Orem, Utah (AP) – It took two decades for Utah Valley University to develop from a diminutive community colleague to the largest school in the state and has one of the safest locations in the nation.
It only took seconds for this picture to be broken by the murder of the right activist Charlie Kirk.
The extensive campus of almost 50,000 students among the Wasach Mountains will be tied to the events of September 10, when a ball took over the founder of Turning Point USA when he spoke outdoors in the middle of the campus in an amphitheater outdoors.
The university – previously largely unknown outside of Utah – was defined in an undesirable national spotlight during the search for Kirk’s murderer. Students and faculties returned to class this week, still stepped with grief, fear and fear and confronted a fine question: How do you deal with Uvus sudden shame?
“The university brought this onto the map and paid more attention to it than ever before,” said Branding expert Timothy Calkins, professor at Northwestern University. “You certainly didn’t want this situation. But you have to find a way to come back.”
University director say that you are currently concentrating on the security of students and your community, but you are already starting to think about how the broken identity of the school can be redesigned.
“We won’t shy away from”
Kyle Reyes, one of the deputy presidents of Utah Valley University, said he hoped that the school could be a role model for healing and inclusion of the challenging dialogue.
“We know that our eyes are on us and we will not be afraid to demonstrate our resistance together,” said Reyes.
According to data collected by the US Ministry of Education, the school has only minimal violence for years. The latest report by the UVU about the main campus in Orem, which covered 2021-2023, showed that the police were examined or received over four stern accusations of attack, 13 allegations of rape, an obvious arson and no cases of murder or homicide. Kirk’s murder was the first murder on campus that the administrators are known, said the spokeswoman for the university, Ellen Treeanor,.
University officials quote this data to support the claim that it is one of the country’s safest universities.
Uvu also promotes their forceful connections to the Church of Jesus Christ of the saints of the past few days, as the home of the world’s largest educational institute for youthful Mormons. His mascot is the Wolverine. “Just like Wolverines, UVU students are determined, ambitious and fearless,” says the university’s website.
“We all still come together”
The 18 -year -old student Marjorie fetches, who studied primary school on the UVU, was too delayed to the Kirk rally and arrived a few minutes before his shot. She ran with others to directly protect in a nearby building.
In the days since then, Holt took a break from work and went home to spend a night with her family in Salt Lake City. She said she had the feeling that the University of Kirk and his family failed because she did not give better security. She is worried that she goes to class in a building near the crime scene.
But when Kirk’s shootout deepened the political differences of the nation, Holt believes that the common trauma has brought the UVU closer together.
“We are all people who, as they know, loved or hated him,” she said about Kirk. “We all still come together, no matter how we believed, and I have the feeling that our school has brought our school closer than ever before.”
Back to class, but not normal again
When the students returned on Wednesday, they reported that the lessons were quieter than usual. Matthew Caldwell, 24, said that the history class “felt” as if the professor understood better for all beliefs and that it is ultimately about sharing these beliefs. “
The president of the student body, Kyle Cullimore, asked his classmates during a Friday guard not to sit down and see themselves as humans so that Uvu a place where disagreement does not delete our dignity “.
Other schools that have become synonymous for shootings offer various templates for combating the Fallout.
The massacre of the Columbine High School from 1999 led on the same day on which Kirk was killed, increased security and training for shooters in schools in the USA. It is the same school district as Columbine, and the officials have been attributed to the avoidance of further losses for years.
After the shootings at Virginia Tech University in 2007, the Sandy Hook Elementary School of Connecticut in 2012 and the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida in 2019, pupils and family members transferred their grief to weapon control.
In Uvalde, Texas, officials voted for the demolition of the Robb primary school after a mass shooting in which 19 students and two teachers were killed.
The rest of the story
At Kent State University, where soldiers from the National Guard killed eight other students in a Vietnam War Protest in 1970, Professor Johanna Solomon said that the school has since banged into its role as a place to express ideas freely.
There were fights on the way. From 1986, the Ohio School, athletics uniforms, letterhead and signage began to change “Kent” and bring “State University” into diminutive letters to distance themselves from the shootings. The change was fallen in 2000, said Karen Cunningham, professor at the School of Peace and Conflices Studies by Kent State, which was set up in response to the 1970 shootouts.
“I am very proud of her decision to recognize as a university that she did not escape or forgot what happened,” said Solomon. “Managers have a really strong choice after such things have happened, and one is to lean into the split, and the other side is to humanize people, bring people together.”
When the UVU students ventured back last week, the Republican governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, met with a diminutive group on campus. “It was rough for all of us, right,” he admitted. The world now only knows one thing about UVU, he said – and he wants everyone to know the rest of the story.
“This place is incredible and it is incredible because the students are here, an amazing faculty,” said Cox. “The world urgently needs changes, but they won’t find them from politicians. It has to come from you.”
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Brown reported by Billings, Mont.
