Collegiate Times

As students, family and friends rallied around lost peers and professors one year ago, colleagues from the two academic departments affected by the shootings also mourned lost friends and coworkers.

Among the casualties of last April 16, five integral and celebrated faculty members were killed in Norris Hall. The five instructors were from three departments in two colleges within the university.

The College of Engineering lost engineering science and materials professors Kevin Granata and Liviu Librescu and civil and environmental engineering professor G.V. Loganathan.

In the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, the foreign language department lost German instructor Jamie Bishop and French instructor Jocelyne Couture-Nowak.

A year later, the departments' healing processes remain unfinished, but they have begun a return to normalcy. The first step in the recovery was moving on from the initial shock of the shootings.

"Many in engineering science and mechanics not only heard about the tragedy, but were actually involved in it in the sense that we had injured students, and we lost colleagues. But equally important, many of us were in the building at that time, and we then had to deal with its aftermath," said Ishwar Puri, ESM department head. "The shock and the sadness certainly was a big emotional hurdle."

Of the 25 students killed in Norris Hall, 15 were in foreign language classes of either Couture-Nowak or Bishop.

"I think our department is doing as well as can be expected given the circumstances," said Richard Shryock, foreign language department head. "Many of our students knew (the students who were killed), or else many of our students had had one of the instructors who were killed that day, so those students are facing particular difficulties."

Shryock went on to add, "This is something we still feel very, very much. Our department continues to be very profoundly impacted by this emotionally, and that hasn't changed at all with this last year. We still miss deeply the two colleagues we lost."

Both Puri and Shryock said that enrollment in the departments did not suffer as a result of the shootings, and actually increased.

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