Articles by Levick Experts

Campuses are controlled environments in terms of size and the number of people affected by a crisis. As such, their electronic communications infrastructures are centralized, with all students, faculty, and staff assigned email addresses. It is a ready-made communications template. The challenge now is to ensure that the templates meet the needs that arise in worst-case situations – a significantly more manageable task than having to quickly create the system from scratch. 

The standard for the emergency broadcast system has been set by the Department of Homeland Security. It broadcasts text messages to all subscriber phones and emails on a range of crises, from dangerous weather conditions to terrorist attacks. There are commercially packaged emergency networks already in use throughout the country, and that are blessed and administered by local law enforcement as well as Department of Homeland Security offices. (See, for example, the Roam Secure Alert Network (www.roamsecure.net/about.php.)

Once an incident occurs, information, including precise instructions, can be broadcast to students, faculty and staff in the form of:

• Text message to university email accounts
• Pop-up messages from the network administrator to all computers logged on to the university network.
• Scrolling banner messages on the cable network television if the university operates one. If not, the messages should be run by another local operator – which means that it is essential to have an agreement with that operator now, before a crisis occurs.

University or campus police should administer the emergency broadcast system. It is essential that these police have an established working relationship with local and state law enforcement, who will feed them the appropriate information and instructions that need to be broadcast. Instructions may include evacuation specifics, shelter locations, and locations to avoid – as well as other sources where people can go for more detailed information and updates. Among such additional sources, a dark website should be constructed now so that it can be immediately posted in the event of a crisis.

It is essential to maintain “low-tech” levels of preparedness as well. Virginia Tech President Charles Steger would later lament that “14,000 people [were] en route…Where do you lock them down?” Apart from the emergency system, direct access to every local radio station would have reached some of the commuters.

All too often we see crises and tragedies spin out of control – not for want of sophisticated communications networks – but rather because administrators are simply not trained to use them effectively. To be sure, human error played a role at Virginia Tech and the misperceptions of on-campus authorities are by now well-known. “We had some reason to believe [Cho] had left campus,” said Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum, citing witnesses. “You can second-guess all day. We acted on the best information we had at the time,” which also included indications that the shootings were domestic in nature.

The point of comprehensive communications networks like the one described above is to minimize misperceptions or, at least, the damage that follows on unavoidable human error. Above a reasonable threshold of severity – and the crackle of gunfire certainly exceeds that threshold under most circumstances – the emergency system must be triggered.

In the aftermath of the shooting, UCLA, for one, reported that it has just such protocols in place to “notify the campus community in the event of any circumstances requiring emergency action, such as the closing of the campus.” Yet UCLA President Robert Dynes said that all University of California campuses would nonetheless review their security procedures in light of the shootings at Virginia Tech.

The technology exists. Virginia Tech teaches that we must be able to use it.