The administrators at Virginia Tech are under intense criticism for their response to the first shooting there as well as the bloody mass killing that followed it. (And indeed The Washington Post is reporting that the state may eventually authorize an independent investigation.) A main focus of the criticism is the two-hour period that ensued between the initial shootings and the first campus-wide e-mail warning students about the incident. Classes were not canceled until after Cho Seung-Hui’s second murderous rampage.

Inside Higher Ed observes that “the real-time aspect of Monday’s crisis, in which some students who might still have been in danger weren’t informed of the ongoing situation, sets the situation apart from other mass killings.”

Critic Christopher Simpson, who heads a communications strategy firm, says the administration “failed in using the Web, which is your most important and valuable communication tool, certainly for the first six to seven hours of this crisis.”

Andy Beedle, whose company works with higher education institutions on targeted mass e-mailings, added, “What I’m puzzled about is the idea that sending out an e-mail to people is going to warn them about any imminent danger…It’s something that I would send as part of a larger strategy, but…it wouldn’t be a very big part of my plan to inform people.”

Beyond e-mail, the campus has “loudspeakers all over” and a “very solid phone-tree system,” Beedle commented. Yet they did not appear to be significant elements of the administration’s response.

The one medium of emergency communication that the university was unable to utilize is said by most experts to be the most useful: text messages, which are starting to be used, for example, at Montclair State University and State University of New York-Buffalo and -Cobleskill.

In fact, as the New York Post reports, the SUNY system (of which I am a trustee) is considering requiring that all of its 64 campuses adopt emergency text-messaging programs that could instantly reach students via their cell phones in the event of a crisis such as the one at Virginia Tech.

SUNY, which has more than 417,000 students, may also adopt a “reverse 911 system,” in which students and staff would be called en masse on their cell phones with “a specific” voice message about an emergency.

Numerous other institutions are now discussing the adoption of a text-messaging system. David Ring, a vice president at Dowling College, believes the benefits are clear. “Virtually every student now has a cell phone,” he says, “and they text as much as they talk.”

This national revisiting of communication and security measures on campuses comes too late for the students massacred at Virginia Tech. May it serve to protect all the rest of them.