1 20 1 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Brent Jesiek Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Thomas W. Bruce, W. Kent Fuchs, David J. Skorton, Carolyn "Biddy" Martin Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007-05-03 Description An account of the resource From: Thomas W. Bruce [mailto:vpcommunications@cornell.edu] Sent: Thu 4/19/2007 3:58 PM Subject: President Skorton, Provost Martin, and Dean Fuchs in Remembrance of the Virginia Tech Tragedy Dear Friends, This afternoon witnessed a gathering of the Cornell community in Sage Chapel to honor the memories of the victims of Monday&#39;s tragedy at Virginia Tech. I would like to share with our entire Cornell family the program and the remarks of the three speakers: Dean W. Kent Fuchs of the College of Engineering, President David J. Skorton, and Provost Carolyn "Biddy" Martin. A video of the service can be seen on the web at the Cornell University home page: <http://www.cornell.edu> Tommy Bruce Vice President for University Communications THE PROGRAM A Service of Remembrance and Reflection for Victims of Virginia Technical Institute and State University Tragedy Thursday, April 19, 2007 12:30 p.m. Sage Chapel, Cornell University Ithaca, New York Prior to the service, the chimes of McGraw Tower rang thirty-three times in memory of each victim of the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech on Monday, April 16, 2007. Prelude: Master Tallis&#39;s Testament Herbery Howells (1892 - 1982) Professor Annette Richards, University Organist Welcome and Remembrance W. Kent Fuchs The Joseph Silbert Dean of Engineering Father of Eric Fuchs, Virginia Tech, Class of 2008 Music: &#39;In Paradisum&#39; from Requiem Maurice Durufle (1902 - 1986) Cornell University Glee Club and Chorus Directed by Katherine Fitzgibbon Message David J. Skorton President, Cornell University Music: Panis Angelicus Rev. Heewon Chun Chaplain, Korean Church at Cornell University Reflection Carolyn "Biddy" Martin Provost, Cornell University A Time of Silence Postlude: Fantasia in G Minor J. S. Bach (1685 -1750) Professor Annette Richards, University Organist "We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly. We are brave enough to bend to cry, and sad enough to know we must laugh again." Nikki Giovanni Virginia Tech University Distinguished Professor, Poet and Activist REMARKS BY DEAN KENT W. FUCHS Today the Cornell family joins with the Virginia Tech family in remembering the many students and faculty that unexpectedly and violently died this week. Our grief at this loss is profound because we are a part of the same family of students, faculty, and staff. Like those at VT, Monday morning we were in class, taking exams, giving lectures, and sharing with Virginia Tech students and faculty in the hard work but great joy of learning and teaching. Many in the Cornell family have very personal connections to VT. Some of you have studied, lived, and even have grown up in Blacksburg. A number of you have degrees from Virginia Tech. Others of us have colleagues, friends, sisters, brothers, daughters, and sons now at VT. My first visit to VT four years ago was with my son, Eric. He was looking for a good engineering school, but one that wasn&#39;t too close to his parents at Cornell. On that first visit Eric and I were immensely impressed by the people of VT and the peaceful beauty of the campus. With Eric now studying Engineering at VT, I have come to greatly appreciate the VT family. The students and faculty care greatly for each other and have an immense loyalty to their university. I have also come to appreciate, through my son, what it means to have a Turkey as your school mascot, to have statues of a Turkey in town, and to call yourself a Hokie, which my son does with enormous pride. He loves the campus, his studies, and the people of that university. The unspeakable tragedy of this Monday morning in Norris Hall and West Ambler Johnston Hall is particularly difficult to comprehend, because of its scale, because of its stark contrast to the peaceful beauty of VT&#39;s campus, and the love and care demonstrated by VT&#39;s students and faculty. The tragedy is also an enormous contrast to the common mission that we share in the joy of learning and teaching. It will take many years before we will be able to see how the good resulting from this tragedy could possibly be greater than the pain of this week. Although I have not experienced the depth of loss now present at VT, I do pray that I will become a better person because of this week. I pray that I will value more greatly the enormous privilege of being at a university with students, staff, and colleagues. I pray that I will more dearly love the students, staff and faculty on this campus and will work more diligently to serve others. I will close by reading a few words from my colleague, the Virignia Tech Engineering Dean, Richard Benson. I have been in his office on the 3rd floor of Norris Hall, the floor above where most of the deaths occurred. I was at a meeting with Dean Benson Monday morning in another city when he received the urgent message about the first shootings. Here is a part of what Dean Benson wrote to his Engineering students and faculty: "My heart aches for the lives of the students lost. These bright young men and women were in the prime of life, planning for rich, fulfilling futures. They came to Virginia Tech to acquire an education; an education that would forever change their lives... "The murdered faculty members had devoted their lives to scholarship and education. They so beautifully embodied Virginia Tech&#39;s motto of Ut Prosim - that I may serve. "Virginia Tech is a noble place. It is a nobility born of our great Land Grant tradition, a nobility born of a place of learning. Young women and men - many of modest beginnings - come here to learn. We ask that they work hard - and they do "While our loss is huge and our grief unbearable, the nobility of this great community of scholars is undiminished. Those of us that survive, and those that will come after will continue to dedicate themselves to teaching and learning. And we will never forget the friends that we lost. As long as there is a Virginia Tech they will be remembered. They are more than friends. They are family." We are here as members of the Cornell family. But this week we are also members of the VT family. This week it is an honor and a privilege join with those at VT and to call ourselves Hokies. REMARKS BY PRESIDENT DAVID J. SKORTON We Are One We are one; one community, one people, one planet. We are here today to affirm that one-ness and to draw strength from each other, to find peace in each other, to care for each other and to share our love. We are one. We are here to bear witness to the passing of the 33 members of our family at Virginia Tech University who have met an untimely and terrible fate. We are here for all of those who are gone, for all 33. We are here for the 32 who have passed from the immediate to another place, not by their own choice. We are also here for the 1 who has also passed. We are one. We are here to join arms and hearts with the families, friends and colleagues of all of these individuals. We are here to join with our friends in the Korean and Korean- American communities for we are all one family, most especially today we share the same sorrow and the same need for comfort and reassurance. We are one. We are here to recognize that there are many issues to discuss, many plans to be made, many disagreements to be settled, causes to be sought, remedies to be conceived -- but not today, not now. Now, we are here to comfort and be comforted, to remember. We are one. We are here to seek meaning, to make sense out of the senseless, to somehow find a way to move forward. We are here to find courage, to find a way to still believe in tomorrow, a tomorrow without fear, a tomorrow that still has endless possibilities. We are here to affirm the importance of openness on our campuses, the openness that permits us to be together in this way, in this place, at this time. We are one. We are together today to look both backward and forward, to look both within and without, to look at the person next to us and at ourselves, to find our bearings, our place. We will stay together, we will go forward together, we will never forget our loss. We are one. REMARKS BY PROVOST CAROLYN "BIDDY" MARTIN On Monday morning I was in my native Virginia at my mother&#39;s home when word began to break of the shootings at Virginia Tech. On the local Roanoke news, there were anchors who were graduates of Virginia Tech, and we received the news from people who knew and loved the campus. One of the many things that struck me in the coverage that day was the dignity of the students who were approached for interviews--their humility, their respect, their unwillingness to offer superficial commentary, and their resistance to easy analysis and the assigning of blame. In their responses to questions, they made a plea, sometimes implicitly, other times directly. What did they ask of the journalists and, also, of us? That we not reduce their university or their experience of it to this horror, this unspeakable tragedy, that Virginia Tech not be defined only by that spectacular phrase that we have heard so often since Monday-"the biggest massacre in U.S. history." In their efforts to defend against this stain, the students kept open a space of thought and reflection. The media rushes, understandably, to cover the event, and the events become spectacle, compounding the effects of depersonalization as journalists and the public press for immediate and abbreviated responses and analyses. How extraordinary, under those circumstances, were the efforts of the students and alumni to express their love of Virginia Tech, of one another, to hold open the gap between their experience of the place and the violence and death that were coming to define it. They had been robbed of friends, of classmates, and of teachers; they had had the taken-for-granted safety of the dorm room and the classroom shattered. They have lost for now a sense of safety in the thrilling openness of university campus. They did not want, in addition, to be robbed of their experience of the place or their attachment to it; did not want their murdered friends, classmates and teachers to be remembered only for the horrifying way in which their lives were taken. Just as the names and stories of the victims began to give a human scale and texture to an otherwise surreally traumatic and depersonalizing event, so, too, the students&#39; reserve and their claims to the totality of their experience and attachment began to restore to them all that they have learned and loved at Virginia Tech. In their expressions of pride, they fight to have life and attachment prevail over the isolation, illness, and rage that appear to have been major factors in this horror. It is not difficult for Cornellians to answer the students&#39; call, to attach to Virginia Tech, out of compassion, and with a capacious understanding of what Virginia Tech is and what it represents. Like Cornell, it was founded in the 1870s as a land grant university, and it is beloved throughout the state of Virginia for its remarkable contributions for over a century and a quarter to the state, the nation, and the rest of the world. It is nestled among some of the most beautiful and gentlest mountains in the Appalachians, and even in this cold Virginia April, has already displayed wild profusions of yellow forsythia and daffodils (or jonquils, as my mother would say), pink and white dogwood, and the beginnings of that splash of color that only azaleas can produce in the turn toward Spring. It is a university with a great faculty and great students, proud, in particular, of its Agriculture and Life Sciences, its engineering, and creative writing, the liberal arts, and its outreach and extension, proud, too, of its legendary athletics teams. It is beloved, as I have said, not only by students, faculty, staff and alumni, but by the entire state of Virginia, even those who choose the University of Virginia in the great rivalry between Virginia Tech Hokies and Virginia Cavaliers that is one of Virginia&#39;s great sports. This week, everyone is a Hokie fan. Already on Monday and then on Tuesday and Wednesday, counties all over Virginia were covered with Hokie colors, Virginians having donned Virginia Tech sweatshirts and hats, some spontaneously, some at the urging of the churches that were holding vigils. At the convocation in Blacksburg on Tuesday, poet Nikki Giovanni used her poetic genius to invoke, indeed, to activate a healing sense of community and of perspective, linking the tragic deaths and injuries at Virginia Tech to other tragedies in other parts of the world, and emphasizing that none of them was deserved, also repeating, as incantation, the words: "We are Virginia Tech," the emphasis on the word "are," signaling the fact of being, of continuity, and a commitment to life and to community. "We will prevail," she said, but not by moving on, not by denying our shock or the many dimensions of grief. We will prevail, she seemed to be saying, by going straight through the effects of horror, together. Here at Cornell let us remember what unites us in our shared humanity, our shared vulnerability, our capacity, indeed, our responsibility to attach to others, especially the most isolated. Let us also risk even, and today, especially, a certain hokiness. May life and attachment prevail over isolation, social deaths, physical death, and violence, everywhere. Please join me in a moment of silence in remembrance of Monday&#39;s victims. Language A language of the resource eng Title A name given to the resource Vigil for Virginia Tech, Cornell University, April 19, 2007 - Program and Remarks cornell fuchs martin memorial skorton