To raise the alarm, use cellphones?

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."

More cameras, loudspeakers, and sirens

To some extent, it's already happening.

The University of Iowa is accelerating plans to install a campuswide public-address system. The University of Minnesota in Minneapolis already has hundreds of cameras pointed to all corners of campus. Some colleges are incorporating video-scanning software that brings attention to unusual behavior, such as someone falling down. The University of Washington is mulling over whether to install warning sirens across campus.

At Radford University, neighbor of Virginia Tech, officials are going over emergency plans with a "fine-tooth comb," says spokesman Rob Tucker. Radford is now installing sirens and loudspeakers across campus.

But text messaging offers a new approach, and more schools are implementing systems that can send warnings to everyone or to a specific group of people. Penn State in University Park, which fired up its text-message system in the fall, has already used it at least 20 times to announce weather warnings and campus closures.

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