SEAHO Report - Summer 2024 - 41

Unsettling:
A Campus View for 27 Years
and Counting
By Holly Shikano, Georgia Tech
In the winter 2024 issue of the SEAHO Report, you got to meet me in my article " Settling In. " That article
focused on me settling into the college life-style, but campus life can sometimes be unsettling. Students can
be consumed with classes, extra-curriculars, relationships and financial pressures. Our campuses often have
their own governance, self-run police departments, their own conduct systems and politics. As much as we try
to insulate our communities, we are impacted by what happens in the U.S. and the world.
I remember many unsettling times bleeding onto the campuses I worked on. As 24-hour news became a
thing, the impact of outside events and occurrences hit harder and louder than I remember from my own
collegiate days. From near-campus crimes to social movements and protests, almost all my memories of
society's crises are linked to how the campus I was on- University of Florida, Florida State, the University of
Evansville, Georgia Tech-experienced the various issues.
Having lived on campuses from 1988-2008 has created for me a unique understanding of how things
impact students and how campus communities can be both safety nets or safe havens, but also cauldrons of
discontent. Technology has changed drastically as the University of Florida opened its first computer lab when
I was there in the late 80's to early 90s and now we all carry computers in the form of cell phones everywhere
we go. Since then, ATM machines, cell phones, the iPhone, and other devices are standard. And of course,
social media both connects and disconnects us.
Tiananmen Square, June 1989, occurred my first summer home from college and I quickly became an Asian
History major after seeing the one gentleman stop the line of tanks dead in their tracks for what seemed like
hours. The image is seared into my mind.
The first global event I recall experiencing while at college was the joy of
watching the fall of the Berlin Wall when Ronald Reagan said to the Russian
leader, " Tear that wall down " on June 12, 1987. Our Buckman Hall council
meeting had just ended and we were changing the channel to get to Star
Trek, The Next Generation and the news interrupted every channel with the
Berlin Wall coming down. We watched in disbelief as the Iron Curtain we
had been taught to fear through Hollywood movies was weakening.
Crimes can also invade our campus community. I was a student at University of Florida in the fall of 1990 when
Danny Rollings murdered 4 first-year students and a bouncer in the span of about 5 days the first week of
classes. It was a typical August sauna day in Gainesville, when you step out of the shower and dry off, only to
experience the stickiness of Florida heat in a building with no AC. I was walking to class and some students
were passing out the Alligator Extra, Something I had never seen before. I took one but didn't read it till I
sat down in my classroom. Two students had been found dead, it said. Three more young people would lose
everything before Friday.
41

https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2019/11/07/berlin-30th-anniversary-since-wall-came-down-lc-lon-orig.cnn

SEAHO Report - Summer 2024

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