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.
from the May 8, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 3
Moreover, college officials say, texting could backfire if, say, a perpetrator is tapped into the network or a text-message beep goes out while a student is hiding from a gunman.
"There are a million scenarios out there, and we've got to be smart enough to do a good job of getting information out ... without exacerbating whatever situation is ongoing," says Chris Meyer, environmental health and safety director at Texas A&M. "The idea is fairly simple, but how you implement it can get ... complicated."
But critics say that schools continue to fall short on emergency planning, and that the major reasons are lack of will or competence.
"It's pretty clear to me that the Virginia Tech campus didn't realize what was going on, and that represents an institutional failure on the part of its management for failing to anticipate and drill for this kind of circumstance," says Simson Garfinkel, a fellow at Harvard's Center for Research on Computation and Society in Cambridge, Mass. "It's a failure of leadership, not a failure of technology."
In the end, preparation is as vital as technology, says Mitchell Celaya, assistant chief of campus police at the University of California at Berkeley. To keep students in the loop, UC Berkeley uses everything from sirens and PAs to desktop alarm and blast e-mail systems. The real challenge, he says, is to enlist faculty and staff to impress upon students the need to stay in touch with campus friends during emergencies.
Technology may help students stay out of danger on campus, "but folks have to understand that these things are never going to be totally solvable," says Allen Bova, who oversees risk management at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.
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