No easy answer for responding to graffiti threats

This is so high school.

Bomb threats and other warnings were commonplace when we were in high school, especially after the shootings at Columbine High School in 1999. Oftentimes it wasn’t more than a false alarm used to get out of class on a nice day or to skip a test.

You’d think by the time people reached college, they’d grow out of their cowardly pranks and move on. That isn’t the case.

Two colleges — Malcolm X College in Chicago and Oakland University in Rochester, Mich. — resumed classes by Tuesday after finding graffiti threatening death on April 14. But other nearby schools in the Chicago area, from elementary schools to universities, remained closed after the warnings were found.

The fact that this all happened close to the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech shootings probably isn’t coincidental.

False alarms following a rash of shootings on college campuses get attention and incite fear. It also annoys and angers people. Any of these things would most likely tickle the perpetrating sycophant who was obviously never hugged as a child.

But at the collegiate level, this is especially worrisome. We are considered adults. We pay to go to classes. We make the choice every day to wake up and go to lectures and labs. Despite all this, some students or nonstudents out there feel compelled to make a threat — real or not — in an effort to cancel classes, lockdown the campus and cause a panic.

This poses a dilemma — dismiss threats as possible pranksters looking for attention or take every precaution necessary?

Based on the reaction, those making threats might embolden people to continue the trend. When it gets to the point that there are threats every other week, a public university with buildings that people once entered and exited freely will feel more like a prison. Heeding every threat might inhibit the freedom many students enjoy to go wherever, whenever.

Perhaps colleges and universities can set up systems to announce threats, but allow students the freedom to stay home or go to class anyway. No one would have to miss class and no special attention is given to the threat creator.

But imagine if administrators and students started to not take threats seriously and just ignore them.

Although recent campus shootings occurred without warning, there might be a time when there are clear signs that we ignore to our detriment. In fact, those who truly mean harm might come to depend on it.

Taking every threat seriously is costly for a university, annoying for students and might needlessly create hysteria. Yet no college administrator should gamble the lives of students based on what hasn’t happened yet.

There’s no easy answer for what continues to be a delicate situation. There are too many “what if’s” to consider. But if this behavior continues, college students will surely be branded for the actions of a few morons.

It won’t be long before the talking heads on CNN, Fox News and other broadcasting stations start questioning, “What the hell is wrong with college students?”

Published on Wednesday, April 16, 2008