‘We are a small, tight-knit community’: Emerson president reflects on losing a student and a professor within a month
“We are a small and caring commonwealth of learning, and so when these types of tragic events occur, they have an extraordinary impact on our faculty and staff and students and even trustees."
Losing a student is enough to devastate any college or university community. Now, Emerson College faculty, staff, and students are dealing not just with the death of sophomore Dan Hollis earlier this month, but also that of professor Moses Shumow.The timeframe of the losses is short — Hollis died Oct. 2 of brain injuries sustained during an altercation in Allston on Sept. 28; Shumow passed away after being struck by a commuter rail train in Beverly Tuesday morning. The college is just halfway through its first term of the academic year, college President M. Lee Pelton said in an interview with Boston.com.“We are a small and caring commonwealth of learning, and so when these types of tragic events occur, they have an extraordinary impact on our faculty and staff and students, and even trustees,” he said Wednesday. “And because we are a small, tight-knit community, we tend to come together and rally around tragic losses in our community.”College counseling services are available to the community, and space has been designated for faculty that need space to grieve and comfort each other, according to Pelton.“We are a resilient community, we also recognize that different people respond to tragedy and grief in different ways,” he said. “For some, there’s the obvious external expression of grief, for others less so, but there is a kind of somberness this week, and there is a shock of us losing a student who was loved by many and a faculty member who was equally loved and respected.”
Emerson College President M. Lee Pelton speaks with reporters outside of the Tufte Building in Boston after the vigil for sophomore Daniel Hollis on Oct. 3.
Along with attention to grieving students, faculty, and staff, Pelton said the college has also turned its attention to the families of Hollis and Shumow. Hollis left behind his parents and sister; Shumow had a wife and three children.
“They both had just extraordinary, wonderful families so our thoughts mostly are turned towards supporting them,” he said.
Pelton has been a college president for 20 years — he spent 13 years as president of Willamette University before being chosen to lead Emerson in 2011 — and has worked in higher education before that. Thinking back on his career, he said he hasn’t dealt with a situation quite like this one. He served as a dean at Colgate University when a plane five students were on went down in Scotland in 1988, calling that incident “cataclysmic. This is different because of the two separate incidents of loss.
“I can’t recall a time within a month, four weeks, that both a student and a faculty member die in two separate occasions,” he said.
Update: A GoFundMe campaign has been set up to benefit the Shumow family.
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