Orem, Utah – It took two decades of Utah Valley University to develop from a small community college to the largest school in the state, and it is proud of the presence of one of the safest universities in the country.
It took only seconds to break this image by the assassination of the right -wing activist Charlie Kerk.
The sprawling campus will be linked to approximately 50,000 students below the mountains of Wasatch forever with the events of September 10, when the Turning Point USA bullet was shot down while he was talking to a large crowd in an outdoor runway on the center of the campus.
The university has been reformed – unknown to a large extent outside Utah – in the unwanted national spotlight while searching for the Kirk killer. Students and faculty members Get back This week is still reeling with sadness, fear and anxiety, and facing a thorny question: How do they deal with the sudden villain of UVU?
“This university has placed on the map and gave it more attention than it received,” said the brand expert Timothy Calcins, Professor of North Western University. “Certainly they don’t want this situation. But they have to find a way to return.”
University leaders say they are now focusing on the safety of students and their community, but they have already started to think about how to reshape the shattered school identity.
Kyle Reyes, one of the Vice President of Utah Valley University, said he hoped the school will be a model of recovery and embrace the difficult dialogue.
“We know that the eyes are on us and we will not be ashamed to show our elasticity collectively on this,” said Reyes.
The school only had the minimum violence for years, according to the data collected by the US Department of Education. The most recent UVU report on the main campus in Orem, which covered 2021-2023, showed an investigation into the police or received reports of four strict assault allegations, 13 allegations of rape, one of the clear premeditated burning and there are no anxiety killings or murder. University spokeswoman Eileen Trinor said that Kirk’s killing was the first murder on the campus that officials realize.
University officials cite these data to support the prosecution as “one of the safest colleges in the country.”
UVU also refers to its strong prayers in the Church of Jesus Christ for the last days, as it is home to the world’s largest educational institute for young hormones. The amulet is Wolfirin. “Just like Wolverines, UVU students are designers, ambitions, and fear,” says university website.
The 18 -year -old student Margori Holt, who studies primary education in UVU, was late in the Kirk Rally and arrived minutes before he was shot. I ran with others to house a nearby building in the wake of it.
In the days after that, Hoult took a vacation and returned home to spend a night with her family in the Solt Lake City. She said that she feels that the university has failed Kirk and his family not to provide better security. She is concerned about going to the classroom in a building near the crime scene.
However, with the deepening of Kirk’s shooting from the nation’s political divisions, Holt believes that the common shock made UVU closer.
She said about Kirk: “We are all people, as you know, love or hate him.” “We are all gathering regardless of how we believe, and I feel that this made our school closer than ever.”
When students returned on Wednesday, they reported that the classroom was quieter than usual. Matthew Caldwell, 24, said that in the history category, “I felt as if the professor was more understanding of all beliefs and that in the end it is related to the participation of these beliefs.”
The head of the Student Authority, Kyle Kolimore, urged his colleagues on Friday to stop the positions of posters on each other and see each other as a human being so that UVU “is a place where the dispute does not erase.”
Other schools that have become synonymous with shooting are different molds to address the repercussions.
The 1999 Columbin Secondary School massacre looked in increasing security and training for archers in schools throughout the United States on the same day as Kerk, these protocols were placed in a shooting test at Colorado Secondary School in Colorado when the Taliban was wounded and took his life. It is the same educational area as Columbin, and officials are attributed to years of preparation and training to avoid more losses.
After the shooting at the University of Virginia Technology in 2007, Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012 and Margori Stoniman Douglas Secondary School in Florida in 2019, student victims and family members transformed their grief over activity in order to control weapons.
In Uvalde, Texas, officials voted to demolish the Rob Elementary School after a mass shooting that killed 19 students and teachers.
At Kent State University, where National Guard soldiers killed four students And eight others became in the protest of the Vietnam War in 1970, Professor Johanna Suleiman said that the school has since bent its role as a place to express ideas freely.
There were conflicts along the way. Starting in 1986, Ohio School began changing athletics costume, mission and banners to highlight “Kent” and put “State University” in small messages under it, in an attempt to a gunfire. Karen Keningham, a professor at the Kent Statement and Conflict, said in 2000.
Suleiman said: “I am very proud of their decision to study as a university that he was not fleeing or forgetting what happened.” “Leaders have a truly blatant option after things like this happens, and the other is to tend to divide, and the other side is to give the human character to people, and to bring people together.”
When UVU students ventured last week, Republican Governor Uta Spencer Cox met with a small group on campus. “It was cruel, right, for all of us,” confessed. He said that the world knows only one thing about UVU now, and he wants everyone to know the rest of the story.
“This place is incredible, which is incredible because of the students here, the amazing faculty members,” Cox said. “The world strongly needs change, but they will not find it from politicians. It must come from you.”
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Brown mentioned from Bellings, Mont.