University of Texas experience offers hope for Virginia Tech

by Robert Powell
for Virginia Business
May 2007

A killer cut down 32 faculty and students on April 16, the deadliest day of gun violence in American history. Is that going to be the enduring legacy of Virginia Tech? Will its name become shorthand for school tragedy, along with Columbine and Kent State? Not necessarily.

The last time such a massive loss of life occurred on a college campus was in 1966 at the University of Texas in Austin. Charles Whitman, a 25-year-old former student, killed 16 people and wounded another 31 firing a rifle from the 28th floor observation deck of the university’s 307-foot tower. He was killed by police after a 90-minute shooting spree.

The massacre traumatized a nation still recovering from the assassination of President Kennedy less than three years before in Dallas. But the incident is not the first thing that comes to mind today when someone mentions the University of Texas. The event “eventually became little more than a curiosity, with prospective students asking campus guides to show them the bullet holes,” reports Jay Mathews of The Washington Post.

How did Texas escape the shadow of the gunman in the tower? First, it already had a national image, largely built on the success of its football team (the Longhorns were national champions in 1963, 1969, 1970 and 2005). Second, the university continued to build its academic reputation (it now ranks 47th in the country according to U.S. News and World Report) with the help of an $11.6 billion endowment. And lastly, the massacre was an isolated incident, not a battleground in an ongoing cultural war, as in the case of Kent State University in 1970.

Does any of this sound familiar? Virginia Tech hasn’t won a national football title, but it is among the top contenders year after year. Its overall academic reputation is growing (now 77th according to U.S. News), and its engineering program is among the nation’s elite. And the gunman’s actions in no way represent a pattern of violence at the university.

In fact, Tech’s best bet for its future may be the impression its students have made on national television. These men and women had been through hell, but they showed amazing poise in the glare of national publicity.

A hint of the future course of Tech’s reputation will be the decisions of high school seniors who had been accepted at the school. They had to decide by May 1 whether they would join those students in Blacksburg. Many probably concluded that they couldn’t be in better company.