An amphitheater at Umpqua Community College, in Oregon, has become a makeshift memorial since the October 1 shootings that left 10 people dead. Classes resumed 11 days later, but for many, teaching and learning where the gunshots rang out have been a struggle.Leah Nash for The Chronicle
On the short drive down the rural road that ends at Umpqua Community College, Danielle Haskett was headed back to her office in the student center. Just four days after the shooting here in October, memories flashed through her mind — like the woman in a wheelchair she knew who was gunned down in her writing class that morning.
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An amphitheater at Umpqua Community College, in Oregon, has become a makeshift memorial since the October 1 shootings that left 10 people dead. Classes resumed 11 days later, but for many, teaching and learning where the gunshots rang out have been a struggle.Leah Nash for The Chronicle
On the short drive down the rural road that ends at Umpqua Community College, Danielle Haskett was headed back to her office in the student center. Just four days after the shooting here in October, memories flashed through her mind — like the woman in a wheelchair she knew who was gunned down in her writing class that morning.
Ms. Haskett coordinates accessibility services at Umpqua, helping students whose physical and mental disabilities qualify them for special educational accommodations. After the shooting, more people needed her help. They flooded her office. One had been shot in the hand. Many couldn’t focus on their schoolwork. They needed extra time to complete assignments. Some were failing. Should I just drop out? one after another asked her. Some showed up just to tell their stories about where they’d been “that morning,” and to cry.
“I would go home,” Ms. Haskett recalls, “and hide in my bed.”
The college tried to pick up where it had left off just 11 days after the shooting, which left 10 people dead, including the gunman, and as many wounded, shattering the community in this modest-income lumber town. If classes didn’t start up again by then, the president feared, the entire semester would be lost.
But while most people did return, they have struggled mightily to finish the term. For two months, they’ve had to teach and learn and work where many heard gunshots and hid, or ran for their lives. They have been grieving for the classmates and colleague they lost.
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Danielle Haskett, the college’s accessibility-services coordinator, coped with a flood of visits to her office after the shootings — students who were injured, or needed extra time on assignments, or just needed to talk. “I would go home,” she recalls, “and hide in my bed.”Leah Nash for The Chronicle
A temporary counseling center was opened in a meeting space next to the cafeteria, where Amy Baker, a mental-health specialist who came in from Portland the day after the shooting, has camped out for anyone here who wants to talk. Umpqua is a small place. “Everyone knew someone,” Ms. Baker says. “They are all having to hold it together.”
Snyder Hall, where the shooting took place, is shuttered, but the scenes are still vivid everywhere. Joshua Friedlein, vice president of the student government, had been staffing the front desk of the peer-tutoring center that morning, where Sarena Moore was working on a paper. Then she left for her writing class, where she was killed.
What if he had asked her to stay longer? “I’m trying to forgive myself,” he says. “I was the last chance.”
Many here are also grappling with their memories of the shooter, a 26-year-old student named Chris Harper Mercer who had attended a special high school for troubled students and had been known all his life as quiet and lonely. After fatally shooting eight classmates and his professor, he exchanged gunfire with the police, then killed himself.
Outsiders frequently, hopefully, ask people here if things are back to normal. But the truth is that the college is barely lurching along, trying to resume regular operations while facing a crushing new set of demands: renegotiating the terms of students’ financial aid with the federal government, designing a recovery website, configuring its telephone system to work as a loudspeaker, responding to inquiries from reporters, dignitaries, and an array of well-meaning organizations.
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Faculty members and administrators are at times distracted, sad, stunned, angry, and fearful. Under stress, many have suffered from panic attacks, headaches, coughs, colds, even pneumonia. Some professors find themselves watching certain male students — those who keep to themselves — and wondering: Could he be the next shooter? About a half-dozen instructors haven’t been able to return.
Ms. Haskett went straight back to work, until a regular medical checkup a couple of weeks later. As her doctor opened the exam-room door, she broke into tears. Taking her doctor’s advice, she spent two weeks at home, letting her husband and two kids take care of her. “I had to step away,” she says, “and get myself healthy.”
But she worries that her absence let some students down. Back on the campus, Ms. Haskett is doing the best she can. “So many of us have just been trying to get by until winter break,” she says. “We are exhausted.”
The shooting was on Thursday, October 1, and Rita Cavin, the college’s interim president, wanted to reopen and resume classes on Monday the 12th. She knew it would be difficult.
Then on the Friday before that Monday, as administrators were frantically attending to details, the college got a threat.
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“Ninety percent of my staff wanted to close the college right then, and I said, ‘If we evacuate, no one will come back on Monday,’” Ms. Cavin recalls. She persuaded people to let the FBI evaluate the threat first. It was a tense and emotional wait. The FBI determined that while the threat was credible, it wasn’t local. The campus stayed open.
Since then, Umpqua has added an armed security officer and two patrol cars. On a hill overlooking its low-slung, tan, siding-and-stone buildings, it is installing four new modular classrooms to stand in for Snyder Hall, while trying to find the money to pay for them.
Days before classes were to resume, Umpqua received a threat. ‘Ninety percent of my staff wanted to close the college right then,’ its interim president says. But she knew: ‘If we evacuate, no one will come back on Monday.’
Newcomers like Ms. Baker, from the state’s Community Health Alliance, are here to help. Lane Community College, an hour and a half away, sent a handful of senior administrators; and folks from other community colleges in the state have also traveled to Umpqua.
In the first week back to class, a journalism professor and former dean from the University of Oregon came to advise the student newspaper and left cameras and tape recorders. (Melinda Benton, the faculty adviser for Umpqua’s paper, had kept its Facebook page updated from the morning of the shootings until 3:30 a.m. the next day. It was a vital source of information after the college’s website crashed from too much traffic.)
Students and professors here felt abused by reporters who descended on the campus within hours of the shootings. To help manage the onslaught of news media, the college hired a woman from a public-relations firm in Eugene.
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Even with outside help, people here couldn’t prepare for everything that came up. Along the way, they had to figure out things like how to field an array of unexpected proposals. Someone tried to donate a 6,000-pound rock engraved with the names of the “Umpqua Nine” (the campus didn’t accept it). One well-intentioned stranger wanted to help the college become known for something other than the shooting by getting it into the Guinness Book of World Records for the most pumpkins carved on Halloween. (“You want to bring 1,500 knives onto our campus at night?” Ms. Cavin recalls wondering.)
A mass shooting affects not only the people who remain, but nearly everything about how a college does business. Umpqua scrapped its usual drop/add and payment deadlines this term and announced an “extended” — or E — grade to let students keep working on assignments over the next two terms. Administrators made special arrangements with the U.S. Department of Education so that students who didn’t come back this fall will maintain their eligibility for federal financial aid come January.
Ms. Cavin has had to pay attention to all kinds of details, things no one would have noticed before. A construction crew building a new nursing complex had to switch to another welding technique because the rivets it was installing sounded like gunshots. “People,” she says, “are very much still on edge.”
In many ways it appears the college is back to business as usual, but people here talk about a “new normal” — the campus may be operating, but things will never be the same.
In the weeks since the shooting, everywhere the women’s volleyball team has played, their opponents have wanted to publicly express their condolences. At first the River Hawks didn’t want any part of that, says Cheryl Yoder, the athletics director. The women just wanted to play. Then they came to realize that other people needed to feel that they could help in some way. At one game, players from Linn-Benton Community College wore T-shirts honoring the River Hawks and gave the team roses.
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The men’s basketball team is down a player.
The coach, Daniel Leeworthy, had tried contacting all of his players by text that morning. But Treven Anspach, a soft-spoken, 6-foot-4 forward, never responded.
At first the coach thought he might be injured and in the hospital. Then, through the athletics director, whose hairdresser is Mr. Anspach’s mother, the team learned he had died.
The team framed Mr. Anspach’s green and white jersey, No. 35, and Mr. Leeworthy wrote a song, “Only Memories Remain,” recording it with acoustic guitar accompanied by musicians from the Eugene Symphony.
Ali Mageehon, who’s serving as historian of the shootings and the response, is cataloging the thousands of documents and gifts the college has received. There’s a balance, she says, between maintaining memories — “making sure people know there was this outpouring and compassion” — and moving on.Leah Nash for The Chronicle
Some people here say that as the semester ends, they have managed to go a day without thinking about the shooting. But not Ali Mageehon.
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In her small office here in the Educational Skills Building, she is surrounded by memories of October 1. That’s her new job: cataloging the mementos. Every day, more cards, pictures, banners, letters, flowers, and gifts arrive, among them a string of 1,000 rainbow-colored peace cranes from Japan.
Ms. Mageehon, formerly known as dean of academic support, has taken on the role of historian of the tragedy. In a corner of her office are 70 banners, all rolled up, each offering support from another college or school. She’s gradually making her way through thousands of other documents, recording them and then placing them in protective plastic holders.
At first she thought she would respond to everybody, but she quickly realized that would overwhelm her. She is working with a curator at the local Douglas County Museum, but so far it isn’t clear what they’ll do with everything.
There is a balance, Ms. Mageehon says, between maintaining memories — “making sure people know there was this outpouring and compassion” — and moving on.
The shooting has dissolved some of the traditional boundaries in higher education — say, between faculty and staff members — as people lean on one another.
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Cathy Chapman, an enrollment-services assistant, staffs the front desk of the college’s welcome center. She’s the first person most visitors meet at Umpqua. Colleagues are now in on two sets of code words Ms. Chapman uses. One is to signal them to pay attention to what’s going on at the front desk; the other means she wants them to call security immediately.
Before the shooting, Ms. Chapman often ate lunch alone in the welcome center’s windowless break room. But that’s where she and 35 others were locked down that morning. Now Ms. Chapman eats in the cafeteria with a group of faculty and staff members who sit and talk and laugh.
Jared Norman, who’s finishing a preparatory program before starting nursing school, says he now makes it a point to say hello every day to students he doesn’t know. He wants all students on the campus to know “there’s someone outside their social circle who cares about them.”Leah Nash for The Chronicle
Students in the cafeteria here still gather with their own groups of friends, the gamers at one table, jocks at another. Jared Norman, a pre-nursing student, still sits with his student-government friends, but he makes a point to say hello every day to students he doesn’t know. He has in mind the shooter, who had few friends and left behind a manifesto detailing his social isolation.
Mr. Norman wants anyone who may feel like that to get a smile and recognition from at least someone on the campus. So he’ll go over to one of the gamers and ruffle his hair and ask him something. “What they’re doing doesn’t interest me much,” says Mr. Norman, “but I want to let them know there’s someone outside their social circle who cares about them.”
Ken Carloni, chair of the science department, is thinking about mental illness. “If you understand a problem, maybe you can stop it,” he says. “Maybe you can catch a person or two that way.”
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After Thanksgiving, the end of the term was in sight for people on the campus. And yet each day held its own challenges. Would they feel OK, or would a particular memory haunt them?
Last week finals came and went, and people started clearing out for winter break. Ms. Haskett is home, wondering if people should have returned to work and classes so soon. She’s thinking about, in the event of another crisis, evacuation plans for students with disabilities.
She is taking it slow — sleeping a lot, watching her pets, enjoying her children’s company. “I’m really lacking in motivation,” she says, “I still have a hard time getting out of bed and going out in public.”
Classes start again on January 4, and when she looks ahead, that doesn’t seem far off.
Robin Wilson writes about campus culture, including sexual assault and sexual harassment. Contact her at robin.wilson@chronicle.com.
Robin Wilson began working for The Chronicle in 1985, writing widely about faculty members’ personal and professional lives, as well as about issues involving students. She also covered Washington politics, edited the Students section, and served as news editor.