Collegiate Times

Larry Hincker's history at Virginia Tech goes back about 40 years when he attended school here as an undergrad.

Currently, he serves as the associate vice president for University Relations, the office that handles all university news and relations with the press. One year ago, Hincker became deeply immersed in the immediate dealings with the tragedy, delivering press briefings twice a day, barely sleeping, and along with President Steger and VT Police Chief Flinchum, became one of the most recognizable faces from the university. As the anniversary approached, he found time amidst dealing with endless interview requests to sit down with the Collegiate Times to talk about last year's shootings, the changes of the past year and his hopes for the future. In the first section of the interview, Hincker discusses questions directly related to last year's shootings and the resonating effect it has had on this past academic year. A second interview is included in the regular edition of the Collegiate Times.

Caroline Black: Looking back now one year later, what do you remember about the morning of April 16? What goes through your head when you think about it?

Larry Hincker: What I've told everybody else is that I'm not going to relive April 16. The thing that I will share with you is the very surreal nature of having just been briefed on the scope and horror of that tragedy, and within minutes knowing that we have to start preparing for the onslaught. We were already getting phone calls, Mark Owzarski and I, that the trucks were rolling  ...  It was simply surreal, and I don't know any other way to describe it.

CB: From a policy-related perspective, looking at the aftermath of the shootings, over the past year your job has sort of evolved a lot, and you've sort of had to combine what you do with mediation and grief counseling in dealings with the victims' families. How do you feel, over the past year, the university's relationship with the victims' families has become and evolved?

LH: Before I answer that question, one question that you didn't ask me that I want to talk about is the role of mass communications in helping the institution through its grief recovery, I think that's something that we need to talk about. As we look back on the way the university "managed the aftermath of the crisis," we really were in a crisis management, crisis communication phase for a long, long time, and effectively we still are. I think our institution did an excellent job of trying to bring people together. President Steger was the one that said, "I want to have a convocation." President Steger wanted to have a convocation on Monday evening, and we all said, are you crazy? Yet we managed to pull together this university community in 24 hours. Remarkably, within hours, we began this process of healing. So, we did a lot of things very well. Whether it was management of reoccupying Norris, how we were going to involve the community, the memorial was a remarkably simple but poignant and powerful way to say, "We're not going to forget." But, one of the things we mishandled was the liaison with the families. We set up, literally, people inside student affairs, inside the counseling center, inside the dean of student's office, career services, all around the university, anyone who had some background in trauma management to be a liaison with one family member, to try to assist them with whatever their needs were, and injured students, so it was a lot of folks. One woman, she described it early on as "victims helping victims." When you think back, the whole institution, and our leadership, too, was in shock. Yet, we were trying to run this place and manage through. So our people were just exhausted, totally, totally exhausted. Late May, we said, "we need to have a full-time office," it took a while to get that going. Now we have the Office of Recovery and Support. Now there are trained counselors and there are people managing those students, who came back by the way, every single student ... it took a while, those people are grieving, traumatized, and many of them angry, but I think the university finally got its act together. That's one that took a long time.  

CB: You mentioned at first how the university handled representing the families. How has that evolved this past year, how has that relationship changed from then until today?

Continue Reading: 1234 Next »