By Emily Glazer
The Daily Northwestern
In the aftermath of the shootings at Virginia Tech, Northwestern administrators said they are working on ways to expedite campuswide communication in emergencies using text messaging or loudspeaker announcements.
Thirty-three people, including the gunman, were killed in last Monday’s shootings on the Blacksburg, Va., campus..
The day after the tragedy, NU President Henry Bienen sent out a campuswide e-mail offering his condolences to the families and friends of the victims at Virginia Tech.
But on Friday, Bienen said the bulk e-mail was “cumbersome” and the university is making a priority of looking at how to improve the speed of communication.
“(E-mail) wouldn’t suffice in an emergency,” he said.
In the past, NU officials have also reported incidents such as assaults or muggings via alerts on HereAndNow.
Bienen said he thought communicating through the Internet is not the best method because students would only receive the message if they had immediate access to computers.
“The best way would be cell phones and text messaging and that sort of thing,” he said. “There are vendors who do that, so that’s something we’re looking at.”
Medill sophomore Vinika Porwal said she checked her e-mail Tuesday evening and did not think it would be a fast enough method of communication in the event the university needed to evacuate the school.
“I would’ve preferred something more direct like loudspeakers or a siren,” she said.
Bienen said the university is capable of such a system.
“The other way which we are reasonably set up for is a ‘bullhorn go around campus’ type of thing,” he said.
Weinberg sophomore Jennifer Held said the best way to reach her in an emergency would be by sending a text message or calling her.
“I don’t think e-mail is the best,” she said. “All of our inboxes are already cluttered with messages from listservs.”
Held said she thought text messaging would be “direct enough” so that between receiving text messages and word of mouth, “everyone would get the message in a respectable amount of time.”
Alan Cubbage, vice president for university relations, said NU is trying to figure out the best way to reach students in an emergency.
“We have a lot of technology at our disposal and I’m just trying to frankly get a better sense of the best way to reach our audience,” he said.
Bienen said there are a number of different types of emergencies and different probabilities of them occurring at NU.
“(In an emergency), you’d want to be able to do an evacuation and communicate with people,” he said. “So we have things in place, but we certainly went back (after the Virginia Tech shootings) and started looking at them all again to see how good they are, how quick they are.”
Bienen said although people do not like hearing that NU has an open campus, the reality is that it does.
“You don’t want to turn them into Army camps, but they are very hard places to shut down quickly because they have scattered populations that are all over a fairly extensive area,” he said. “It’s not Oklahoma or Texas in space, but it is what it is nonetheless.”
Reach Emily Glazer at [email protected].
