A University Touched by Tragedy Ponders How to Recover

On Wednesday morning two men walked back and forth over the seal on the floor of the student union at the University of Central Florida. They chose their steps carefully to avoid the yellow faux flowers covering the image of the university’s symbol, Pegasus.

The seal is surrounded by a rope line. According to campus legend, students who step on it will never graduate, explained one of the men, David Oglethorpe. But the two are not undergraduates. And they had a job to do.

Mr. Oglethorpe, the communications coordinator in the Office of Student Involvement, and Miguel Ortiz, a graduate assistant in the office, were collecting the candles scattered across the seal and putting them in a cardboard box. The candles are electronic, and needed to be recharged following a vigil held the night before to honor the victims of the mass shooting at a local gay nightclub that claimed 49 lives and left 53 people wounded on Sunday. The university is mourning two of its own, Juan Ramon Guerrero, a student, and Christopher Andrew Leinonen, an alumnus.

The vigil may be over, but administrators and students alike said that UCF, like other colleges in the area, is just beginning to work through the aftermath of an attack that hit very close to home. Burned-out candles are one small example of the many things the university’s leaders must tend to as they begin to put the campus back together.

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The administration had a crisis plan in place, and it shows. Still, staff members have been clocking long hours, keeping their own emotions in check as they support students who are reeling from a tragedy.

Maribeth Ehasz got up early on Sunday, planning to go to church. Instead, she fielded text messages about the shooting from her staff. “It started with just: ‘Did you see this, did you hear this?’” said Ms. Ehasz, who is vice president for student development and enrollment services. “And then it was this awareness that there were so many, and how devastating it was, and that our community is going to be affected.”

Administrators scrambled to determine whether the university had lost students in the attack. And they worried about how the shooting would affect several student communities. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning/queer students, because the shooting took place at Pulse, a gay club. Latino students, as the attack came on the bar’s Latinx (a designation including all genders) night. Muslim students, who might face a backlash since the shooter was identified as a Muslim. Those communities, of course, can also overlap.

Ms. Ehasz and other campus leaders, including the president, met on the campus at 11 on Sunday morning to coordinate the university’s response. Members of the counseling staff were on the campus by noon. A representative from the blood drive — already planned, but expanded after the attack — came by.

Being prepared comes with the territory for a campus situated in the path of hurricanes, Ms. Ehasz said. But that wasn’t the only factor in UCF’s level of readiness: The university has experienced a violent, man-made emergency before. After a student shot himself to death in his dormitory room in 2013, the authorities uncovered his stockpile of weapons and plan to kill the building’s residents in what has been termed the “Tower 1 Incident,” after the name of the residence hall.

The university regards its response to Tower 1 as largely successful, but “as prepared as we were, we used that incident to get better,” Ms. Ehasz said. “And one of the things our counseling staff learned is that they could do counseling and support anywhere. They didn’t have to have the most private of places.”

“I wouldn’t wish that on any institution,” Ms. Ehasz said, “but it is something that every institution has to be ready for.”

‘The Ministry of Presence’

The counseling staff doesn’t just have a crisis plan, it practices it, said Teresa Michaelson-Chmelir, the outreach director. Throughout the week, counselors were out and about on the campus, looking to meet students where they already were. They took turns sitting in the student union and Pride Commons, described on its Facebook page as “a safe and inclusive hangout for all UCF students who identify as LGBTQ+ or Allies,” for an hour each day. Those on duty carried emergency kits: backpacks containing information packets, counseling appointment cards, stress balls, and tissues.

No students walked in during the hour Ms. Michaelson-Chmelir and two colleagues spent in the student union on Wednesday. Still, she said, it was important for them to be there. “There’s something about the ministry of presence,” she said. It may be too soon for students to process what has happened, she said, but just knowing there’s someone ready to talk if they need to can be a comfort.

Pride Commons is usually closed during this part of the summer, but the university opened it up to give students another place to gather after the shooting. And the counselors aren’t the only ones who’ve been there to show their support for the LGBTQ community. The very first person to stop by on Monday, several students said, was Maha Qureshi, president of the Muslim Student Association.

It is Ramadan, and Ms. Qureshi slept in on Sunday because she was fasting. She was also avoiding social media, and first learned of the shooting in a text from the university’s office of diversity and inclusion. “I didn’t know what to do,” she said, “but I knew I had to do something.”

So she went to Pride Commons, where students were surprised to see her at first. She helped with their vigil, and spoke at the event about what the Muslim and LGBTQ communities have in common: the struggle to be authentic when others judge your identity.

The university estimates that 1,000 people attended the vigil, and it was also streamed on Facebook. The student union is circular, with rings of balconies overlooking the ground floor. The night of the event, it was filled to the fourth floor, a storage space that rarely sees any traffic, Ms. Ehasz said.

Later Wednesday afternoon, two sets of visitors dropped in on Pride Commons during the hour the counselors were there. A small group of women with Cru, the evangelical student organization formerly called Campus Crusade for Christ, came by to offer “love and support, chocolate and water,” as one of them put it. They stuck around for a while, playing with Play-Doh that was left on a table and with the stress balls from the counseling kit, and making small talk.

A little bit later, two more women arrived with handmade cards. They weren’t from a student organization, but simply wanted to show their support. “Love is the answer,” one card read. Another said “stay strong” and had a drawing of mountains.

Justin Andrade, the university’s coordinator of LGBTQ+ services, said supporting students at a time like this requires a difficult balance. “How do we separate being a practitioner with also feeling with them?” he asked. “Through the tragedy that just happened, there’s two opportunities. There’s one for them to see you draw the strength, to model the way on how to maybe deal, or how to effectively process through it,” Mr. Andrade said. “And then the other piece of that is also breaking down with them, having that human side, hugging them.”

Finding that balance may be even harder for someone who, like Mr. Andrade, both works with and belongs to the affected community. Mr. Andrade identifies as “a gay, cisgender man” and a Latino. He knew the two UCF victims, has been to Pulse, and lives just a few blocks away from the club. So it’s not a tragedy he can leave at work. “When I shut off at 5 p.m.,” he said, “I’m still a gay man.”

Personal Connections

Throughout Wednesday afternoon, students gathered at Pride Commons, which has colorful couches and a refrigerator. Students described spending their Sunday morning checking in on friends. Figuring out who in a large circle of acquaintances may have been at a particular bar on a summer Saturday night is daunting to begin with. But there was an additional challenge: Friends who identify as LGBTQ, but who might not yet do so publicly, wouldn’t have a good way to signal to everyone worrying that they were all right, said Rebecca Hunter, a history major planning to graduate this summer.

To Ms. Hunter, the attack was shocking only in its scale. “None of the violence is ever surprising to me. Never will be,” she said. “The difference with this time is just it happened to its worst extreme.”

Ms. Hunter added that it’s important to recognize that “this is a club that primarily had a lot of nonwhite and Latinx people coming to it,” who often are subjected to violence in the queer community. “Often that violence is ignored,” she said.

For the students, this attack is deeply personal, said Michael Nunes, a recent UCF graduate who is about to start a master’s program there. “We see it everywhere,” he said, “and one of the thoughts when we see violence toward the queer community is: Oh my God, that could have been me.” But that was especially true this time, he said. “We’ve all been to Pulse, we’ve all been around the Orlando area. These are our safe places, these are our homes. And now we just don’t feel safe in our home anymore.”

The feeling of freedom LGBTQ students experience at a place like Pulse is something straight people can’t really understand, Mr. Nunes said, because “they don’t have to be worried about walking down the street. They don’t have to be worried about holding their partner’s hand.”

“That was the point of this vigil,” Mr. Nunes said, “to rebuild that sense of community that we lost.”

But rebuilding takes time. The small group of students gathered in Pride Commons described complicated emotions mingled with their grief. Fear for their physical safety. A strong sense of community with one another. Anger that so much of the public discussion of the attack played down the gunman’s targeting the LGBTQ community, and that most of the victims were part of that community. Concern that the support they’re receiving now will soon run out.

Ms. Ehasz, the vice president, expects the need for support on the campus to continue after such an event. “Because there’s aftermath,” she said. “It’s like surgery — you want to get through the surgery in the best way possible,” she said. “But it’s recovery that makes all the difference to what your life is going to be like.” And UCF is not in recovery mode yet, she added. “Getting one foot in front of another, that’s where we are right now.”

Many of the students praised the university’s actions, citing the presence of counselors, the help of administrators, and the public statement made by the president, John C. Hitt. His message included the line: “I tell our LGBTQ students, faculty, staff, and alumni this: You are not alone. Your university stands with you.”

But much of the response beyond the campus strikes Austin Price, a senior majoring in modern languages, as “hollow,” he said, “when many people won’t even acknowledge the root causes of what made this possible.”

“UCF as a campus has come together,” Mr. Price said, “and I’m very proud of that. But UCF isn’t everywhere.”

Beckie Supiano writes about college affordability, the job market for new graduates, and professional schools, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.