Today, my day as a professor at The Ohio State University started like most other days – I spent time reviewing the assigned reading for my 10:20 class and refined a list of questions to discuss with the students. As I walked to my classroom in Jennings Hall, I ignored several phone chimes that indicate incoming text messages. However, by the time a few of my students started to trickle in to class, word began to spread about an active shooter on the other side of campus, and we shortly were advised by emergency text to shelter in place.
In order to earn tenure at a major research university I have had a large amount of training, including biological theory, esoteric statistics, methods pertaining to data analysis, and teaching pedagogy. At no point did my training include information about what to do in your classroom during an emergency lockdown. So my students and I sat in our seats, periodically talking and checking for updates on our phones. I looked out the window several times, and the sidewalks around Jennings were empty. Eerily so. Occasionally a phone would ring, a student would answer and say “yes Mom, I’m OK”. My wife and brothers texted to check up on me, and I sent my mom a text to let her know that I was safe. But in my classroom, we mostly waited around for some 90 minutes for the campus lockdown to be lifted. It seemed longer.
As I write this on Monday night, a few facts about the attack seem clear. Several bystanders were injured when a suspect drove his car into a crowd of people and attacked several with a knife. By all accounts, this situation was quickly defused by a brave campus police officer. The rapid response of public safety personnel clearly minimized the number of victims, and as I write this on Monday night the only fatality was the alleged attacker. A second fact involves the identity of the attacker. News outlets are reporting that the young man was a Somali immigrant, and a profile in a campus newspaper from earlier in the semester makes it clear that he was having difficulties adjusting to aspects of life at OSU. In many ways this is not surprising, as large land-grant universities such as OSU are large and complicated places. Twenty-some years earlier, I had my share of difficulties adjusting to life as a new student at Michigan State University, and the tenor of the 2016 election would have made this process particularly difficult for a student was a Muslim or an immigrant.
In the coming days a debate will ensue about how we as a community move forward. Some will call for tolerance, others will support measures such as a ban on immigrants. As an biologist, I don’t pretend to have answers to political questions, but I do know that decades of ecological research have shown us that diverse ecosystems are resilient because they inherently contain multiple potential responses to stress and perturbation. I’d like to think that American culture is resilient for the same reasons. Our land-grant university system is one of the great contributions of the United States to the world, and like all such universities OSU contains a diverse mix of students. We admit these students not due to any political philosophy but because our mandate is to contribute to solving global problems faced by all people. Our planet is diverse, full of cultures and ideas that are sometimes in conflict, but also small and connected. I was reminded of this today when dozens of friends and colleagues from all over the world checked in with me by email or text. To all of you: I’m safe. And I’m committed to helping our university live up to our mandate: Disciplina in civitatem.
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