Look out the window of Charles Steger’s office at Virginia Tech, and you can just see the edge of the simple memorial to the 32 students and faculty who died at the hands of Seung-hui Cho on April 16, 2007.
Most of the time, someone is there, day or night, pausing by one or another of the stones engraved with a name.
So much changed that day last year, including the idea of what it means to be a college president: Steger, president of Virginia Tech, had to quickly shift from academic, fundraiser and booster to crisis manager.
“Even today, you can’t believe it actually happened, you know,” he says about the campus shooting. “There’s something about it.”