Personal reflections on the NIU shooting

By Michael K. Honey, Haley Professor of Humanities

Northern Illinois University is my alma mater. That's where I got my PhD, and the buildings shown on the news are my old haunts. NIU is a small, almost intimate campus, with the main buildings in a cluster. My niece just went there to do research at the library for her PhD. DeKalb is a semi-rural, almost quaint town, built as the railroads moved west. The flying ear of corn along the roadside signals the hybrid DeKalb corn, and maybe some of you have seen that in the Midwest farm country. It is horrifying and deeply saddening that another college massacre would occur here. On April 8, 1968, after Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis, his widow, Coretta Scott King, wondered how long "before we can have a free and true and peaceful society...how long will it take?"