Fate of Norris Hall unclear
Virginia Tech president Charles Steger is in the unenviable position of figuring out what to do with Norris Hall and, to a lesser extent, portions of West Ambler-Johnston Hall.
Choices include tearing the building down (which would be incredibly expensive and displace the largest college in the university from sometimes complex classrooms into already crowded areas that don’t have all the facilities required to support them), simply reopening it or creating it.
My favorite is renaming Norris Hall:
An online petition has received more than 20,000 signatures in support of renaming Norris for engineering professor Liviu Librescu, who enabled students to jump to safety by blocking his classroom door with his body until Cho shot him. Librescu, 76, was a Holocaust survivor who had taught at the school for 20 years.
“I felt that something needed to be done to commemorate this brave man,” Justin Kozuch, a web designer in Toronto who started the petition, said in an e-mail.
The building now is named for Earle Bertram Norris, who was engineering dean from 1928 to 1952.
Russell Harris, a sophomore engineering major, said in a letter to the student newspaper, the Collegiate Times, that the building should become a memorial.
“To demolish it would let our fears win and give evil more power,” he wrote.
You can find the petition online here.
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Please check out the link to this blog in support of converting parts of Norris Hall into the Institute for Transformative Learning
http://norrishall.blogspot.com/
Comment by norris hall — November 21, 2007 @ 11:00