What Kind of Notification System Works Best When Crisis Strikes?
By Jeffrey R. Young Walter L. Czerniak, associate vice president for information-technology services at Northern Illinois University, was out of town when a gunman killed five students in a classroom last week. Mr. Czerniak was attending a conference in Arizona where he was learning, among other things, about emergency-notification systems that can send text messages to cellphones—a method that a growing number of colleges have set up since the shootings last spring at Virginia Tech (The Chronicle, October 5, 2007). But Mr. Czerniak still isn’t sure whether such a system would have done much good in keeping people on campus updated as the crisis unfolded if it had been in place at Northern Illinois. For one thing, he said, he learned that other colleges have had trouble getting people to sign up for emergency-alert services—a problem that college leaders discussed at a recent meeting in San Diego (The Chronicle, February 12). Most colleges leave the choice of whether to register for th
