Reacting to threats
Last week, St. Xavier University in Chicago and Oakland University in Auburn, Hills, Mich., closed their campuses for a few days in the wake of graffiti found on each campus that threatened violence. (See Chicago Tribune article and Detroit Free Press article)
In light of the incidents, The Tribune reports, campus security experts were debating whether finding anonymous scrawls in a bathroom stall justified such a drastic security response.
What do you think? When is it appropriate to close a campus in response to a threat? Are administrators acting responsibly when they don’t close their campuses in response to a threat?
Leave a comment and give us your opinion.
April 22nd, 2008 @ 2:32 pm
Every time some punk decides to rattle the cage of the principal or central administration, he (and it is almost always a he) makes an anonymous threat, and we’re supposed to shut down the schools? I’m sure the people who wrote the graffiti in Chicago and Michigan are having a good laugh over the way they got school officials to pay attention to their pathetic cry for the spotlight.
April 29th, 2008 @ 8:50 am
9/11 brought the United States, generally, a new reality regarding security. Virginia Tech and more recently NIU have, so to speak, been the college and university 9/11. If safety and security managers on campus don’t recognize it, they should reconsider their viability to lead those agencies.
These threats, written, spoken or in the form of bomb threats seem to be our new “activated fire alarm.”
All forms of threats must be taken seriously and as credible until proven otherwise. To fail to take reasonable reactive or proactive measures should not be tolerated in this new age.