial and systems engineering major.
“The students need to look at it every year and how they want to handle it in years to come, really year by year figure out what they want to do and how they want to go about remembering the students that we lost,” he said.
Some looked to the aftermath of other mass student killings for guidance on what to do and what not to do. Kent State, for example, still holds a yearly commemoration for the four students killed by the Ohio National Guard in 1970.
What will never happen, said psychology professor Scott Geller, is anything like what followed Mexico’s Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, in which police and military killed hundreds of student demonstrators.
“They don’t talk about it, there is no discussion, there is no remembering, in a sense those people just died in vain and nobody knows,” he said. “I’m proud of the fact that we will never let that happen here, that we will open up the conversation, we will talk, we will grow, we will grieve, we will heal.”
