The call came at 2 a.m. and I answered the phone in a fog.

“Hello?”

“Dr. Ruehlmann, this is Lina. I’m sorry to bother you at home but I thought you should know what has happened.”

Lina Green is associate dean of students at Virginia Wesleyan College, where I work I’m adviser to The Marlin Chronicle, the campus newspaper. She sounded upset.

“Yes?”

“Someone has tried to set fire to the student newspaper offices.”

“What?”

(That would be a feature way to begin.)

Fires were set Monday in the publications area of Village I and at the office door of a human services instructor. Approximately 200 residents were evacuated at 1:35 a.m.

“It wasn’t a pull,” said resident assistant Kerry Strnad to students huddled around the flagpoles. “This is the real deal.”

Virginia Beach firefighters arrived and both fires were extinguished quickly; damage was estimated at $3,000.

(That would be a news way to begin.)

Either way, it’s all about story, and the feature way does this one better justice. Why would anyone want to burn The Marlin Chronicle? We’ll speculate: Earlier that day the paper came out with a front-page story about a brawl that sent two students to the hospital. The lead by Cynthia Wells read:

“Twenty-three male athletes from the baseball, basketball and lacrosse teams have received athletic suspensions for their roles in an on-campus fight Jan. 18. Four non-athletes involved in the fight received letters of reprimand. The 11 baseball players, seven basketball players and five lacrosse players received punishments ranging from letters of reprimand to disciplinary probation.

“All athletes involved received suspensions ranging from two to 15 games and are required to perform at least 25 hours of community service.”

There was more:

“The brawl occurred on the soccer field between Villages I and II around 11:30 p.m. following a scuffle that began at Winner’s Sports Bar. Several of the players in the bar were underage and many admitted during the arbitration hearing to drinking that night prior to the fight.”

It wasn’t one of those mythic John Wayne western bar fights where everybody whales away to no ultimately serious consequence. The Chronicle reported that one student received nine stitches in his face and restorative plastic surgery. Another suffered bruised ribs and required staples in his head.

The story went on to recount the details and note that 25 hours of community service assigned to each player would be completed through a group project directed in part by the human services instructor whose door would be torched.

The fires might have been devastating in this building that also housed students had not Chronicle copyeditor Jaime Kimpton, returning barefooted from a late date with a ceramics project, smelled, then saw smoke. She turned in the alarm. More than offices was saved. There could be, a reasonable person might reflect, a connection between the brawl story and the evident reprisals for it. If the idea was to daunt the student press, it didn’t work. The next issue of The Marlin Chronicle provided a front-page photo of the newspaper office with a police tape stretched across it.

The headline: “ARSON STRIKES AT VIRGINIA WESLEYAN.”

Kimpton wrote the story.

So much for intimidation.

Over the years, The Marlin Chronicle had seen its share of adversity. There was the time the roof fell in and the little warren of offices was flooded, ruining documents and equipment. There was the time somebody – perhaps in reaction to unsettling information on the front page – removed an entire issue from the racks; they learned with the arsonists that, now that The Chronicle is online, the news cannot be stolen. And of course there were the ongoing times of critical letters and calls, anonymous and otherwise.

In the lyrical words of James Taylor, we’ve seen fire and we’ve seen rain.

But our campus paper has always done its best to meet the challenge of serving its purpose on deadline.

Pasting It Together

Students stared at the TV monitor in the Grill, poleaxed by what they saw.

Playing again was the inexorable image of an airliner moving in a slow loop to drill the second of the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Flame bloomed.

There was no time to process this. The students were no longer sitting at their tables over morning coffee but standing six deep before the baleful eye of MSNBC when the whole pile went down in a cloud of hell, the spire at the top plummeting like an arrow in the smoke.

“Oh, shit!” someone said.

It was a cry for help.

And that image too was replaying endlessly as down the hall in Bray Village at Virginia Wesleyan College Mike Touhill, editor of the campus newspaper, unlocked the door to The Marlin Chronicle newsroom.

This day was deadline, and in an unprecedented effort, The Chronicle staff had already put their pages together so the issue stood ready except for the polishing a full day early. Time to tear them up.

Touhill, a senior communications major, had relatives in New York; the lines were jammed.

In the Grill, some numb, some in tears, students were joining hands in a circle of prayer.

The masthead of the paper carried a statement signed by the president of the college that said student editors have the authority to make all content decisions and bear the responsibility for those decisions.

Here as elsewhere, the First Amendment remained an important difference between America and its enemies.

Touhill reached out to his staff. A newspaper, he believed, is the glue that holds a community together. Reflects it, informs it.

The father of freshman Chanell Roach worked in downtown Manhattan; he would be all right. The daughter of psychology professor Margaret Zimmerman worked at the Pentagon; she would be all right.

Others would not be.

“You hear your parents talk about where they were when Kennedy was shot, or your grandparents when they found out about Pearl Harbor,” Touhill would write. “For our generation it will be Sept. 11, 2001. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you are from, the magnitude of this destruction will last forever. . . .”

After the classes and the calls, the huddles and the horror, Chronicle community editor Kelly Rust and staff writer Courtney Coe teamed up to pull together data and quotes for the remaking front page. Photo editor Amylynn Coddington took pictures at a prayer vigil on Foster Field. One youth’s bowed head was wrapped in a scarf that bore the stars and stripes. Arts editor Erika Johnson, using an improvised straight edge, sketched an American flag at half mast.

“Sept. 11, 2001, was a day when Americans joined together as a nation to support one another in a time of grief,” Touhill would write. “Finding a person affected by the disaster was easy; finding someone to lean on was even easier. The sense of belonging to a community was never more comforting, and for students hundreds of miles away from their families, it was our Virginia Wesleyan College community. . . .”

Opinion editor Sara Steil talked to peers, took their pictures with a battered Polaroid. “I used to live in New York,” said sophomore Marc Brown, “and it’s hard to think of New York without the World Trade Center.”

The Chronicle staff had found a small mercy in the journalist’s role to document in the
face of disaster, at once a close connection to community and a temporary distraction from tears.

“I don’t want to die,” said senior Emily Bowling. “I’m ready for the bombs to start dropping. I just want to find my dad.”

She would.

And Touhill would write, “As news spreads of this tragedy, a small epicenter of support sprang up on our campus. Residence life staff, counselors, coaches, faculty and students cared for each other as a family would, enabling all to cope with pain. Hours passed before students could contact relatives and loved ones, leaving them no choice but to turn to others. . . .”

By 11 p.m. the stories and the pictures were in and the pages were being remade. Features and sports had gone under the eyes of editors Rebecca Desjardins, Josh Hill and Victoria Scavo, then to those of copyeditor Elizabeth Calhoun. When a computer failed, web editor Linda DeRosa brought it back.

At midnight news editor Emily McLaughlin bent before the screen to put together Page One. Then and only then did Touhill sit down to craft the staff editorial.

“More questions will come, before most answers,” he wrote, “and it is during this time that we as a community and as a nation must unite and prove to the world we are stronger than the ones who would try to intimidate us. It is here that our small community stands tall. Embrace it and each other.”

Then he stood behind McLaughlin as she punched in the banner headline.

“Make it bigger, Emily,” Touhill said. “Make it bigger.”

It read: “CAMPUS MOURNS.”

Still Doing Our Part

It has been a difficult time for America domestically and abroad in the wake of 9/11. I have never been prouder of student journalists, who found their roles recounting, assessing and, ultimately, sustaining the effects of history on campus communities all over the country. These effects have been profound and have informed our sense of identity as citizens and active supporters of the First Amendment.

So where are we now?

Early on, we at The Marlin Chronicle felt the need to belong to connect ourselves with the journalism profession at large. Our journalism program started on a shoestring at Virginia Wesleyan College. We had no professional affiliation, and as a daytime student body of 1,200, we were too small to qualify for full membership in most national organizations. Then we discovered the Society for Collegiate Journalists.

SCJ gave us important journalistic perspectives beyond the campus. It provided publications, opportunities for awards and – above all – encouragement. SCJ reminded us that the tradition of the organization and, indeed, the profession, is service, and it focused our sense of obligation.

In answer to the SCJ call, our chapter has assisted grade school and high school publications, sponsored campus-wide professional speakers, provided a helping presence at campus functions and worked at making our own publications better. We have had fun, too, with field trips and picnics and special programs.

SCJ has made an important difference in our lives at Virginia Wesleyan College, and I believe it can do the same for the membership at your campus community. The only way to repay that gift is to pass it on. For information on how you can become a part of SCJ, consult our website at www.scj.us, e-mail us at wjruehlmann@vwc.edu, or write me, Dr. Bill Ruehlmann, Executive Director, The Society for Collegiate Journalists, Virginia Wesleyan College, 1584 Wesleyan Dr., Norfolk, VA 23502.

Yours for the future,
Bill R.