The Traumatized Campus

As a structural engineer, Ann E. Jeffers thinks a lot about building design.

In the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor’s College of Engineering, where Jeffers is an associate professor, many of the buildings are linked. In winter, you can float between departments without bringing a coat.

She knows this complex by heart — its hidden stairwells and indoor passageways, the colors of the walls before they were repainted, the one area that has the funky floor tiles.

For years, Jeffers’s mind also twisted the complex into a constant threat of violence. While teaching, she would imagine a gunman entering her classroom. When she walked down the hallway, she heard gunshots, saw people fleeing.

Those hallucinations and a bout of mood swings led Jeffers to seek mental-health treatment. In late 2013, she got a diagnosis: bipolar disorder with psychosis and post-traumatic stress disorder.

In retrospect, she recognized that she’d displayed signs of bipolar disorder her whole life. But the psychosis and PTSD were related to her time in graduate school at Virginia Tech, where a shooter in 2007 murdered 32 people.

Getting to OK took not only the right mix of medications and counseling — it also required Jeffers, 41, to learn how to succeed in an environment that her mind had closely associated with trauma: the college campus.

She’s not alone in this. As shootings continue to devastate campuses, including nearby Michigan State, survivors are faced with the challenge of returning to spaces that remind them of tragedy. Some students have put pressure on administrators to delay reopening buildings where violence occurred, or to tear them down altogether.

That’s not financially or logistically possible for most colleges. Moreover, it doesn’t square with the impulse to move forward — the heart of the disagreements between colleges and their students.

In the aftermath of a shooting, campuses might add security measures and tweak protocols. But there’s no blueprint for how to deal with a building marred by violence, or how to navigate the trauma. Jeffers’s story illustrates a painful reality: Such tragedies have a long tail, and healing is messy.

Today, Virginia Tech’s Norris Hall blends into the university’s ashen landscape, its façade covered in the same dolomite rock, “Hokie Stone,” that dominates campus. Years ago, it was renovated. Classrooms were replaced with gathering spaces, offices, and labs.

You would never know just from looking at it that Norris played host to a horrible tragedy. Unless the tragedy was the only thing you saw.

As a graduate student, Jeffers had taken classes and taught in Norris. The building faced Patton Hall, home of her department, civil and environmental engineering.

For the most part, Jeffers only came to campus on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when she had class. April 16, 2007, was a Monday.

At home that morning, Jeffers watched the news. An undergraduate student had shot and killed 32 students and faculty members, then taken his own life. Most of the victims had been killed in Norris.

While Jeffers did not personally know any of the victims, her department lost several students and a professor. Nancy G. Love was a faculty member in the department back then. “I went to 10 funerals in eight days in three states,” Love says. “It was traumatic.”

Jeffers attended each of the campus memorial services. She coordinated a dinner to bring friends together.

But privately, Jeffers was flooded with survivor’s guilt. She became afraid of classrooms and crowds, searching obsessively for exits and planning escape routes. She experienced recurring nightmares, including of a white classroom stained with blood. She didn’t feel entitled to her distress, so she buried it.

“For me to say, ‘Oh, woe is me, I have PTSD,’ and I was sitting at home in my living room watching it on TV — it was awful,” she says.

Other local tragedies weighed on her. In 2006, a prisoner escaped from a hospital and killed a security guard and a police officer near campus. In 2009, a graduate student was decapitated by another student in a campus coffee shop. Those murders horrified her, tugging at the part of her that anticipated a violent, public death.

“It was this cascading of trauma that had a cumulative effect on my well-being,” she says.

In 2009, Jeffers graduated with her doctorate, and Love, who had become chair of Michigan’s civil and environmental engineering department, recruited her to Ann Arbor. Fear of another massacre hung in her classroom like a fog. She developed a habit of counting windows, grasping for the security of knowing she could escape.

One day in January 2014, Jeffers was teaching a class. From an elevated platform opposite a brick wall, in room 2315 of Michigan’s G.G. Brown Building, she lectured to 16 graduate students. The topic: nonlinear analysis of structures.

Then a stranger entered the room and sat down. Something seemed off about him. Jeffers panicked. The room had no windows.

“Something like that is usually pretty benign on a college campus,” Jeffers says. “But I immediately thought, ‘Oh, my goodness, he’s got a gun and this is the end of it.’”

She ended class early and ran to her car, where she had a panic attack. Later, she had a nightmare about a classroom shooter.

At her next counseling session, Jeffers’s therapist asked if she could lock the doors from inside her classroom. No; she’d already checked. The absence of locks had enabled the Virginia Tech gunman to enter classrooms, an investigation in the aftermath had found.

Jeffers’s mind was blowing the risk out of proportion. But since Virginia Tech, there had been a growing number of school and campus shootings: Northern Illinois University in 2008, the University of Alabama at Huntsville in 2010, Oikos University in 2012, Santa Monica College in 2013. The threat was real.

When the stranger entered her class, Jeffers had just started mental-health treatment.

Her friends and colleagues say it was not obvious that she was struggling. She worked hard to maintain the appearance that everything was under control. The end of her tenure clock loomed.

Her bipolar disorder yielded moments of incredible productivity. She wrote an entire journal article during one week of mania, and somehow also made time to paint her bedroom, rearrange her furniture, and teach her classes. At other points, she had debilitating hallucinations, causing her to see an intruder in her house or hear a woman whisper “murder” in her ear.

During periods of depression, Jeffers would sleep a lot and often cancel meetings with her students.

She was unable to carry her weight at home, creating tension with her wife, Susan Estep, whom she at times felt didn’t understand her mental illness. “I had my own misconceptions of what medication meant,” Estep says.

In the darkest periods of her mental-health crisis, Jeffers thought about dying by suicide. At a conference in Shanghai, she imagined jumping off a restaurant terrace. Later, at home in Michigan, she planned to overdose while Estep and their daughter went on a trip. Her last-minute decision to join them might have saved her life. “When things were really bad,” Jeffers says, “it felt like my brain had been programmed to kill me.”

The threats, both imagined and real, kept coming. In April 2014, shortly after the incident with the stranger in her classroom, a stabbing at a high school near where Jeffers grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania sent her reeling.

“It was just one more reminder that none of us is safe, that these things can and do strike close to home, eventually,” she writes in her memoir, Can You Hear the Music? My Journey Through Madness. “Most people are capable of handling such devastating news without missing a beat. I know this because I was the same prior to 2007. After the Virginia Tech shooting though, I became hypersensitive to violence and could not bounce back as quickly.”

Jeffers moved her class to the computer lab for the rest of the semester. She never saw the man again.

Frank and Jackie Jeffers say their daughter first showed symptoms of depression in high school. Jackie made Ann go to a therapist, but the appointment didn’t go well, and she refused to return. Jackie thinks stigma led Ann to keep her mental-health struggles to herself.

“My father had what would be PTSD — they called it battle fatigue — from World War II,” Jackie says. “So I grew up with that, and in our household, we just didn’t talk about it.”

A few weeks after the Virginia Tech shooting, Frank and Jackie went down to visit.

“She cried, we cried, and we thought she was doing OK with it,” Jackie says. “Until I read her book, I didn’t realize how traumatized she was from the shooting.”

For years, Jeffers worked hard to hide her pain, to avoid confronting it head-on. In November 2014, that changed.

Jeffers went back to Norris Hall — not literally, but in a way that might have been just as excruciating.

Her therapist had given her an assignment: research the three Virginia Tech tragedies. The task was a form of exposure therapy, a treatment for trauma that works from the premise that confronting a source of pain diminishes its power.

At home one afternoon, Jeffers sat down with her laptop to review emails from the day of the mass shooting.

She teared up as she read the campus alerts, the timestamps reminding her of how information came “too little and too late.” Later emails contained details about memorial services. She cried harder as she remembered the head of her department breaking down at a service.

She researched the lives of the people who had died in the shooting: a professor who had held a door closed to allow students to escape through a classroom window; an undergraduate student who had enrolled in a challenging graduate course only to die during a lecture.

“Their faces had been etched in my mind — people I had never even met yet they were so familiar to me,” she writes in the memoir.

She looked up photos of the renovated Norris Hall. Jeffers doubted anyone would want to go in there.

She sat with those feelings for a while, crying and shaking on her living-room floor. Then she regrouped to take notes.

After a few rough nights of sleep, she met with her therapist to work through the materials she had unearthed. The hour-long session was painful, but over the next month, Jeffers’s nightmares subsided.

And as she entered her classroom again, she was struck with a sensation she had not felt in a very long time: the conviction that a violent attack was not imminent. By sitting with the pain of that April day, instead of avoiding it, Jeffers had opened herself up to the possibility that the classroom could be a safe place.

Many students at Michigan State haven’t gotten there yet.

In January, the university resumed teaching in Berkey Hall, the building where two students were killed a year ago. (A third student was killed in the student union.) While administrative and staff offices reopened in the fall, no classes had been held in Berkey.

The decision to reopen Berkey for classes was controversial. Some students said it was too soon to focus on learning in a place where so much trauma had occurred. The wing where the shooting happened remains closed. The room where violence broke out is sealed; it will be converted into spaces for reflection.

On the first day of this semester, a few dozen students protested for several hours outside the administration building. Gallons of hot chocolate chilled to chocolate milk as students pressed for more counseling resources and hybrid course options. They shared their stories of hiding on campus, terrified, as they waited for the all-clear. They expressed frustration at Michigan State’s leaders for failing to protect them then — and failing to listen to them now.

Cassidy Howard, a student and an organizer with Michigan State’s chapter of March for Our Lives, an anti-gun violence group, knows it would be costly for the university to let Berkey Hall sit unused.

“But I also believe that you have to consider it from not just a business aspect, but from a human aspect,” she says. “You have enough money that this one building will not hurt you.”

On the other hand, many students felt that it was important to “reclaim the space” as soon as possible, says Thomas Jeitschko, Michigan State’s provost.

“There were a lot of people who literally called it their home, who said it’s so important for them to not have this person take that away from everyone,” Jeitschko says.

The week after the shooting, university leaders decided to resume classes in person. Some students argued they should have virtual options. But administrators said they’d talked with mental-health experts and officials at other colleges, and decided that getting students back in their routines was best for their well-being.

This spring, Jeitschko says, 250 classes are being offered in Berkey. About 4,000 students — roughly 8 percent of the student body — are enrolled in them. To accommodate students who aren’t ready to spend time in the building, classes that were offered only in Berkey this spring will be offered outside of Berkey this fall.

After a tragedy, how long should a university linger in limbo? When is it time to move on?

The dilemma sits at the intersection of two major trends in American higher education.

The first is the targeting of colleges in mass shootings. The second is the more expansive understanding of trauma that many academics and students have adopted — recognizing that someone does not have to witness a traumatic event to be affected by it.

The University of Nevada at Las Vegas is the latest institution to have to wrestle with this debate. In December, a gunman shot and killed three professors in Beam Hall, home of the university’s business school.

No classes have been held there since. In January, President Keith E. Whitfield announced that Beam would remain closed to the public for the spring semester. Employees who work in the building, his statement said, have suffered “intense emotional trauma” from the shooting, and so have students.

The chair of the UNLV Faculty Senate, Bill Robinson, told The Nevada Independent that the university will have to reconfigure the layout of Beam Hall in order for people to feel comfortable there in the long term.

In March, Whitfield announced that Beam would reopen for classes in the fall, with several security improvements. “These are difficult choices,” his statement said.

Some choices are easier to make. In December, the University of Idaho at Moscow razed an off-campus house where four students had been stabbed to death in 2022. The owner had donated the house to the university.

A few family members of the victims opposed the demolition, saying the house had emotional and evidentiary value. But university officials argued that tearing down the house, which was visible from campus, would be a step forward in healing the community.

With the decision concerning Berkey Hall, Jeitschko acknowledged that healing varies from person to person.

“This is a particular instance where it becomes clear that there is no one right answer for everyone,” Jeitschko said. “That really means that you have to find paths forward that help the most, that have the greatest impact in terms of healing. That might not be perfect for anyone.”

Virginia Tech’s answer, 17 years later, has been a mix of preservation and starting over.

Norris Hall still houses the engineering science and mechanics department that lost several of its members in the 2007 shooting. But now it is also home to the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention.

James Hawdon, the center’s director and a professor of sociology, says that after the massacre, some people felt strongly that Norris Hall should be demolished. But others felt a renovation made more sense, seeing it as a way of pushing back against the gunman.

In fact, the idea for the Center for Peace Studies came from the daughter of one of the professors who died in Norris Hall, Jocelyne Couture-Nowak.

“The idea was to transform the space from a place where such horrific harm had been done, horrific acts of violence, into something that was more pro-social,” Hawdon says.

The center opened in 2009 on the second floor of Norris Hall, with Couture-Nowak’s widower, Jerzy Nowak, at the helm. He retired in 2011 and Hawdon took the reins.

“It is a very attractive space, unlike most academic buildings that are cinder block and tile floor,” Hawdon says. The renovated Norris Hall has “plaster walls and beautiful glass pieces and nice hardwood floors. It’s actually a very welcoming space. That, of course, was by design.”

When survivors and relatives of the deceased have visited the space, Hawdon says they have told him it was “cathartic” to see the second floor transformed into something hopeful. But he acknowledges this is a self-selecting group of people. Some aren’t there yet. Some may never be.

Love, the Michigan professor who knew Jeffers at Virginia Tech, says that the aftermath of the shooting made clear to her how people “move through trauma at different rates.”

Physical acknowledgments of the tragedy — like memorials or signs on doors telling media to stay away — were one point of contention that elucidated this reality.

“There were people who needed to not see memorials and move on,” Love says. “And there were people who couldn’t let go of those memorials. And how you navigate that is very difficult, but it requires acknowledging that those differences exist.”

Security improvements also became physical reminders of the tragedy, of lapses in the safety net that were exploited.

The gunman had chain-locked the handles on some exterior double doors. So, the university removed a handle from each pair. Love says this change was a constant reminder of the attack.

(A Virginia Tech spokesman said there are few single-handled double doors remaining on campus, because of construction and Americans With Disabilities Act requirements.)

Virginia Tech remains possibly the best example higher education has of what things look like years after a campus shooting.

The university can’t keep the dangers of the world from penetrating every building. People have learned to live with that.

Jeffers says she has a lot of sympathy for students at Michigan State, because she knows how it feels when trauma is attached to a space. She remembers her apprehension when she first heard that Virginia Tech was going to reopen Norris Hall with a peace-studies center.

She has found what moving forward means to her. It means getting through class without feeling paranoid about a shooter. It means being able to talk about what she went through.

“Ten years ago, if you had just mentioned the Virginia Tech shooting, I would have been in tears,” Jeffers says. “I’m in a much better space now. And that’s just a testament to treatment being helpful.”

It took a while after Jeffers felt safe in her classroom for her to get the bipolar disorder and the psychosis under control. In 2015, she earned tenure. Today, Jeffers and her wife have three kids together.

In her office, Jeffers has pasted up to-do lists created by her therapist. She used to not be able to finish them.

The classroom where the stranger had unnerved Jeffers has since been renovated and renumbered. It now has an interior lock on its door. Before we toured the campus together, she hadn’t even noticed.

A different classroom she recently taught in had an all-glass exterior. She admits it made her nervous — she doubted the glass was bulletproof and knew that if someone came in with a gun, she and her students wouldn’t be able to hide.

But she kept teaching. Kept breathing.

If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide, you can call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988 or text “HOME” to the Crisis Text Line at 741741. Both services are free, confidential, and available 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.