Virginia Tech tragedy – Andrew Careaga

Friday Five: Virginia Tech

Note: This is not the typical Friday Five. That is, this post is not formatted in typical fashion. There are not five interesting links in a bulleted list below. After what happened at Virginia Tech on Thursday, I don’t even want to think about bullets. Not even on a blog. – AC

Thursday’s shooting incident at Virginia Tech, in which a campus police officer was killed by a gunman, brought thoughts of “not again” to the minds of many in the higher ed community. Comparisons to the April 2007 massacre on that campus were unavoidable for many of us as we watched the situation unfold from afar on our Twitter streams and other social networks.

“That campus just can’t catch a break,” was one statement I read from a higher ed colleague on another campus. As though shooting incidents at Virginia Tech were commonplace, or that the two incidents, separated by more than 4 1/2 years, were somehow related.

I guess that’s how our minds work. We tend to look for patterns or trends, even in the absence of no patterns or trends. One Washington Post columnist this morning even called Thursday’s incident evidence of an “unshakeable curse” for the campus.

A little perspective, please?

Yes, the murder of Virginia Tech police officer Deriek W. Crouse is sickening and heartbreaking. There is no doubt. He was only 39, and he left behind a wife, five children and stepchildren, and many, many friends and loved ones. But to connect Thursday’s incident to the 2007 massacre of 32 people is more than unfair. It is unfair to Virginia Tech, to Officer Crouse and to the families of those 32 who died in 2007.

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Today, many of us began our mornings by scanning media reports and analyses to see what lessons we can draw from Thursday’s incident. The big question on our minds — Did Virginia Tech’s mass notification warning system work? — seems to have been answered. It did. Thank goodness, it did.

The incident was “a test like no other” of the campus’s new emergency alert system, as the Chronicle of Higher Education reported this morning. (Thanks to Karine Joly for pointing this out to me this morning.)

And yet, I worry about our campuses and the false sense of security many of us have, post-Virginia Tech massacre, that a mass notification system and “secure in place” measures will protect us from someone who is intent on doing harm.

Virginia Tech tragedy, two years later

It’s hard to believe it’s been two years since the Virginia Tech massacre of April 16, 2007. CollegeWebEditor.com’s Karine Joly, who reported on Virginia Tech’s online response to the tragedy so thoroughly two years ago, posts some somber reflections today and ponders whether microblogging, had it been so widespread then as it is now, would have changed the outcome. That’s pure speculation, of course, but it is something to think about.

Karine also asks her readers:

And, to honor the memory of the victims, why not tell us now what you’ve learned or have changed on your campus in terms of emergency notifications or security by posting a comment.

So. What has changed?

On our campus, as on practically every other campus in the nation, we have signed up for a mass notification system that relies on text, phone and email alerts in an attempt to more quickly notify students in the event of a crisis. We’ve tested the system a few times, with decent results, but these notification systems simply cannot speed the messages to a broad community via text in a fast enough time. The bandwidth simply isn’t there. It’s an improvement, but is it enough?

What else has changed? The sense that our campuses must be more open and accountable to the public, especially the families of our students, about our safety measures.

Our universities are also more involved in “profiling” students who might be at risk of committing the same sort of massacre as the disturbed gunman, Seung-Hui Cho.

This more active, early-intervention approach coincides with a change in the public mindset about just how safe our college campuses can be. Most campuses are designed as open, inviting places, so security on a broad scale — in terms of geographic coverage — is a huge challenge. But the public seems to expect us to make our grounds and our facilities as safe as possible. Which raises the question: How safe is “safe”? How much risk can we eliminate? Time magazine talks about this in a sidebar to its feature, Virginia Tech, Remembered.

Virginia Tech: one year later

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech shootings, and the university’s website is again a virtual shrine in remembrance of that day.

Inside Higher Ed looks at the impact of the Virginia Tech shootings, one year later.

Colleges and the country at large are still feeling reverberations from the gunshots on Virginia Tech’s campus, the massacre triggering national debates about gun control, mental health care, and campus security. In the past week, several colleges temporarily shut themselves down in the wake of threats to student safety.

An Associated Press report carried on the University Business website carries a similar tone. And with the anniversary fresh on our minds, now might be a good time to think about how well our emergency websites are functioning, and consider attending a webinar on that very subject.

The Northern Illinois tragedy: thoughts and links

We’ve seen far too many photographs like this over the past year. This image comes from the student vigil held Thursday night (Feb. 14, 2008) on the campus of Northern Illinois University, where a former NIU grad student opened fire in a lecture hall, killing six students (the latest count) and wounding 15 others before taking his own life. (Photo by Charles Rex Arbogast for the Associated Press and found here.)

Several higher ed bloggers have posted their thoughts on the tragedy. You can find many of them on the BlogHighEd aggregator and see additional posts as they are certain to occur throughout the day. There isn’t much I can add, other than to agree that this was a senseless tragedy. About the best I can do — the best any of us can do — is to offer our prayers and support to the families of the victims.

Here are a few higher ed blog posts worth noting:

Like me, Brad J. Ward (one of the guys behind BlogHighEd) did a quick post Thursday night as soon as he found out about the tragedy. “Sitting here in class and saw “17 shot on Campus” on laptop screen in row in front of me. Pulled up Twitter and sure enough Andrew Careaga was already on the story with a CNN link.This one hits a little too close to home.”
Karine Joly does a nice job reviewing NIU’s crisis response as it played out on the campus’s website yesterday and today. “There are some blog posts I would rather not write,” Karine explains. “This is one of them, but as I did at the time of the Virginia Tech Tragedy, I think it’s important for the higher ed web and communication community to keep a record of the way NIU is handling this tragic event.” I agree, on both counts. It appears that the university’s response was solid, but that’s little consolation to the families of the victims. Thank you, Karine, for having the composure to give us a quick but solid analysis of NIU’s online communications.
In A Somber Friday, Deanna Woolf posts some poignant thoughts in response to the tragedy that everyone should read. Go ahead. It’ll take less than two minutes. And while you’re there, why not leave a note to let Deanna and her readers know that you’re keeping the NIU community in your thoughts and prayers?

Some media links worth noting:

The tragedy in pictures, via BBC News.
The shooter was apparently an award-winning grad student while at NIU who served as an officer for a criminal justice student group, a fact that just makes the story more enigmatic.
‘It’s unlikely that anyone’ could have stopped shooter, a Chicago Sun-Times article focusing on the campus security angle.
Brace yourselves for more media attention on our campus security systems. Stories in today’s Kansas City Star, Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader and many other media outlets are all taking the same angle. Look for more to follow suit.

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Virginia Tech prof named ‘most inspiring’ person of ’07

From the Chronicle News Blog: spirituality website Beliefnet has named
Virginia Tech’s Liviu Librescu as its Most Inspiring Person of the Year for 2007, based on readers’ votes. Librescu, you may recall, is the Romanian-born Holocaust survivor who had barricaded the door of his classroom with his body and told his students to jump out of windows when he saw gunman Seung-Hui Cho trying to make his way in. Because of his actions, all but one of his students survived the attack. “Beliefnet readers overwhelmingly voted for Librescu, amazed by his heroic actions that fateful day.”

Librescu was one of the 31 victims of Cho’s shooting spree. But his spirit lives on. Beliefnet reports:

One of Librescu’s students, Andrey Andreyev, tried to get him to flee with the rest of the class, but the 76-year-old professor refused. As Andreyev made his way out of the window, he turned and saw Librescu still blocking the door.

In a recent interview with Beliefnet, Andreyev, 20, says he plans to follow in his research advisor’s footsteps by becoming a professor himself. “What he did was an unbelievable thing,” said Andreyev. “But, what he did, to me, has always been just a final proof of what he was like as a person. He would always do anything for his students.”

Inspiring.

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