It took two decades for Utah Valley University to develop from a small community college to the big school and boast of having one of the safest campuses in the nation.
It only took seconds for this picture to be cut by the murder of right -wing activist Charlie Kirk.
The scattered campus of nearly 50,000 students during the Wasatch Mountains will forever be tied to the events of September 10, when a bullet took the founder of Turning Point the United States as he spoke with a large audience on an outdoor amphitheater in the middle of the campus.
The university – largely unknown outside Utah Disabled now – was corrected in an unwanted national spotlight huge search for Kirk’s killer. Students and faculties returned to classes this week, still rolling with grief, fear and anxiety and confronting a thorny question: How do they handle the UVU’s sudden notorious?
“This has put the university on the map and given it more attention than it has ever disappeared,” said branding expert Timothy Calkins, professor at Northwestern University. “They certainly didn’t want this situation. But they have to find a way to return.”
University leaders say they are focused right now on the safety of the students and their society, but they have already begun to think about Howpe the school’s bestowed identity.
‘We’re not going to get away’
Kyle Reyes, one of Utah Valley University’s vice presidents, said he hopes the school can be a model of healing and embrace difficult dialogue.
“We know that our eyes are on us and that we are not cold to get away from disassembling our resilience collectively over this,” Reyes said.
The school has only had minimal violence for years, according to data collection from the US Ministry of Education. UVU’s latest report for his most important campus in Orem covering 2021-2023, police showed investigated or received reports of four worsening assault charges, 13 rape depletions, a seemingly arson and no case of murder or murder. Kirk’s killing was the first murder of campus that administrators are aware of, said university spokeswoman Ellen Treanor.
University officials cite this data in support of the claim that it is “one of the safest colleges in the country.”
UVU is also its strong connections to the Church of Jesus Christ of later Saints, as the Home of the World’s Great Education Institute for Young Mormons. Its mascot is Wolverine. “Like Wolverines, UVU students are determined, ambitious and fearless,” says the university’s website.
‘We are still coming together’
Student Marjorie Holt, 18, who studies primary school education at UVU, was late to Kirk Rally and arrived minutes before he was shot. She ran with others to protect herself in a nearby building in Immondate Aftermath.
In the days sincerely, Holt took free from work and went home to spend an evening with his family in Salt Lake City. She said she wants the university to fail Kirk and his family by not giving better security. She cares about going to classes in a building near the crime scene.
Nevertheless, as Kirk’s shooting elaborates on the nation’s political dives, Holt believes that the shared trauma has BUST UVU closer together.
“We are all people who, you know, loved him or him,” she said of Kirk. “We all come, no matter how we thought, and I feel like this has made our school closer than ever.”
Back to class but not back to normal
When students returned Wednesday, the classes reported were quieter than usual. Matthew Caldwell, 24, said that in the history class “it felt as if the professor was more understanding of all beliefs and that it is ultimately about sharing these beliefs.”
Student Organization President Kyle Cullimore urged his classmates during a Friday guard to stop putting labels on each other and seeing each other as a human being, so UVU can be a “place where disagreement does not erase our dignity.
Other schools that became synonymous with shootings offer different templates to tackle the fall.
The Columbine High School massacre In 1999, heighted security and training for shooters in schools all over the United States on the same day that Kirk were killed, these protocols were put to test in a shooting on Colorado’s Evergreen High School when two students shoots took their own lives. It is the same school district as Columbine, and officials credited for many years of preparation and training to avoid more injuries.
After shots at Virginia Tech University in 2007, Connecticuts Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 and Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2019, students stepped victim and family members their grief to Activim for pistol control.
In UVALE, TEXAS, officials voted to break down Robb Elementary School after a mass shooting that killed 19 students and two teachers.
The rest of the story
At Kent State University, where the National Guard soldiers killed four students and wounded eight others at Vietnam War Protest in 1970, Professor Johanna Solomon said the school has since leaned into its role as a place to freely express ideas.
There were matches along the way. From 1986, the Ohio School began to change athletics uniforms, letterhead and signage to highlight “Kent” and put “State University” in small letters downstairs and try to distance themselves from the shooting. The change was dropped in 2000, said Karen Cunningham, a professor of Kent State’s School of Peace and Conflict Studies, established in the 1970 shooting.
“I am very proud of their decision to realize as a university that it was not appving or forget what happened,” Solomon said. “Leaders have a really sharp choice after things like this happens, and one is to lean into the division, and the other is to humanize people, to bring people to train.”
When UVU students dared back last week, the Republican Utah government sets Spencer Cox with a small group on campus. “It’s been rough, right, for all of us,” he acknowledged. The world knows only one thing about UVU now, he said – and he wants everyone to know the rest of the story.
“This place is incredible and it is incredible because the students who are here are amazing faculties,” Cox said. “The world desperately needs change, but they won’t find it from politicians. It has to come from you.
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Brown exposed from Billings, Mont.