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After Tragedy, a Network of Universities Takes on Healing Together

When violent incidents shatter campuses, universities look to those who have endured similar tragedies for guidance on helping students move forward.

Brown University memorial for undergraduate mass shooting victims Mukhammad Aziz Amurzokov and Ella Cook

On a dark winter night this past December, a student laid a bouquet of flowers to rest against the Van Wickle Gates at Brown University. Snow quickly dusted the petals, and candlelight glinted against the stems’ plastic wrapping. It is one of many offerings placed at the gates that students ceremonially enter when they begin their time at Brown and exit when they graduate—a tradition that the two students killed in the campus shooting in December will not be able to complete.

The following morning, Matthew Guterl, Brown’s vice president for diversity and inclusion and the leader of the university’s healing efforts, visited the temporary memorial with a specific goal in mind. With his colleague, he began pulling frozen petals from bouquets in the hopes of giving them new life in the university archives. The university shared the project with the Brown community in a press release and on social media.

But the idea wasn’t Guterl’s—it had been inspired by a similar initiative at Michigan State University, following the mass shooting there in 2023.

He said the decision to undertake the memorialization project was rooted in healing strategies focused on public messages of resiliency used at Michigan State.

“What the Michigan State folks did, beyond preserving the flowers, was also to signpost for the community what they were doing,” Guterl said.

“You have to explain why what you’re doing is helpful in the language of resilience and recovery and repair,” Guterl added. “Part of what you’re trying to do is to create an active metaphor for the community.”

When an institution faces unspeakable tragedy, few others know exactly what the recovery process looks like. But the network of colleges and universities that do can provide each other with expertise, inspiration, and unparalleled support.

After the 2023 shooting at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), which left three faculty members dead, Jamie Davidson, the university’s associate vice president for student wellness, said he received an outpouring of support from colleagues across the country.

“It’s one of the things I like about higher education. We can be competitors on the football field or the basketball court, but we’re all in it together to support each other during these unfortunate times,” he said.

Responsible for assisting with student recovery, Davidson leaned on support from institutions that had already faced the impossible task of deciding how to move forward.

Davidson met with the student affairs team at Michigan State and sought help from Micky Sharma, the director of Counseling and Consultation Service at The Ohio State University. Sharma was at Ohio State when a student attacked a crowd of pedestrians in 2016. Before that, he was the director of the Counseling and Student Development Center at Northern Illinois University (NIU) in 2008, when a shooting left five students dead and 17 injured.

At Davidson’s request, Sharma traveled to UNLV to help train the school’s student affairs staff on how best to support the UNLV community. Davidson and his team directly implemented strategies used at Ohio State, including providing drop-in workshops for students, faculty, and staff to discuss self-care and recovery.

Andres Carrasco, who was a student working on an assignment on the floor of the building where the shooting at UNLV occurred, took advantage of the university’s counseling resources. His professor was one of the three faculty members who were killed in the attack, which Carrasco heard taking place down the hall from where he sat.

Although he at first tried to distance himself from the events of that day, a dean........

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