Fire the VT Admin

FOX News is reporting (a rare pasttime over there) that several parents are pushing for the President of Virginia Tech to be fired due to the negligence and poor handling of the tragedy yesterday.

“My God, if someone shoots somebody there shouldbe an immediate lockdown of the campus,” said John Shourds. “Theytotally blew it. The president blew it, campus police blew it.”

I can't say I disagree.  The warning disseminated to students was a vaguely-worded email put out at 9:26am, more than two hours after the first incident and ten minutes after the second had already started.  My university sends me about 80 junk mails a day (most universities sell their student email lists to advertisers), so many student don't even check their student accounts.  Those who do have to fish through scams and spams; once they actually find the email, are we to expect them to react quickly when the email is squished between Lunch Specials and Student Club sign-ups?

No sirens until about 10am.  Not sure if there were two shooters, and if there were, they aren't pursuing anyone for the first shooting.  Tons of speculation in the press conference.

I know this kind of thing isn't supposed to happen, but parents should hold the university accountable for parts of the disaster that could have been minimized or avoided altogether.

Your thoughts?

Comments

[George]

I tend to disagree with you. You could blame the Administration but how can you warn 30,000 people in 2 hours? That's a small city. You can the professors who did not take action when reading this guy's writing, you can blame campus security, you can blame the person who admitted him to VT, you can blame immigration (as O'Reilly predictably will do) and you can blame society.

The only real blame should be the lack of gun control in the country. It's ridiculous that you can buy weapons like this. If the media does not make that their primary focus here they are a joke.

This is Bowling For Columbine in a nut shell.

[Erick]

I couldn't agree more about the gun control. That said, let me disagree with your first part and explain why I wrote what I wrote. There are several logical ways to handle a crisis of any sort and the policy works the same with any subject.

- RAs in dorms and Deans (or Dean's assistants) in each department would be notified if there was a lockdown of any sort and would proceed to lock the doors of the facility and advise people to stay in their dormrooms / classrooms.

- A campus-wide siren could be sounded to alert students to take cover or shelter or simply return to their rooms immediately.

These two simple things are already in place but either weren't utilized at all (the RAs / Assistants) or used too late (the siren was sounded around 10am, long after the first shooting and soon after the second). RA / Assistants are notified in situations ranging from weather warnings to security breaches of any kind, they just weren't yesterday. Sirens are used for weather warnings, fires, drills, and any other practices where students need to take cover. These were utilized too late.

Yes, people will inevitably seek to blame someone other than the man himself who committed these acts, but there is something to be said for having a crisis plan and this university unfortunately didn't act fast enough. Had they been efficient and proactive in their warnings (like most K-12 schools), we might be looking at a 2-person scene instead of a 33-person scene. Not blaming, but simply pointing out something that my PR textbooks will likely cite in future crisis case studies.

[Michel]

I don't think there was purposeful negligence. It was more a question of not having planned for it in advance. What the school has the obligation to do now though is to draw up a security plan for future threats. And since any school can be the next target, we should be warning the schools of our communities now, since I'm sure VA tech is now dealing with this, whereas campuses which haven't been attacked yet may still have a "can't happen to us" attitude.

I'm in Montreal, which earlier this semester had a shooting. I think almost every university in this region (there are 4 or so major universities) has had some kind of shooting in the last 30-40 years, so we're very aware of the threat. The Dawson shooting by Kimveer Gill was an example of a shooting that was handled properly: police were on the scene quickly, people evacuated, and only one death in the end. But if you're in a town or city defined first and foremost by the university that is there, you are the most susceptible in thinking you're not a target, when in fact you should be the most prepared for such an attack.

Rather than blame, let's educate.