Campuses struggle to `consecrate’ scenes of violence

c. 2008 Religion News Service (UNDATED) 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 […]

c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) 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 set 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,” says 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,” says 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 says. “The hope is that there will be new purpose and new life to a space that once saw tragedyâÂ?¦ If we were to knock it all down, then this terrible thing would have gotten the best of us.”

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In seeking appropriate new uses, custodians of tragic sites ought to expect a “contentious” process since “memorials always open as many wounds as they heal,” according to Indiana University historian Edward Linenthal. He notes that families of 9/11 victims have resented plans to build a new commercial tower at Ground Zero, which many regard as a burial ground.

But even a soothing Oklahoma City memorial, which features 168 empty chair sculptures to represent those killed in a 1995 bombing, isn’t without problems in Linenthal’s view.

“If you turn a site of violence into a memorial environment that almost by definition has to be aesthetically pleasing, are you in fact hiding the memorial’s reason for being?” Linenthal says. “Should a memorial include some sense of the hideous nature of what went on?”


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Such issues quickly become concrete problems as planners must decide, for example, whether to reference the killer who died on site.

Ultimately, scholars say, communities require years to figure out what feels right in terms of managing their charged sites. Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, remained shuttered for more than a century afterward.

In more recent cases, how a community handles the site of carnage may depend on its understanding of the incident, according to cultural geographer Kenneth Foote. Communities have a greater need for purging when a killer comes from their own ranks, he said, and that desire sometimes takes the form of a razed structure.

Whatever the circumstances, Foote says, a community beset by violent tragedy will feel compelled to utilize “religious prototypes,” such as a structure that resembles a high altar at the Columbine memorial. He says these make people feel comfortable in an otherwise charged and unsettling atmosphere.

“People will always come back to the site,” Foote says. “Even if they remove the building, the presence is still there.”

KRE/RB END MacDONALD1,000 words, with optional trims to 650 or 800

A photo of a student vigil at Northern Illinois University is available via https://religionnews.com.

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