Posts filed under 'Collin Quick'
February 27th, 2008
An open letter to Gov. Rod Blagojevich
Dear Rod,
It’s great that you’re showing so much interest in the future of Cole Hall. While NIU had planned to leave the building alone for a couple months, let the stigma of the Feb. 14 events settle and then possibly reopen it in the fall for classes, you just came in and offered a - in your mind - better solution before the halls could even get cold.
You threw $40 million at NIU president John Peters and said, “Tear down that sucker and build a new one.”
Um, thanks? That’s exactly what we need? That’ll make us forget about the six lives lost and the 17 others that were wounded?
No, not at all. We all know the word “Columbine” is no longer synonymous with a flower, but instead a high school in Littleton, CO., where two teens killed 13 people. VA Tech is no longer a small college in Blacksburg, VA. It’s now a place where a gunman killed 32 people before taking his own life.
And sadly, we have to add Northern Illinois University to that list.
A college town that sits along I-88, whose city symbol is a piece of corn and whose claim to fame is - depending on who you talk to - the birth or barbed wire and Cindy Crawford’s hometown.
So Rod, you think that giving the school money to raze Cole Hall and build a new high-tech building called - get this - Memorial Hall will make you liked in the community?
Maybe the school doesn’t want a new hall. Maybe leaving Cole to stand the test of time is the best thing to keep the faith and hope alive for the 25,000 students who attend classes. Maybe you should focus all your time and energy on all these labels people are calling you these days and that big trial in Chicago.
Or maybe, maybe you should just butt out for a bit.
Knocking down a building won’t hide the fact the shootings never happened. If that’s your prerogative, tell that to Lauren Debrauwere who was released from the hospital the other day with a bullet in her chest. A bullet that is within centimeters from her heart. Go ahead, tell her.
Just because you think something is right doesn’t make it right. Ever thought of talking to the students at NIU? Maybe the professors? Maybe more than just the people who sit behind big oak desks in Altgeld Hall all day long? Those are the people who really care about NIU’s future.
It’s funny, you know. About five years ago, the school was begging you for money to improve our buildings. We couldn’t walk down hallways without kicking up floor tiles or dodging falling ceiling tiles. Leaks were as common as assigned readings. So we sat there, in our classrooms that fell apart by the day, wondering if and when we would ever get a couple bucks for some insulation so we could make it through those harsh Illinois winters.
Hey Rod, we were in such a budget crunch that paper had to be rationed. Certain professors could not call their students from their office phones. Some of us wouldn’t get in elevators because we didn’t know how safe they were.
And here you are, throwing money in the face of a national tragedy. Throwing money at friends and families who lost loved one, boyfriends, girlfriends or just someone they sat next to in class.
You’ve hit a new low, Rod.
If I could take back that vote I cast for you, I’d do it in a heartbeat.
Signed,
Collin Quick, Class of 2006
February 18th, 2008
I didn’t sleep well at all this weekend. While I may have been 60 some miles from NIU and Cole Hall, I was up to my elbows in everything NIU related.
Since Thursday, we turned our newsroom into a 24/7 coverage post. We sent reporters, photographers and videographers out to DeKalb to cover every inch of the town and campus.
We even put them up in the Super 8 motel on Lincoln Highway, several hundred feet from the Travelodge where the shooter spent his last days alive.
I’ve talked to several friends since the shooting; all are well physically, but emotionally, they are drained. Phone calls are filled with long pauses, one-word answers and the occasional breakdown.
When we first heard about the shootings, I grabbed my cell phone and started calling anyone I knew who was still enrolled. I did this for two reasons: 1) to make sure the people I knew and cared about were OK, and 2) to see if anyone would talk to someone in the newsroom.
I figured when I left the newsroom, the NIU talk would cease. Though it’s kind of hard for that to happen when my roommate is a fellow NIU grad. Couple with the fact that my Saturday night game night started out with theories about the gunman, there was no escape from anything NIU this weekend.
This next week will be a trying time for students, families and friends. Sunday will bring a packed house the Convocation Center for a memorial before classes start up on Feb. 25.
For the rest of the spring semester, I don’t know if the word “normal” will be in the vocabulary of anyone at NIU.
February 15th, 2008
I graduated from NIU in December 2006. I’ve had a good amount of people here ask me if I’m OK, how am I doing, etc. It’s weird because I haven’t been in DeKalb since August. While I still have friends there, there isn’t much bringing me back to the ‘ole campus.
And now I feel like if I go back - when I go back - that it’s going to be out of pity or grief. I’ve watched friend after friend on their Facebook or MySpace page change from a photo of themselves to a black and red ribbon with an NIU Huskie on it. I’ve talked to people and they are basically numb. No emotions, no reactions. Just a sense of “wow, it happened here.” You can hear it in their voices.
I think the headline on our 1A today said it all.
No. Not here.
February 15th, 2008
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.
February 15th, 2008
In the everyday hustle and bustle of a college campus, Cole Hall easily got lost as a building at Northern Illinois University.
It was the type of building that you walked past, ever going in unless you had a lecture in one of the two large auditoriums or needed to do something in the computer lab in the basement of the building.
During my three years at NIU, I had three classes in Cole.
One was a math class that met in one of the auditoriums two days a week; the second, a photojournalism class that met once a week in the basement; and a third, an English class that met in the viewing room behind the auditorium.
The more I think about it, I’m pretty sure I know how the gunman got on the stage. It was the back staircase.
Cole Hall is an old building. It smelled like an old building, it was concrete everything and it was built around the same time as other surrounding buildings – Reavis Hall, DuSable Hall, Zulof Hall.
Even if I didn’t have a class in the building, I cut through it all the time on my way to class. It was easier to walking through a sea of bodies waiting to enter the auditoriums than going around the buildings on the broken-down dirt paths.
In the cold winter months, my friends and I would use as many “warm cuts” as possible – a way to cut through as many buildings on your way to class. Cole was perfect for that.
I can only imagine students running for those doors to get out of class. Cole is set up that you enter and exit from the same location. When you came in, you walked down a gradual slope and found where you wanted to sit. To leave, you got up, turned around and walked out the same way you came in.
I always sat in the back of the class, towards the doors, for my math course (that’s probably why I did so bad in retrospect) so that I wouldn’t have to wait and trudge up incline to get out of class at the end.
Sitting under the auditorium for my photojournalism class, you could hear collapsible desk arms falling to the side of seats and people walking above and the big, black metal doors slamming shut.
To sit under those sounds on Feb. 14, coupled with the gunfire and screaming … that’s a sound I never want to imagine.
