Though Washington University’s emergency text-messaging system (WUText) has been scarcely publicized outside of an e-mail that students received earlier in the year, students ought to sign up for it as soon as possible, especially in light of successful uses of similar systems in the past month.

At St. John’s University in New York just a week ago, students were alerted of the presence of a masked freshman with an allegedly loaded rifle on campus. Within 18 minutes of the threat’s arrival on campus, a text message had been sent out to thousands of students warning them of the gunman.

At the University of Wisconsin, the school sent out mass e-mails and paid for a Facebook advertisement to warn students of a suicidal gunman on the loose on campus.

In both the St. John’s and University of Wisconsin incidents, no students were hurt.

And at Delaware State University last week, after two students were shot and wounded, campus police and RAs knocked on doors to tell students to stay in their rooms, and warnings were posted in dormitories and on the school’s Web site.

Washington University has joined these and many other universities in implementing quick-response safety features in response to the 32 people killed in the shooting at Virginia Tech this April. The University’s text-messaging system is provided by clearTXT, a web-based program that has the ability to send text messages and e-mails to students and will soon be able to send messages directly to PCs.

In August, students, faculty and staff received an e-mail inviting them to join the WUText network and their phone numbers and e-mail addresses were compiled to be used in case of an emergency. Beyond this e-mail, the University has not greatly publicized the new text-messaging system.

Because students must actively register for the program, Washington University should make it more clear what is necessary for students to do in order to be in the WUText database. For an issue this serious, students must be made consciously aware that this emergency response system exists. One e-mail is not enough.

We commend the University for their swiftness in establishing such an emergency information-distribution system and having it ready for this school year. That such systems responded to the aforementioned incidents so well, especially in the St. John’s incident, is a testament to their real value. But that students know about this service is crucial for the successful use of WUText in the case of an incident. That St. John’s, University of Wisconsin and Delaware State have all experienced similar incidents so soon after the Virginia Tech shooting shows that such incidents at Washington University would not be an impossibility.

Students should go to http://wustl.cleartxt.com to sign up for the emergency text-message and e-mail service. We encourage them to do so and to keep in mind that it is better to be safe than sorry.

We also encourage the University to further publicize the system, so as to inform the maximum number of students about the service as well as to promote a general feeling of safety on campus.

In light of recent incidents, it is clear that being lackadaisical about the service is disregarding a very possible threat. Washington University and its students ought not take it too lightly.

Popularity: unranked [?]

 Print This Post

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Forum. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.