Dr. Theresa Woodruff was a few days into her new role as interim president at Michigan State University when I met her for the first time.
I had tickets to watch a Spartan football game from the President’s Box in November, and my daughter, a junior at MSU, was thrilled to join me. Woodruff made remarks at a pregame reception, and my daughter and I had an opportunity to chat with her.
None of us had any idea how we’d be bonded through trauma just three months later, in the wake of shootings that left three students dead and several injured. Woodruff now is tasked with tending wounds with counseling services, moving forward with educational mission and enhancing safety on campus.
“We're on a journey together, but at different paces,” she said last week in a sit-down I had with her and her vice president of public safety, Marlon Lynch.
“There are ‘concentric circles’ of continuing fallout from the violence," Woodruff said. “There are those in the center who are most affected, most proximal to the violence; those in the next ring that were just outside of that circle. And then the entire community was, in fact, impacted.”
Some students, faculty and staff members have been involved in prior active shooter situations – including students who survived the attacks at Oxford High School in 2021. Woodruff herself was involved in a lockdown situation at Northwestern University before coming to MSU in 2020.
“People have different imprints and life experiences that also are part of healing,” she said. “We're making sure it's not an overall one-size-fits-all, but rather we're trying to enable each individual along the way.”
And she also pointed out how other shooting incidents, most recently last week in Nashville, when three adults and three children were killed in a private school, made the trauma fresh all over again for MSU survivors.
“There are real lives lost, real people damaged for the long term. And so, that kind of news really does resonate across our campus and in real ways.”
In addition to ongoing trauma counseling for staff and students, MSU administration is enacting several measures to “harden” the campus, improve readiness and responsiveness to future threats. Some of the measures, such as adding security cameras and offering active-shooter training, were ongoing. The shooter training now will be mandatory.
Hours that buildings on campus are open to public access has been narrowed from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. (some buildings, and all living areas, always required 24-hour key access).
There had been calls after the shootings to lock all buildings at all times, said Lynch, but that’s not practical on a campus with more than 400 buildings and 1,300 classrooms, some inside residence halls.
“We spent some time after Feb. 13 meeting with our community in student town halls, faculty discussions and different formats,” he said. “We have to have a balance because we have so many various interests and perspectives.”
The university also is in the process of establishing a 24/7 “operations center” that would monitor campus safety and have the ability to “lock every single door on campus that is attached to the system” with a keystroke, Lynch said.
All of this can seem onerous and it certainly is expensive. But it is sadly the world we live in, and we all must adapt.
“That’s just the reality of it,” Lynch said. “Safety and security by its nature is inconvenient. It's a lot easier to just simply walk up to a door, grab the handle, push or pull to enter than it is to stop and take out your Spartan ID.”
Woodruff and her team are doing what’s in their power to return the campus community to “normal.” The larger issues behind the horrible events of Feb. 13 will take a much larger effort – politicians and political advocates, health professionals, social scientists and regular citizens who are fed up with the cycle of violence.
She noted the state Senate passed “red flag” background check and gun storage laws, and that MSU students took part in post-shooting political rallies at the state Capitol.
“Those are the students who are going to look at the world around them and, ‘Is this the world that I want to live in and create?’ And I think they will go out and change the world.”
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John Hiner is the vice president of content for MLive Media Group. If you have questions you’d like him to answer, or topics to explore, share your thoughts at [email protected].
