A proposed requirement that colleges warn students and employees of emergencies within 30 minutes has yet to become law. But the prospect that it might prompted sharp rebuke from campus police chiefs and other administrators here over the weekend, at a conference on higher-education law sponsored by Stetson University and Naspa—Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education.
Many college officials expressed extreme frustration with the proposed 30-minute rule, a provision in legislation to renew the Higher Education Act that the U.S. House of Representatives passed this month. As it stands, the measure would require institutions to “notify the campus community in not more than 30 minutes in the event of a significant emergency or dangerous situation.” It defines such a situation as “an immediate threat to the health or safety of students or staff.”
The watchdog group Security on Campus lobbied Congress for the 30-minute rule, which is not a limit on the “timely warning” already required of colleges under federal crime-reporting law, but a new obligation in the case of a severe crisis. (The law would not change the way colleges report threats less immediate than, say, an active shooter or an approaching tornado.)
The watchdog group’s main concern is that campus bureaucracies result in slow responses. “We don’t want a committee to be deliberating something while lives are being lost,” S. Daniel Carter, senior vice president of Security on Campus, told college officials at a conference session here.
The administrators responded that the time limit was not only impossible to meet but also misguided. The first priority in a crisis, several police chiefs said, is to be on the scene controlling the situation, not in an office sending an alert.
Would it really be a good thing for campus safety, asked Dolores A. Stafford, chief of police at George Washington University, if observers of a crisis could say, “Well, they got the notice out, but they really screwed up the response”?
“Your institutions give you the resources to do both,” said Mr. Carter, to which the room responded with laughter.
“Are you talking to the same people who are trying to cap our tuition increases?” one participant yelled, referring to Mr. Carter’s conversations with federal lawmakers.
Mr. Carter defended his position by citing Northern Illinois University’s response to the shootings on its campus last week. Officials there sent out an alert within 20 minutes, he said. “Don’t say it can’t be done.”
“We’re living in a different world now,” Mr. Carter said. Students and parents’ expectations of communication are higher, he argued, and colleges must re-examine old notions of how — and how fast — they can share information. An initial alert “doesn’t have to be perfect,” he said. But, he suggested, it has to be fast.
A quick alert may not be useful if it does not provide students with well-informed advice, said Carey M. Drayton, executive director and chief of public safety at the University of Southern California. “What do you tell them in those 30 minutes to do?” he said.
Not all threats are immediately clear, some police chiefs said, doubting whether, in those cases, a warning as simple as “be alert” would be of any use. Experts debated that question after a graduate student was murdered near the University of Chicago this past fall (The Chronicle, November 28, 2007).
The proposed 30-minute rule, while setting a strict time limit, leaves some questions unanswered. When does the clock start — at the first gunshot, or the first 911 call? And what has to happen in that time — a college’s sending of alerts, or all students and staff members’ receipt of them? A large public institution that recently tested its text-message notification system found that it took 50 minutes to transmit alerts to 40,000 people, one participant said.
Whether the 30-minute rule will become law is still unclear. The Senate’s version of the bill to renew the Higher Education Act, which passed last summer, does not set a time limit for colleges to warn their campuses of emergencies. Instead it says such notification should be “reasonable and timely.” In the coming weeks, a conference committee of legislators from the House and the Senate will meet to hash out their differences.
After the conference session here, Mr. Carter was willing to entertain some participants’ proposed compromises to the 30-minute rule. For one, they said, let the clock start not at the first report of an incident, but when authorities have gathered pertinent information about it. And allow reasonable exceptions to the deadline when a college has demonstrated a good-faith effort to respond, said Jesus M. Villahermosa Jr., former director of campus safety at Pacific Lutheran University and founder of Crisis Reality Training, which consults with law-enforcement agencies.
Expectations differed on whether the provision, modified or not, would become law. But Mr. Carter was certain of one thing. Even if it is not in the final version of the bill, he said, “we’re not going to let it go away.”
