D-State models smart response

The News Virginian / News Virginian
Published: September 25, 2007

Virginia Tech officials have formed a policy group to decide what to do about a series of recommendations made in the wake of Seung-Hui Cho's April 16 rampage. Perhaps the group's to-do list should include giving their counterparts at Delaware State University a call.

When shots rang out there last week - two students were wounded, one seriously - university administrators responded without blinking, locking down buildings and closing gates to keep anyone else from setting foot on campus. Within 20 minutes of the shooting, students had been told to remain in their dorm rooms. "The biggest lesson learned from the whole [Tech] situation is don't wait," university spokesman Carlos Holmes said. "Once you have an incident, start notifying the community."

That makes sense, so much so that it is difficult to understand why the same thinking did not automatically apply in Blacksburg. To be sure, Tech's failings leading up to last spring's tragedy were almost innumerable. Cho showed myriad signs of trouble, starting with his bizarre writings, and yet somehow slipped the notice of those who conceivably could have helped.

Identifying indicators of trouble and formulating policy to guide how officials deal with potentially disturbed students is the smart and logical thing to do, not only at Virginia Tech but at schools everywhere. But anyone who believes university administrators, or anyone else for that matter, can pre-empt all acts of insanity is misguided. That fact has to be considered in crisis planning.

Virginia Tech's plodding response as Cho's rampage unfolded allowed the horror to multiply. Administrators delayed notifying students for almost two hours. By the time word of danger finally got out, Cho already had opened fire inside Norris Hall, where he killed 30 people.

Delaware State was not confronted with the kind of circumstances that turned tragic at Tech. The shooting in Delaware happened at around 1 a.m., when many students were already in their dorms. Cho killed his first victims at 7:15 a.m., then began shooting in Norris about two hours later, with students and faculty already packed into classrooms. Further, Delaware State students say the shootings there were motivated either by a campus rivalry or a dispute over a card game, not the brand of deranged thinking that drove Cho.

Still, Delaware State's swift action looks to us like a model for how to respond when violence breaks out on campus. Some of the recommendations at Tech will cost millions of dollars to implement. We wonder if any will prove more useful than common sense amid crisis. Alerting students quickly to potential danger and locking down buildings to cut off access to those bent on doing harm are relatively simple steps that could prove to be life-savers. Officials at Tech and elsewhere should take notice.