After a harrowing mass shooting this week at Michigan State University that left three students dead and five others severely injured, some students are pushing for a temporary remote-learning option to accommodate those who don’t yet feel safe going to classrooms.
Michigan State suspended all classes and campus activities immediately after the shooting. University leaders said on Thursday that they planned to resume in-person classes on Monday. But more than 15,000 people have signed a Change.org petition calling on the university, in East Lansing, to offer hybrid and online options for “students and parents who are uncomfortable with returning to campus with such haste.”
A Thursday editorial in The State News, the campus newspaper, declared: “We’re not going to class Monday.”
As the violence unfolded in two campus buildings last Monday night, students, faculty, and staff were locked down in classrooms, dorm rooms, and other facilities. They relied on social media and text alerts for updates.
Mikayla Stokes, a junior political-science major who signed the petition, told The Chronicle that while some of her peers wanted to “reclaim” the campus that is home to them, others felt it was too soon to try to resume normal activities.
“Right now, the students, faculty, and staff at MSU need to be offered flexibility and grace to heal and grieve as they individually see fit,” Stokes wrote in an email. “To not offer options to accommodate the needs for each Spartan’s personal healing process would be cruel. No individual needs should be dictated right now.”
A similar scenario played out last fall at the University of Idaho: In November, students left the campus in droves after four of their peers were stabbed to death in an off-campus residence and no suspect was immediately named. The university offered a remote-learning option to students for the rest of the semester, which was nearly over. In late December, a Ph.D. student at nearby Washington State University was arrested and charged in the students’ murders.
Michigan State’s Berkey Hall, an academic building where the shootings began, will be closed for the rest of the semester, university officials said during a news conference on Thursday. The administration is still deciding what to do about the MSU Union, where the shootings continued.
The interim president, Teresa K. Woodruff, said there were “ongoing discussions” about whether to offer an online option for students.
“We’re considering all options for the manner with which we continue the continuity of education, research, and outreach on this campus,” Woodruff said.
Daniel Olsen, a Michigan State spokesperson, said university leaders were talking about what a return to the classroom on Monday might look like.
We need time to process this. My safe place, my friends’ safe place, my classmates’ safe place, has become a crime scene.
Some signers of the online petition left comments that identified themselves as Michigan State students. Those commenters said they would feel too anxious in physical classrooms to be able to learn. Many said they needed more time and space to recover from the trauma they had experienced on Monday.
“We need time to process this,” one wrote. “My safe place, my friends’ safe place, my classmates’ safe place, has become a crime scene. This can’t be healed in a week. We don’t feel safe.”
Several described feeling scared whenever they left their residences.
“Even just returning to my off-campus jobs feels strange and foreign,” one wrote. “Any sense of security for students like I and my friends [sic] has been completely shattered, and even just leaving my apartment to toss out trash makes me anxious and uneasy.”
Helping Both Students and Professors
Teaching experts told The Chronicle that the decision to conduct classes remotely or in a hybrid format should come from the top — so that faculty members, experiencing their own trauma from the shootings, would not have to make decisions that could be unpopular with students.
“It can be very difficult, depending on the systemic structures or the policies of the university, to make the call on your own as a faculty member,” said Joshua Eyler, director of the University of Mississippi’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. “At many universities, you need to get clearance to move even a single class to remote.”
Eyler said that if Michigan State decided to offer an online-learning option, it would need to provide faculty members with resources to support the transition to that option. This could include linking faculty members with teaching assistants to help develop online tools for students.
Andrea Aebersold, incoming executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Montana State University at Billings, said it was important to remember that traumatized students will not absorb information well in any modality. But feeling safe could help them learn more.
“If you can do the best that you can as a faculty member to make a space where learning can still happen at some capacity, that is still something,” Aebersold said.
While tragedies on campus have always existed, Eyler said, the Covid-19 pandemic showed colleges and their students that it was possible to move online quickly.
“This is a tragedy compounded upon three years of trauma, so it’s only natural to respond by asking for flexibility from their institutions,” Eyler said. “I hope that Michigan State is able to provide the structures so that that need can be met.”
