Albemarle County Police locked down and evacuated the University's Fontaine Research Park Thursday morning while the rest of us were left out in the cold. Nothing happened - it was a bomb threat - but there is still cause for alarm since the University failed to notify students. While a statement was posted to the University website, the highly tested University Emergency Notification System went unused. No emails, no texts, no sirens. Students are busy, yes, but the administration could have at least left us a message.
The University's inaction came the day after a jury had found Virginia Tech negligent for its procedural failures during the 2007 shooting massacre. That trial hinged on a counterfactual thinking which asks what would have happened if things had been different; a question difficult to ask, if not impossible to answer.
But here was an opportunity for the University to take action beforehand. Though this bomb had only potential energy, instead of getting things moving the University responded with a Newtonian inertia when behind the 8-ball. And the results are not a scratch; skipping their turn counts as points against the administration. Even a threat is no game with which we can gamble, and the administration should've taken no chances.
Sure, at colleges it can be hard to draw the line security walks. The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, for example, unnecessarily expelled Tyler Molander last month for composing an invitation of questionable tone which posed no real threat. Meanwhile, the University of Maryland dismissed student Alexander Song who posted this week on Reddit he would "be on a shooting rampage tomorrow on campus." He wrote, "Hopefully, I kill enough people to make it to national news." Well congratulations, you made it, and could now go straight to jail.
With threats, the only way to test their caliber is seeing them through to the end. Obviously, no one wants this. Of course we can get paranoid and cry wolf every time we see something strange. But crying wolf is always better than crying tears, surely. And this bomb threat was no suspicion; it happened. That University leaders posted a notice and updates on their website does not serve as evidence to acquit them, it reveals that they saw this threat as significant.
No, we are not overreacting - as if the University, the parent who didn't want to scare us, is somehow justified by the bomb not having blown. Moreover, a threat such as this endangers the whole community and not just those in Fontaine's radius. If not an isolated event, a threat along these lines could have detonated a University-wide disaster, and should have been on all students' radars.
Alfred Hitchcock said surprise was when a bomb went off, and suspense was not knowing what would happen. And while anyone who calls in a bomb threat may be a psycho, we like suspense only with the basketball March Madness. All alarms and no surprises, please.
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