In October of last year, we printed a staff editorial praising the WUText emergency text messaging system recently implemented in light of the Virginia Tech and other university shootings but criticizing its effort to include all students on campus. Our argument was that a system of such critical importance merits more than just one e-mail to students.

Students received another e-mail this week reminding them to sign up for the service. But the University’s approach is still not effective enough.

As a news article in Student Life reported on Jan. 23, the University automatically entered the e-mail addresses of more than 30,000 undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, staff and alumni into the system. These 30,000 people represent the members of Washington University who should be immediately warned in case of an emergency on campus.

Only 4,000 of these affiliates are currently signed up for the emergency text message system, which provides a far more immediate mode of contact with those who need to be warned.

The University should take the same approach with text warnings as they have with e-mail warnings of campus emergencies: Consolidate the information for the entire school and enter it all into the WUText system.

The first step is for the University to gather the phone numbers for the entire school by obligating students to provide the school with their cell phone numbers.

There are many channels on campus through which the school can make this effort.

Residential Life, on its housing forms for the next year, can require students to provide their cell phone numbers. For those who don’t live on campus, the school can ask for cell phone numbers on other required forms.

But an even more potent idea is the possibility of WebSTAC as a tool for gathering students’ cell phone numbers. Just as a prompt pops up for many students every few months asking for a change of password, the University could engineer the site to require that students enter their cell phone numbers, if possible, before performing any further actions on the site.

Because WebSTAC is the crucial student resource for almost everything (at the very least, for class registration) student cell phone numbers can quickly and efficiently be collected.

WebFAC is a similar resource for Washington University faculty and can be used in the same way.

If the school takes advantage of the ease with which they can collect student, faculty and staff cell phone numbers, the next step will be a breeze: consolidate these phone numbers so that the WUText system can address all those likely to be on campus at the time of an emergency.

If students are resistant to giving out their cell phone numbers, WebSTAC can provide a “No thanks” button for students to opt out of joining the WUText system. We are sure that, immediately faced with the choice, few students would choose this option.

This method provides students with the same amount of freedom and privacy with their cell phone numbers but is more up-front about the emergency text message system.

As we said earlier this academic year, for such an important matter the school cannot afford to be passive. It must confront the students with a choice. They will be free to opt out should they choose, but far more likely to stay in the texting system.

This kind of upfrontness by the University may very well save lives.

 Print This Post

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 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.