today we are all the same

Each time I logged in this week to add to my blog, I lost interest and moved on to other things. My heart is heavy and my mind is still slow with shock. I have thought of things to blog about, had some funny work stories and philosophical insights and amusing anecdotes to ponder, but cnn.com is my homepage and each time I open internet explorer on the way to blogger.com I get sidetracked by the headlines and the images and the grief and the questions and the blame and the heartache.

As a Virginian, I take great pride in the wealth of quality higher education that my state offers. Given my upbringing in the central part of the state, I have friends who went to all of the universities in Virginia. I have attended games at many; I drank too much at several; I learned things at a few; I have lost my virtue and found my inspiration and lost my keys and found my self at more than one campus in this great Commonwealth. I've always had a little uppity UVA in me, a great deal of W&M intellect, some VCU toughness, a little Mason diversity, maybe even some Tech spirit. God knows I spent enough time hanging over the campus hooked to a tree belaying my high school boyfriend during his rock climbing exploits, but that's another story.

I have spent the last ten years of my life on college campuses. One of the great challenges of the past few months has been learning to establish my identity when I don't have a ready-made community like William and Mary or GW or UVA. As a student or an administrator, your campus becomes your world, your small little piece of the universe, a microcosm of all of the politics and entertainment and social circles and bureaucracy of the world. Everything becomes contained in those few square blocks--you run your errands at the student center, you make friends in varying departments, you get your news from the student paper. Yet you are also part of a larger community: the sometimes archaic, always political, largely rewarding world of academia. As a student, you identify immediately with other students, rivals though they may be; your collective unconscious of shared experiences like keg stands and moldy showers and all-nighters and open-book exams bonds you regardless of school colors or athletics ranking. As an administrator, the daily challenges of straddling the awkward friend-authority line or the constant battle between red tape and student needs make for easy conversations and ready empathy. In my years as a college administrator I never thought twice about picking up the phone and asking a complete stranger for advice or assistance, nor did I ever balk at helping out a fellow student affairs professional. Academia is unlike any other world; the university is one of the few places where the lines between adolescent and adult, customer and provider, teacher and student blur so freely. It is the one place where, though some may at times lose sight of it, the bottom line is always fundamentally the love and appreciation of knowledge and learning and the benefit to society that education provides. It is a world of which, though I chose to leave, I will always be grateful for having been a part. And it is that world that has been shaken up this week.

Perhaps my heart is so tired this week because the daily stressors and sadnesses in my job make me prone to inappropriate emotional responses. Perhaps it is because I have so many friends and family personally touched by the tragedy. But I think we are all affected by this because of that larger community to which we belong--that place in our history where we struggled on the way to an early class, wore our flip-flops on the first warm morning, pulled out our notes eager to make a point during discussion. And you do not have to be a professor to feel dismayed at the loss of promising younger and distinguished older minds. It is the student in me that grieves. It is the college counselor in me that aches. It is the educator in me that mourns.

But today it is the Hokie in me that still hopes.