OUR VIEW:  On Sunday night, campus police were made aware of the threat of a possible shooting planned for the next morning. The police quickly found the threat to be a hoax, but poor communication from multiple university sources caused unnecessary panic, leading many students to stay home despite a perfectly safe campus. The MSU Alert system should have been used to clarify facts and alleviate concerns, but only an inclement weather alert was issued.

While campus police did a great job ensuring the safety of the students and faculty as well as in continuing the investigation further, many students have voiced concerns over how the communication of the threat was handled.

In the future, however, officials need to use the alert system to inform people that a danger has passed as well as when a danger is imminent.

Two tweets were initially sent by the official university account, @MidwesternState, that falsely reported the FBI’s involvement with the case. The tweets were deleted shortly after posting, which Director of Marketing and Public Affairs Julie Gaynor said was an attempt to remain accurate.

It’s understandable that police and administrators don’t want to overuse MSU Alert, the emergency notification system, but students were relatively unanimous in their confusion caused by the conflicting announcements issued by the public information office.

Sending a final message through the alert system would have clarified the concerns of students and reached the highest amount of people in the most direct manner. If the system was used, more students would have attended class Monday.

No official post was made on the university website either, showing that either public information officials or administrators felt that the conflicting messages posted to Facebook, Twitter and the postmaster emails were sufficient in alleviating student concerns. Clearly they were not.

Instead of attempting to persuade students and faculty that the emergency alert system is only for “immediate threats,” administrators need to rethink the service that MSU Alert provides, and consider what the public expects from such a service. These emergency alert systems were adopted by universities nationwide in direct response to the Virginia Tech shootings, so it seems unimaginable that it wasn’t used a single time during a possible shooting situation.

We are glad that representatives from both the public information office and the police department have said they will discuss what went wrong in communicating to the students, but we hope that the confusion they caused students by not using the emergency system or the official website is as clear to them as it is to the The Wichitan staff.

RELATED ARTICLE: “Threat to campus a hoax: Campus officials re-evaluate communication during crisis”
Click here