Campuses struggle to 'consecrate' scenes of violence

By G. Jeffrey MacDonald

Religion News Service

Students at Northern Illinois University gather for a campus vigil after a shooting spree at an auditorium left five people dead on Feb. 14. The school is now struggling to decide how to memorialize the shooting.

Photo by Scott Walstrom

NIU photo via RNS

Officials at Northern Illinois University (NIU) have spent the past month comforting students and consoling families in the aftermath of a gunman's Feb. 14 rampage that left five dead in an auditorium.

But the hard part may be just beginning.

Now the campus community is struggling to figure out what it means to "consecrate" the site, as victims' families have requested. It's no easy task, scholars say, for this school - and others scarred by violence - to vset apart as sacred a space without a religious tradition* to inform the process.

"You don't really have any guiding principles, especially in this more recent kind of horrible massacres in places where we don't expect them," said Gary Laderman, an Emory University expert on American death rituals. "It's not clear what the proper public response is supposed to be ... if you're not just going to put a cross up."

The challenge came into sharp relief soon after NIU President John G. Peters announced plans Feb. 27 to raze Cole Hall, where the shootings occurred. Critics protested the symbolism. Some said razing would imply the shooter had done irreparable damage, or left in his wake a community eager to forget. On March 6, NIU officials said they would reconsider the demolition plan.

Erasing the site of horror would be a step with historical precedent. A non-profit group in 1992 razed the Milwaukee home of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, and the 1692 execution site for Salem's accused witches goes unmarked to this day.

But in recent years, schools touched by violence have chosen to renovate rather than raze. Virginia Tech has temporarily blocked off six classrooms in Norris Hall, where a gunman last year killed 30 and himself. An atrium was built over the site of the former library at Columbine High School in Colorado, where 15 people died during a 1999 massacre.

In opting for renovations, scholars say, schools acknowledge that these charged spaces have undergone permanent transformations and cannot return to business as usual. The challenge is to balance new, productive uses with a desire for ritual and restraint, in order to give an otherwise troubled structure a special, even holy, status.

"Sacred spaces mandate a human response to them," said Joan Branham, an art historian at Providence College and an expert on sacred space.

She recalls how a divine presence in a burning bush compelled Moses to remove his shoes, and by a similar token, Muslims remove shoes upon entering a mosque and Jewish men cover their heads in a synagogue.

For campus buildings that have been overtaken by violence, Branham says, "the question is how to continue with a secular space and infuse it with some of these elements that we see as very common to sacred spaces."

Branham says no hard-and-fast rules apply. Instead, colleges have many options as they improvise upon one tradition or another. But she notes the term "monument" derives from the Latin word "monere," which means not only "to remember" but also "to warn." And in that dual purpose, she says, today's relics of mass murder find parameters to govern their missions for the future.

At Virginia Tech, a $1 million investment will eventually convert a now-closed classroom wing into a shared home for an academic department and a new Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention. School spokesman Mark Owczarski said the new design will help redeem the space by making it a hub for community gatherings. The rest of Norris Hall, he says, will remain intact because it houses precious research facilities and is already home to a lofty mission.

"There's something sacred about a classroom and a lab, where people come together to build a better future," Owczarski said. "The hope is that there will be new purpose and new life to a space that once saw tragedy... If we were to knock it all down, then this terrible thing would have gotten the best of us."