Virginia Tech Shootings and the Failure of E-mail

If there is a disaster on a college campus and you need to alert every student as instantaneously as possible, what do you do? Well, you don't blast out e-mails, as Virginia Tech did.

To college students and teenagers, e-mail seems as old, tired and slow as Postal Service mail seems to working adults. Most don't check it that often. It's not with them all the time.

The shooting rampage began at 7:15 a.m. Monday on Virginia Tech's campus. At 9:25, officials blasted an e-mail to students. Few, apparently, saw it before the killer continued shooting people. University President Charles Steger noted that it was difficult to reach the 11,000 students still driving into the campus at that time.

Which, I'm sorry, is just stupid. I can guarantee that nearly every one of those students -- and every student on campus -- had a cell phone with them, turned on. A blast text message would've hit them all, and nearly every student would have seen it immediately, no matter where they were. Lives could have been saved.

Students are already complaining about the e-mail approach to warning them. Every university should pay attention. A few schools have a system that allows them to blast text messages in emergencies. Every school needs that, starting now.

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