Chronicle of Higher Education
04-23-07
DARK DAY IN BLACKSBURG
Lessons From a Tragedy
By SARA LIPKA
As administrators at colleges around the country closely followed news of the
deadly shootings at Virginia Tech, many of them met on their campuses to
discuss what they could do to try to prevent a similar tragedy.
The risk managers and other officials interviewed for this article were hesitant to
criticize Virginia Tech for its response, but shaken by the incident, and by the
idea that it could have happened anywhere, they began to weigh the lessons of
last week.
Emergency-notification procedures received much of their attention. Among the
questions administrators dealt with was how to notify students and employees of
a critical incident, when to do so, and what to say — to convey necessary
information without causing widespread panic.
Efficient communication is the most important element of an institution's disaster
response, risk and crisis experts said, but getting an announcement across a
campus is a difficult task.
"Emergency-notification systems are becoming more and more important, but at
7 o'clock in the morning, how do you get a message out to everyone on your
campus that they shouldn't be there?" said Richard W. Bell, director of risk
management at Loyola University New Orleans. "We don't have an effective
method to do that."
Colleges can use e-mail, telephone-broadcast systems, online postings, and
public-address systems, but inevitably some people will not get the message, Mr.
Bell said. Students may wake up minutes before class and run out the door, and
employees may already be pulling into parking lots.
Some security experts and members of the media have argued that Virginia Tech
officials should have notified the campus sooner that there had been a shooting,
but others are unsure an earlier warning would have minimized the deaths.
Risk and safety experts scrambled last week to come up with other possible
means of thwarting a violent attack — more surveillance cameras, maybe, or
more campuswide public-address systems, which few institutions now have.
Installing speakers outdoors, as well as in all campus buildings, would be "a
massive undertaking," said Rebecca L. Adair, risk manager at Iowa State
University. "But it could very well be where we need to head."
Another measure she and others proposed was an emergency-notification
system by cellphone text message. On the day of the shootings, a Virginia Tech
spokesman said the university had been developing such a system in recent
months.
Lockdown Procedures
Over the past few decades, violence, natural disasters, and other crises on
college campuses have spurred new security measures, like swipe cards for
building entrances, emergency telephone and lighting systems, and evacuation
procedures. In considering where the Virginia Tech incident may lead, experts
also pointed to lockdowns. To respond to a gunman on the loose, they said, a
college might want to develop a plan to quickly secure a campus perimeter, as
well as dozens or hundreds of buildings.
The chief of police and director of public safety at the University of Maryland at
Baltimore, Cleveland Barnes, pointed last week to his institution's computercontrolled door-lock system, which allows the police to lock all exterior doors and
some interior doors in seconds. (The doors are locked only from the outside, to
allow people a means of escape.)
Many institutions, such as Cornell and Drexel Universities and the University of
Pennsylvania, sent campuswide e-mail messages last week to remind students
of their emergency procedures. At many colleges, officials reviewed policies with
an eye toward updating or testing them.
Meanwhile, some consultants promoted their services for ensuring campus
safety. Sheldon E. Steinbach, a prominent higher-education lawyer, criticized
them for opportunistically hawking their wares to the fearful.
As for another common fear among colleges — legal liability — one expert said
that Virginia Tech's would be limited. Families of the students and professors
who died there may sue the university, but it will be largely protected under the
legal concept of sovereign immunity.
Sovereign immunity prohibits an individual from suing a state institution like
Virginia Tech in federal court, said William E. Thro, solicitor general of the
Commonwealth of Virginia. Family members of the victims could file negligence
lawsuits in state court against the commonwealth, he said, but they could collect
no more than $100,000 each — assuming they prevailed in litigation.
Andrea Foster contributed to this report.