universities trade – After the December Brown University shooting, university leaders built a healing effort around a simple idea borrowed from other campuses: memorials and support work better when institutions share what they learned in real time—workshop after workshop, counsel
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 was one of many offerings placed at the gates that students ceremonially enter when they begin their time at Brown and exit when they graduate—one of those routines the two students killed in the campus shooting in December will not be able to complete.
The next morning. Matthew Guterl. Brown’s vice president for diversity and inclusion and the leader of the university’s healing efforts. went to the temporary memorial with a goal in mind. With a colleague. he began pulling frozen petals from bouquets in hopes of giving them new life in the university archives. Brown shared the project with the Brown community in a press release and on social media.
Guterl said the idea came from a place beyond Brown. It was inspired by a similar initiative at Michigan State University, following the mass shooting there in 2023. He described the memorialization project as more than preservation. In his telling, the purpose is to explain the “why” of recovery—using language that can carry people through uncertainty.
“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,” he added. “Part of what you’re trying to do is to create an active metaphor for the community.”
That metaphor—turning grief into something communities can understand and move through—has become a kind of trade language across higher education, particularly as tragedies strike again and again.
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. described an outpouring of support from colleagues across the country. He said it wasn’t just professional courtesy; it was a recognition that universities share a common duty once an attack ends.
“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.
Davidson. responsible for assisting with student recovery. leaned on institutions that had already been forced to decide how to move forward. He 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’s background was shaped by past violence. He 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 implemented strategies used at Ohio State. including providing drop-in workshops for students. faculty. and staff to discuss self-care and recovery.
For at least one student at UNLV, those choices didn’t feel theoretical. Andres Carrasco. 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 killed in the attack. and Carrasco heard the attack taking place down the hall.
Carrasco said that at first he tried to distance himself from what happened. A dean reached out and connected him with a therapist provided by UNLV, who helped him process what had occurred.
Carrasco said the school “took a very holistic approach” to its healing efforts. He pointed to policies designed to reduce the immediate pressure of normal academic milestones: students weren’t required to take final exams. could take classes pass/fail. and mid-year graduates could attend graduation the next semester instead.
Coming back to campus after the shooting, Carrasco said, was eerie. Even so, he described the level of care and support as apparent.
Sharma didn’t just transfer advice from Ohio State to UNLV. He said he built his guidance from other lessons too, including what he learned while NIU sought direction after the Virginia Tech massacre, where a gunman killed 32 students in 2007.
“There was no playbook before the tragedy at Tech, and they really helped guide us on how to move forward,” he said.
One of the strategies Sharma learned from Tech was making counselors accessible as much as possible. At NIU. he said. counselors were placed in every class for two days to provide “psychological first aid.” He said he later carried the idea to Ohio State. placing counselors at the student union and the recreation center. Around 500 counselors come to campus from across the country to help, all on a volunteer basis, Sharma said.
That volunteer accessibility is the kind of detail that lives or dies on timing—how quickly help can arrive when a community is still stunned. Pasha Sergeev, a graduate student at the time of the 2016 Ohio State attack, described what it felt like to be flooded and then found.
After walking to class on a November morning, Sergeev was stabbed in an incident that would leave 11 injured. In the hours after the attack, Sergeev received hundreds of calls and text messages. The flow was “quickly becoming overwhelming.” When Ohio State connected Sergeev with a counselor. Sergeev said one of the first things she helped them do was draft a text to send to their community.
The next day, a therapist reached out and told Sergeev he would clear his schedule to help manage panic attacks and process memories from that day. Sergeev said that through student insurance, all their therapy and medical bills were covered.
“They were doing a good job and making me feel like they actually cared,” Sergeev said.
By the time Brown started building its own recovery infrastructure, those lessons had already traveled through multiple campuses.
In a state with fewer available licensed healthcare professionals than Illinois and Ohio. Brown worked with the university’s public health experts to create a “lite version” of what was done at NIU and later at Ohio State. Guterl said the focus was on deciding which resources faculty members should share when students returned to class and on staffing tables with counseling support in prominent locations across campus.
Sophie Sun, a first-year student at Brown at the time of the shooting, said the support mattered when students returned. “When classes resumed, every professor I had took a moment to acknowledge what happened, which meant a lot,” she said.
Sun described the hours of the attack in visceral detail. She sheltered in place in a classroom for four hours. “The doors couldn’t lock, and the walls were glass, so we just sat in the dark, waiting for updates, desperately texting everyone we knew,” she said.
When she later helped organize student recovery on campus, she focused on drawing students back into each other’s presence. As the vice president of Brown’s first-year class. Sun helped bring students together after the tragedy. including organizing a walk to a nearby park that Mukhammad Umurzokov. one of the victims killed in the shooting. frequented. She also helped organize a bouquet-making event for students to lay flowers at the Van Wickle Gates.
“ The thread running through all of it was the same: bring people together, and remind them of the strength of community,” she said.
Alyssa Rheingold. the director of response. recovery. and resilience at the National Mass Violence Center (NMVC). said that kind of peer-connected effort is crucial when schools and universities are forced to respond. She has taken that expertise to more than 40 communities impacted by tragedy, including Florida State, Michigan State, and Brown.
Her work also reflects a grim reality: demand keeps rising. She said she has been pulled into crisis response as shootings at schools and universities continue across the United States.
Rheingold pointed to figures from Everytown for Gun Safety: there have been 55 incidents of gunfire on school grounds since the beginning of 2026 alone. Last year, 54 individuals died across 163 incidents of gun-related violence at schools and universities.
Having sat with many affected communities, Guterl said Rheingold understands what tends to work in different places. Guterl described her as someone who collects the advice that emerges from other campuses and distributes it back into new communities.
“This is an organization that’s worked with every other major university that’s been through a mass shooting,” Guterl said, “and so they are themselves collectors of advice and distributors of advice.”
Rheingold came to Brown after the shooting to provide consultation and support for faculty, staff, and students. She also helped establish a resiliency center to provide a central hub for support, an approach that has been done at schools such as Michigan State.
The NMVC, Rheingold said, helps connect these hubs by hosting forums for the directors of the resiliency centers across the country to discuss what is and isn’t working.
“One of our roles is to provide that connection of communities to other communities,” Rheingold said.
Not all help comes in the form of an on-campus visit. Other organizations have risen after mass shootings, including groups built by people who were themselves harmed. Six days after the shooting at Brown. Kristina Anderson Froling—who was injured in the shooting at Virginia Tech—hopped on the phone with Guterl. She did so on behalf of the Koshka Foundation for Safe Schools. which provides resources and training to communities after mass shootings. In April, she brought her support to campus, providing in-person consultation and giving a talk to members of the community.
But Froling said support often looks quieter than a speech or a workshop. “Really, what it looks like is people texting one another, usually quite quickly after something happens,” she said.
Froling described this group of schools that have experienced tragedy as the “club no one wants to be a part of.” She said she may not stay in touch with many of the people she has assisted with recovery efforts. but when the anniversary of the shooting in their community passes. she makes sure to send them a text.
“It’s this kind of unspoken friendship of having been there,” she said.
Guterl said moving through it has never felt lonely. “We’ve learned something from each of these folks that have really shaped our response,” he said. “It has never felt lonely to move through this.”
Still, recovery doesn’t follow a single schedule.
Sergeev’s story spoke to the value of immediate accessibility. Davidson and Sharma’s accounts also made room for the long arc—weeks, months, and years—of care. Davidson. reflecting on Ohio State’s resources. said they felt the university moved on too fast at first. returning to classes and finals quicker than Sergeev said they were ready for.
Sharma said at Ohio State, the healing process was about moving forward from tragedy rather than forgetting. He said it involved a plan for how to continue healing for weeks, months, and years after tragedy.
“There’s a strong desire to want to move on and get behind this and past it. And I get that, it’s not all bad,” Davidson said. “But we have to realize that everyone is in different places and the support needs to continue for an extended period of time.”
Other administrators, Sharma said, have run into another pressure point: counseling centers can be overwhelmed when many students seek help at once. That has pushed schools to take new approaches, including offering a range of options from drop-in sessions to virtual therapy.
At Brown, Guterl said the program included drop-in sessions and virtual therapy options. Sharma said he did the same at Ohio State by acknowledging that not every student is seeking traditional, individual counseling.
For the leaders who have learned to rebuild. sharing those strategies has become part of the job—because they’ve been on both sides of the call. Sharma said when he was at NIU, individuals from Virginia Tech visited him and supported the campus community. He said “those gentlemen dropped everything, came to campus for a week, put their lives on hold.”.
At the end of their visit, Sharma said he told them he wasn’t sure how to properly thank them. In response, one of the Virginia Tech administrators said simply: “Pay it forward.”
That ethic reaches beyond institutional branding. Brown’s Guterl said the consequences of moving through the aftermath can shrink the differences between universities.
“It seems to me the consequence of moving through the aftermath of the mass shooting is that there’s a lot less difference than you thought. ” Guterl said. “Every university is trying to help young people ‘get from one point in their life to the next,’” he added. “It’s moving to be connected to so many people who are struggling in the wake of something so horrible to try to help students get back to that.”.
At Brown’s Van Wickle Gates, Guterl said he has seen messages—“Spartan Strong” from Michigan State students and “UVA Strong” from University of Virginia community members—mixed in with bouquets of colorful flowers that have persisted through the seasons.
Miles away. the network of universities treating healing as something that can be shared appears to say that Brown’s grief can be met with more than time. It can be met with lessons carried from campus to campus. rebuilt into a system of care that keeps showing up. even when what happened will never be fully explainable.
Brown University Matthew Guterl Van Wickle Gates campus shooting healing efforts National Mass Violence Center Alyssa Rheingold Micky Sharma Ohio State University UNLV shooting Michigan State Virginia Tech