To raise the alarm, use cellphones?
Colleges weigh text messaging as a tool to warn students of danger, in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings.
By Patrik Jonsson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the May 8, 2007 edition
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Blacksburg, Va. - A gunman is potentially loose on campus for at least two hours as police scramble on their CB radios to find him. Yet students, 94 percent of whom carry cellphones, unsuspectingly don their backpacks and go to class.
Could technology – specifically, emergency text messages via cellphones – have saved some of the 33 lives lost last month at Virginia Tech?
That question is burning across college campuses since the shootings, as schools from California to the Carolinas scramble to fine-tune their incident-response systems in part by tapping into the instant-message culture of today's college generation.
But in that quest, experts say, colleges face privacy and liability concerns, as well as the basic question of whether subtle "social alarms" such as texting are really better at warning of a possible emergency than are the cold-war-era siren and the under-the-desk-drill.
"A lot of schools are badly prepared, and they are frantic to figure out a system for emergencies after what happened at Virginia Tech," says Ming Chow, who teaches a class at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., called "Security, Privacy, and Politics in the Computer Age."
A glance across Virginia Tech's verdant campus reveals the obvious: Though students are spread out across the 2,600-acre campus, they are very connected, with their cellphones as constant companions. The ease of communication has led to higher expectations for communication among both students and parents, as evidenced by the 2007 Survey on College Parent Experiences that showed 1 in 3 college parents chats with his or her child once a day or more.
"I think the expectation now is, why didn't you call me?" says Howard Udell, CEO of Saf-T-Net AlertNow, an emergency text-messaging service in Raleigh, N.C. "Schools now ... have to take control of communication."
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