Campus Security Under the Microscope

A university president’s worst nightmare can take any number of forms. The lone shooter run amok on campus. The freight-train sound of a tornado bearing down on a dormitory. A river cresting its banks, about to flood a college town. From robberies and assaults to fires and chemical spills, the list goes on and on.

Truth be told, college leaders have always had an ample supply of apprehensions significant enough to keep them awake at night. Lately, though, college leaders have seen their institutions’ safety and security threatened in ways their predecessors couldn’t imagine.

Virginia Tech and, more recently, Northern Illinois University have experienced horrific, well-publicized mass murders. In March, UCLA and the Regents of the University of California sued animal-rights groups to stop what a statement called “a campaign of terrorism, vandalism and menacing threats directed at faculty and administrators.” The events of 9/11 directly affected college and university life in countless significant ways—from the disrupted operations of several universities near the Twin Towers, to restrictions on visas for foreign students, to concerns about laboratory safety and dissemination of sensitive research results—to name a few that remain in the minds of trustees, presidents, faculty, staff, and alumni.

Colleges also continue to fall victim to natural disasters. In February, a tornado damaged 17 buildings on the campus of Tennessee’s Union University, destroying 40 percent of the campus’s dormitory space. Nearly 60 colleges and universities were affected by hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, according to CampusRelief. org, a Web site created to support recovery efforts.

Universities today also must worry about the possibility of chemical spills, flu pandemics, and cyber attacks on data. That’s all in addition, of course, to the various types of crimes that are a fact of daily life on many campuses. This panoply of challenges raises the campus security stakes significantly. As a package, they somehow constitute an increasingly palpable set of threats to institutional equilibrium.

The bottom line? Campus security and safety concerns have risen to the top of college and university priority lists—and to the top of the agenda for both presidents and trustees.

As shocking as some of the recent events have been, they also have had some positive effects, many observers say. Most campuses today are better prepared to deal with emergencies than they were just a few years ago. Many individual campuses have devoted a great deal of insightful thought to emergency planning. And strategies borne of hard lessons learned on individual campuses are beginning to be shared widely across the whole of higher education.

Lessons for Campuses

James A. Hyatt was the executive vice president and chief operating officer at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007—the day when Seung-Hui Cho killed 27 students and five faculty members, wounded 17 other people, and then committed suicide. After that event, Virginia Tech President Charles W. Steger asked Hyatt to chair a study of the school’s emergency preparedness—work that engaged a cross-section of university staff and that also studied the university’s readiness compared to other similar institutions.

On the heels of the Virginia Tech study, the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) asked Hyatt for ideas about what steps it might take to address campus security.

“I thought it would be good if we were able to do a similar study nationally,” Hyatt says, “and to do it from an all-threats approach,” which was also the scope of the review at Virginia Tech. That proved the genesis of a major national initiative—the National Campus Safety and Security Project—based at the business-officers group and announced in February. The project will pool knowledge from across higher education on a wide range of campus safety and security issues. The Association of Governing Boards has joined in that project, as have several other associations.

“The thing that’s exciting about this is that it’s an inter-associational project,” Hyatt says. “So as we approach the institutions, we’re looking at it from a whole variety of perspectives with participation of all the professional associations.”

Lessons for Leaders

Hyatt’s experiences at Virginia Tech gave him some insights about the respective roles of university presidents and trustees in campus security: “I think the board needs to be assured that there is a plan in place, but delegate to the president responsibility for safeguarding the institution.” Hyatt counsels trustees to try to take a broad perspective. “They are trustees of the institution, and they’re responsible for what happens within the institution,” he says. “They don’t want to micro-manage. On the other hand, they want to be informed.”

How can trustees become educated about the institution’s preparations for an emergency?

“I’d want to understand that there is a plan in place, that the plan is exercised on a regular basis,” Hyatt says. “The kind of questions that board members want to ask: Is there an emergency-response plan? Is there an emergency-response team? Who chairs the team? Who are the members of the team? Are there drills? And who’s involved in doing that?”

Another critical dimension, Hyatt believes, is benchmarking to see how an institution’s plans compare to what peer institutions are doing; such comparisons are what the National Campus Safety and Security Project is developing at the national level.

Hyatt believes the college or university president has a significant obligation to report back to the trustees regularly on the institution’s progress in developing plans to prevent an emergency if possible and to address one when it arises.

Like Virginia Tech, Delaware State University (DSU) has seen a student turn a gun on other students. A DSU student has been charged with shooting two 17-year-old students on campus in the early hours of September 21, 2007. One victim, Shalita Middleton, died several weeks later as a result of her wounds.

As fate would have it, the incident proved the first test of a plan Delaware State had developed after the Virginia Tech shootings. Within minutes after the first report of the incident, the campus began informing staff in residence life and student affairs. Within two hours, students were effectively confined to their dormitories, and the campus was closed. Written warnings were posted shortly after that, and before dawn that day, notices were posted on the university Web site and emergency phone line.

Since the incident on September 21, campus discussions at Delaware State have focused on what more the institution might do to head off future crises, says President Allen L. Sessoms. “What we have been thinking about here, and I think in general what presidents and trustees think about,” Sessoms says, “is how you build a robust system of notification and of prevention that gives you, to the extent possible, some sort of protection for the students, in the event something happens. But you also want to put in place a process that may detect potential problems and find solutions before those problems manifest themselves.”

As an event such as a shooting unfolds, Sessoms believes it is important for trustees to let the president and his or her staff—and the police—manage the situation. “During an event,” he says, “what you want, mostly, is everybody to stay away.”

Sessoms also suggests that the president not be the point person in speaking about an incident. Rather, he advocates delegating that responsibility to a communications officer. “There should be one voice for the university only, and that should be the one who is trained in knowing what to say,” he says. “It should be somebody there who’s used to being on TV, who’s trained to deal with it.”

One of Sessoms’ concerns is that “when the president says something, it’s hard to take it back,” and anything said can prompt lawsuits. “That’s true with the board as well,” he says. Better to have as a spokesperson someone who is “very good and very professional,” but who can also amend what is said publicly—perhaps more readily than can a president or trustee—as new facts become known.

Sessoms believes that boards have a strong role to play in helping an institution develop a preparedness plan. “What you need the board interaction on,” he says, “is how you try to prevent” events from happening in the first place. “And when something happens, how do you have in place the most robust system to respond appropriately to it? Those are not trivial things in this environment.”

Mental-Health Challenges

Sessoms attributes part of the shadow now hanging over colleges and universities to a troubling increase in students with personal problems. “We have so many kids at colleges and universities now who have issues related to problems in their family, issues related to the ability to pay for college, kids working two, sometimes three jobs. Kids with families are also under some stress. You also have a lot of kids who are on medication. And when they get away from home, sometimes they just go off it. They don’t monitor themselves particularly carefully.”

Part of the solution, he believes, is a system that would identify at-risk students early and get them the help they need. As one example, he suggests an intervention that would occur “when something pops up on the radar screen, when some family member or staff member notices that a student has a particular problem, whatever that problem is.” The intent would be to see that the student gets intensive counseling very quickly, Sessoms says, in order to get some advice on how best to deal with the problem “before the kid gets desperate.”

Those needs, Sessoms adds, will require new allocations of money—no small feat in any economy, but particularly challenging in today’s era of constrained financial resources. “The top of your business is educating the kids, trying to deliver high-quality coursework, in a way that’s flexible and useful for them, and making sure you can get them educated to the point where they’re going to be successful in the world,” Sessoms says.

“There’s nothing that we’re doing that’s overfunded, and there’s nothing that we’re doing that we don’t have to do,” he adds. However, when issues like student mental health come to the foreground, “you have to make that a higher priority,” he notes, and somehow balance that new need with equally pressing demands. “Those are policy decisions,” he adds, and “some of them are not easy.”

Similar concerns are also front and center in the University of California system, which on March 12 released a task force’s study of campus-security and student mental-health issues. Urging better campus communications for emergencies and improved training for public-safety officers, the report also recommends more funding for mental health and the creation of multidisciplinary behavioral-management teams at each UC campus. The task force also suggests a close look at privacy policies and laws, which have been seen as a roadblock to intervention when a student is troubled.

Students face “different stresses and pressures these days,” says UC spokesperson Jennifer Ward. “What that means is that, more than ever, the [mental health] services that the campuses provide are feeling a pretty big strain.” While each UC campus has created a blueprint for action on student mental health, funding for such programs in the face of state budget constraints “is just really going to be a challenge,” she says. In the meantime, the system has increased the UC registration fee to generate an additional $4 million that is earmarked for mental health.

One positive outcome from increased campus awareness of security and safety issues is that institutions and organizations are starting to share more ideas for meeting challenges in these areas. The National Campus Safety and Security Project is one such resource. In addition, in April the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators planned to release a major report, Blueprint for Safer Campuses. The Virginia Tech Review Panel, appointed by Virginia Governor Timothy M. Kaine to investigate the shootings there, delivered its report last August; the full text is available online at www.vtreviewpanel.org. A page available on the Web site of the American Council on Education raises “Questions Campus Leaders Should Ask About Security and Emergency Preparedness,” with links to related resources.

Campus discussions about safety and security are not “sexy,” Allen Sessoms says, but the issues require serious “deliberation and discussion.” They require the expenditure of time and energy to understand the needs “and come up with sensible solutions.” Sessoms knows that no school can prevent the unthinkable, but he believes every institution needs to position itself so that, when necessary, it can respond in the best way possible.

“Ultimately,” he says, “what you want to be able to say to a parent is, ‘Your student is as safe here as anywhere else. And we work very hard to prevent things from happening.’”

Project Plans Self- Assessment Tool

The National Campus Safety and Security Project is designed to closely examine high-risk threats that campuses face, from shootings and terrorist attacks to natural disasters, pandemics, and even cyber attacks. The idea is to conduct a comprehensive national review of what colleges are doing to prepare for such events, and then distribute that information in the form of guidance that can inform institutional emergency preparedness plans. James A. Hyatt, retired former executive vice president of Virginia Tech University, heads the NACUBO-based project.

The project approaches campus security from “an all-hazard perspective,” Hyatt says, and seeks to “determine what institutions need to do to be prepared.” One deliverable will be a self-assessment tool through which individual colleges will be able to see how well prepared they are compared to standardized measures. It also will allow them, Hyatt says, “to think about areas they need to improve in.”

The project will start by collecting information from around the country about how colleges prepare for emergencies. A survey will examine campus safety and security broadly—looking at impacts, for example, on public safety, technology and communications, risk management, and legal policy. Site visits to selected institutions will dig more deeply into practices and policies at a sampling of different types of colleges and universities. Information gathered from these activities will be reported in project publications and on the Web, and will also inform the development of the campus self-assessment tool. The project will culminate in a national symposium on campus safety and security.

Besides the active engagement of NACUBO and AGB, participation by associations of university attorneys, insurers, campus police, personnel officers, and information-technology experts will help ensure that the project engages campus leaders across a wide spectrum of perspectives and responsibilities, Hyatt indicated. The project has been endorsed by the American Council on Education and five other major higher-education associations representing college and university presidents.