Colleges' Safety and Risk-Management Experts Begin Looking for Lessons in Virginia Tech Shootings

By SARA LIPKA

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Administrators at colleges around the country closely followed news of the deadly shootings at Virginia Tech on Monday, and campus officials responsible for safety, crisis planning, and risk management began weighing the lessons of the tragedy.

Efficient communication is the most important element of an institution's disaster response, risk experts said, but getting an announcement across a campus is a difficult task. At Virginia Tech, the first shootings happened early enough that staff members who would typically handle such announcements may not have been in their offices yet.

"Emergency notification systems are becoming more and more important, but at 7 o'clock in the morning, how do you get a message out to everyone on your campus that they shouldn't be there?" asked Richard W. Bell, director of risk management at Loyola University New Orleans. "We don't have an effective method to do that."

Administrators can use e-mail, telephone-broadcast systems, online postings, and public-address systems -- where facilities are equipped with them -- but inevitably many people will not get the message. Students may wake up minutes before class and run out the door, and employees may already be on their way or pulling into parking lots.

Virginia Tech officials said on Monday that they initially believed that the first two shootings, in West Ambler Johnston Hall, were an isolated domestic incident, so they did not immediately issue a campuswide warning. But it is not clear that such a warning would have helped the victims of the second spate of shootings.

"It's terrifying," said Mr. Bell, referring to the many vulnerable targets a gunman could attack -- classrooms, for example, or offices that serve large numbers of students. "It only takes seconds to do what he did in each of those instances," he said. "Unless there is a police officer at the right place at the right time, he's not going to intercept someone who wants to cause that kind of damage."

Many universities have taken measures in recent years to identify students who show early signs of dangerous behavior. At the University of Arizona, where a nursing student killed three instructors and himself in 2002, administrators formed a behavioral-assessment committee to discuss possible threats to campus safety.

"The conventional wisdom out there is that oftentimes there are red flags and behavioral indicators that people with the proper training can identify," said Steven C. Holland, director of risk management and safety at Arizona. The committee includes representatives from the campus police department, the counseling center, and human resources, in addition to other university units.

Virginia Tech officials had not said on Monday night whether the gunman or gunmen were students. "Whether or not anyone had a heads-up about this guy and his potential behavior is going to be one of the main questions, and what could they have done if they had that heads-up," said Mr. Bell, of Loyola.

Even if administrators perceive a threat, he said, they cannot always take preventive action. A college may seek a restraining order, but a court may not necessarily grant it. "They are, most of the time, not willing to do that unless there's some evidence that the student is going to cause some harm," he said.

Once the harm is done, a college should offer intensive counseling to students and employees, risk managers said. But they should provide the counseling carefully.

"A lot of people will just show up to help," said Mr. Holland. "It's a recipe for making things worse if you don't have very consistent criteria and selection processes," he said. "You want to let them help, but you have to make sure they are properly qualified." After the nursing-school shootings at Arizona, counselors followed the Critical Incident Stress Management model, a structured form of crisis intervention.

Following that incident, neither any victims' families nor any witnesses to the killings filed claims against the university, but experts said Monday that it was too early to know whether the same will be true in the Virginia Tech case. Families of the victims, the experts said, could allege that the university had failed to prevent the incident from happening, or to handle it effectively as it unfolded.

But Allen J. Bova, who is president of the University Risk Management and Insurance Association and director of risk management and insurance at Cornell University, said Virginia Tech officials seemed to be responding as well as possible.

"From what I understand, the campus tried to take all appropriate measures to respond to this incident," he said. "It seems like they had an emergency plan, and they tried to put it into place."

A university could try to avoid a tragedy like Monday's by adopting airport-style security, he said, but such a shift would not be in the best interests of higher education.

"As a country we have certain decisions to make about how much freedom we want to enjoy," he said. "This type of thing could have happened anywhere."