Relating national to local

February 15th, 2008 at 11:35am Collin Quick

I remember reading stories about VA Tech last year and the aftermath of what school officials had to deal with.

One of the big issues was what to do with the building; more so, the classroom where the shootings on their campus took place.

It’s easy to close down a single classroom. It’s not as easy to do to an auditorium. The auditoriums in Cole Hall – there are two of them – seat about 300 to 350 students. Easily.

After having been in every building on the NIU campus, the school just can’t close down this auditorium. Students would be left without a classroom. And we’re talking a lot of students.

Those auditoriums held classes Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., plus night classes on certain nights. They were used for everything. Classes. Film screenings. Guest lectures. IHSA tournaments. Greek Row meetings. Everything. It was an easily accessible, easily locatable place on campus. I think it’s fair to say everyone, throughout their college career, had a class in one of those two auditoriums.

Cole Hall isn’t a building that the campus can just hide away and close off. It’s in the middle of campus. Literally. Three main sidewalks converge in front of Cole; thousands of students walk past it, around it, through it on any given day.

So to move these classrooms – if the administration chooses to do so – will be a difficult task. While there are other large areas on the campus – the Altgeld Hall auditorium, the Holmes Student Center ballrooms – they are not “learning areas.” The halls and ballrooms I listed are for large gatherings that see multiple uses throughout the year.

It’s the middle of February and these 25,000 students still have another 12 weeks of classes to get through. That’s 12 weeks of walking past Cole Hall. Twelve weeks of daily reminders of what happened. One horrific day and 12 somber weeks of memories before students can get away for awhile.

Entry Filed under: Collin Quick