Entries for April 20, 2007

While most students at Virginia Tech have until Monday to decide whether they are able to resume their normal college activities, members of several Tech sports teams will have to make decisions on Saturday and Sunday. The Hokies softball team is scheduled to play games against the University of Maryland, the Hokies women's lacrosse team also faces the Maryland Terps, and the Tech baseball team plays a series against Miami this weekend, the Diamondback reports.

Tech's athletic department on Tuesday announced that all games would be played, though the lacrosse game was pushed back one day to give the Hokies some time to regroup, according to the Diamondback. (Tech did cancel its Tuesday, April 17, softball game against East Tennessee State; that match will not be made up this season.) "I'm pretty torn about playing," says the Hokie lacrosse senior tri-captain, Lindsay Pieper. "On one hand, it's good to get back into the routine, but on the other hand, I think it might be too soon. I just don't know if we'll be ready mentally and physically to even step on the lacrosse field."--Kenneth Terrell

Cardinal Points, the newspaper of Plattsburgh State University College, has an interesting article examining how professors on their campus think they would have responded in the face of the violence that occurred in classrooms at Virginia Tech. "The entire situation was too horrible for [Professor Jeff Hornibrook] to think about without feeling ill. Yet it was the stories of the professors who died at the hands of a suicidal gunman, the people who were standing at the front of the classrooms like human bull's-eyes when the shooter stormed through the doors, whose faces have haunted Hornibrook the most," the paper reports."I can't tell you how I would react if a shooter was outside my classroom door," Hornibrook concludes. "I hope I never find out."--K.T.

For Korean and other Asian-American students on campuses across the country, the ethnicity of the Virginia Tech shooter, who was an immigrant from South Korea, continues to be a source of anxiety. Fear of a potential backlash continues to ripple through their communities here and abroad. "A lot of international students are really worried," a Korean student tells the University of Pennsylvania newspaper. "My friends from home [in Korea] who are still in high school but have gotten into college in America are worried about hate crimes."

At the University of Iowa, concern about the significance of the Virginia Tech killer's ethnicity was enough to cause the Korean Undergraduate Student Association to postpone its annual barbecue celebration, during which it also elects its officers for the next school year, the Daily Iowan reports."It just didn't seem to be the right time to celebrate," says the group's president. "We wanted to be as respectful as we could to the victims of this terrible tragedy."--K.T.