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.
I just got back from the Riverside Marriott, where the Inland Southern chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists just gave out the 2006 Southern California Excellence in Journalism Awards.
The Hesperia Star won three awards, with Peter bringing home the biggest kill: In an all-circulation category (meaning he was up against the Press-Enterprise, the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin and all the rest), he came in first for Best Editorial/Opinion Piece. The piece — “Censorship is wrong answer” — was never posted onto our old Web site, so on Monday, I’ll dig it out of the archives and post it on the Web for all to see.
I won two second place awards:
The Daily Press also cleaned up, with a ton of awards for photographer Michael Stenerson. Reporter Tatiana Prophet pulled in the most reporting awards for the High Desert, by my guesstimate. El Mojave and the Desert Dispatch also won awards.
More details can be found in the Daily Press story and on the Star site this week.
Update #1: Peter’s editorial can be found here.
Update #2: Sadly, only one of the three award-winning pieces got commentary passed along by the SPJ judges.
So, for the second year in a row, I talked to Ranchero Middle School and Hesperia Junior High School kids about the value of going to college, this year wearing my Virginia Tech t-shirt.
Last year, I had a tough act to follow last year — a doctor who spent a lot of time, as I recall it, talking about the income potential in the job. Those sorts of questions posed to journalists don’t go quite as well.
This year, though, I was thinking I had it made, since the program was packed full of school district employees, and I figured the kids would be interested in someone not involved in schools.
Well, so much for that. I followed school nurse Peggy Lindsay and it was like following Nickelodeon’s Kid’s Choice Awards. There were discussions of snot, there was talk of blood. There was endless amounts of vomit. There were live insects inside a kid’s ears. Needless to say, she was a huge hit.
I have got to work on my material for next year.
And now for something completely different …
Jenn found this. The crazy thing is that, as of a week or two ago, Lucky just started wearing a red leather (fake lizardskin) collar. And yeah, he does the lying on his back thing.
Tomorrow, it will be two years to the day that I went under the knife in an effort to confirm or squelch the theory that I had stage two lymphoma. I had my throat slit and a probe was sent down into my chest, narrowly avoiding my lungs and heart and a biopsy of my swollen lymph node was taken. (I remember laying on the gurney as I was being wheeled in, thinking that 05/05/05 was a pretty memorable date, whatever happened.)
What it came back with, of course, was sarcoidosis, which was a new one on me, and I think everyone I knew.
Two years later, I still have some lingering problems with granuloma in my joints, particularly on my left side, but they’re diminishing over time. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was completely gone by this time next year.
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