Tragedy highlights security concerns

Author: Brian Fung

Mary Lane '10 heard the news from her mother shortly after 11 a.m. last Monday morning: a gunman was loose at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. By noon, 33 people had been fatally shot in the deadliest school shooting in American history. As soon as she found out what was happening, Lane reached for her cell phone, intending to call the roughly 30 friends she knew who attend the university.

"I couldn't get in touch with all of them, and it wasn't until later that night that I did," said Lane, who hails from Lynchburg, Va., roughly an hour's drive from Virginia Tech. According to Lane, nobody could have imagined or foreseen the disaster that broke upon the Blacksburg, Va. campus last week.

To bolster the safety of their students, and the peace of mind of their friends and family across the country, academic institutions nationwide are now addressing gaps in their security with renewed zeal. At Middlebury, last week's incident raised the stakes for an emergency planning effort that had been underway since last spring.

"We are very much in the middle of a comprehensive review of our emergency planning procedures," said Secretary of the College John Emerson.

Emerson, co-chair of the College's Emergency Planning Steering Committee, is partly responsible for developing the protocols that would take effect at Middlebury in the event of a life-threatening disaster. Earlier this year, the Committee issued a campus-wide e-mail describing how students should respond to the danger of a pandemic influenza. Other items up for inspection by the Committee include the College's technology infrastructure and communication procedures - areas of operation that played crucial roles at Virginia Tech.

"The need for the capability of instant communication throughout the community is something we definitely recognize," said Emerson, "and it's something that's been underscored by the tragedy at Virginia Tech."



Upgrading the system



Since the shootings, a number of institutions, including Middlebury, have been investigating the possibility of introducing a text message-based emergency notification system. Most students today rely more on cell phones than e-mail or the landline phones, making text messages the way to go, according to Vice President of Communications Mike McKenna.

"What we learned when we were doing the research on the pandemic flu is that students don't really check their e-mail all that much, or that the phone that's in their room isn't even turned on, because they use their cell phones all the time," said McKenna.

According to administration officials, students will be required to register their cell phones, likely via BannerWeb, starting in the fall. Should a crisis arise, the College could automatically and remotely mass-distribute text messages to students notifying them of the threat.

The new decision to collect cell phone numbers follows close on the heels of a March 21 mandate calling for students to prepare two evacuation plans in anticipation of a debilitating pandemic flu threat. A full list of emergency procedures tackling a variety of threats will be released in the fall, according to a public statement issued by President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz on April 20.

The College is also considering a campus-wide siren system to supplement the text message solution. The sirens would function much like tornado sirens that currently operate in the American Midwest.

"If that thing starts to ring," said McKenna, "you better check your e-mail or your phone because something's afoot, whatever the cause. Watch for more information to come."

In the event of a disaster, the College's main Web page would also be replaced by an emergency distress message.

But informing students of a threat and the ability to effectively respond to it require two different sets of solutions. Little in the way of a formal policy has been developed to respond to a hostile, armed gunman, according to Dean of the College Tim Spears. If a so-called "active shooter" were to begin a rampage today, chances are that students would have to wait for help as a response was developed on-the-fly. But the Emergency Planning Committee hopes to change all that.

According to Emerson, the College's protocol with state and local police "is all being reviewed and being made more efficient, clearer [and] better understood on both sides, to make sure we don't have wasted motion or wasted time in the face of the kind of emergency that [happened at Virginia Tech]."

However, it remains unclear how the Department of Public Safety will coordinate with local and state law enforcement in an emergency situation.

"Once new protocols are implemented for a notification system, Public Safety will be involved," wrote Assistant Director of Public Safety Larry Rooney in an e-mail. "But until those new protocols are decided on, it is difficult to say what Public Safety's role will be, exactly, as it relates to the notification policy."

Under current arrangements, while waiting for authorities to arrive during an armed incident, Public Safety would likely initiate a campus lockdown by activating security measures that are a feature of the electronic access-card system installed on College residence halls. Buildings unsecured by the system would be locked manually by Public Safety officers.

According to Emerson, access cards faced stiff opposition when they were first introduced at the College.

"It was a very, very controversial step in the student community, and the President and the Board [of Trustees] felt that we couldn't afford the risk of not taking that step," said Emerson. "But do we want the capability of knowing our dorms are secure and locked in a crisis situation? You bet we do."



Anticipating the unthinkable



The effectiveness of the access-card system, however, depends chiefly on proper maintenance of the College's larger technology infrastructure. Today, that infrastructure supports and protects not only electronic access cards, but also computer servers, communications equipment and financial and other sensitive information.

"Frankly," said Emerson, "in this day and age, it's hard to imagine any crisis that we might face that isn't going to involve computer services, technical services, the Web, e-mail, computer-generated telephone calls and things like that."

To safeguard against threats that could neutralize the College's primary electronic assets, auxiliary servers have been established off-campus that will allow interaction with parents, students and the media to continue at full capacity, uninterrupted.

"We could still communicate with people inside the community even if this place was shut down," said McKenna, gesturing to the honeycomb of cubicles and computers that composes the College's Department of Communications. As a member of the Emergency Planning Committee, McKenna is charged with monitoring the news, which is nearly always running on a widescreen plasma TV at one end of the honeycomb, and planning for the worst.

"It's not the kind of thing that's fun to think about," said McKenna. "It's not the favorite part of my job, but it's something I see as part of my responsibility: to watch the news and look at what happens, even if it seems unrelated to a small college in Vermont. You may not be able to prevent things from happening, but you can try to prepare for things happening."

"Preparedness" has in recent days become the watchword of college administrations across the country, and Middlebury is no exception. Here, officials now stress constant vigilance in the face of potential disaster.

"I think we all like to believe that Middlebury's rural character and comparative isolation insulate us from the kind of tragedy that happened at Virginia Tech," wrote Dean of the
College Tim Spears in an e-mail. "Unfortunately, part of the shock that follows from incidents like the one in Blacksburg is the realization that senseless killings can happen anywhere."

"In some sense, Middlebury's problem is that we see ourselves as being a safe environment," said Emerson. "I say it's a 'problem,' because if you think and assume you are safer, then you potentially expose yourself to risks. We can't afford to make the assumption that we're safer simply because we're in Addison County in rural Vermont."

Developing a full-fledged emergency plan is not going to happen overnight, according to officials. A plethora of issues must still be addressed, and once all conceivable major catastrophes have been raised for discussion, the College must then formulate plans to respond to the potential threats. Even when the plans are complete, said Emerson, the Emergency Planning Committee will still be at work, conducting annual reviews of the policies they enact.

"If the question is, 'When will we be through?' the answer is never," said Emerson. "We will never be through."



A nation mourns



The day after the killings at Virginia Tech, students in Blacksburg gathered for a candlelight vigil to mourn the victims. Communities and individuals across the nation did the same. At Middlebury, Mead Memorial Chapel saw over 70 individuals file in and out over the course of an afternoon. At the vigil's end, Gus Jordan, director of the Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life, approached the altar to blow out each of the 33 candles that had been lit in honor of the lives lost, including the gunman's.

"I reached out and took the first candle," said Jordan, "and I suddenly got this feeling, like, 'this is a person. This is a real person, and for me to blow this out symbolizes the death of that person.'"

Pausing before the candles, Jordan recognized each one before blowing it out. "This is representing a real person," he said, recounting the story. "And for me, it became real in that moment, that real lives were lost."

"What started to calm things down was when the victims' identities came out," said McKenna. "All of a sudden, there was a real human face, and a loss, and that slowed up [the media barrage], but it was really something I never expected to see."

For her part, Lane was surprised that some Middlebury students were still oblivious to the incident at Virginia Tech up to a full day after the fact. And once the community had realized what had happened, the shootings received little attention both in and out of classes.

"I was surprised how little the teachers seemed to regard this incident," said Lane, who asked one of her professors if she could postpone a presentation because she was still distraught about not being able to contact one of her friends at Virginia Tech. According to Lane, the professor told her to wing it at the end of class.

"Although academics are important," Lane said, "the way you prevent these things from happening is not to lose sight of the emotional needs of the students. From what I've heard from my friends [at Virginia Tech], for a lot of them this is going to be what they remember most about college, which is horrible, because college is supposed to be four of the best years of your life."