September isn’t over yet, but the month has already seen 2 shooting-related crises:
- Yesterday at St. John’s University in Queens, NY (the campus was locked down after a masked gunman was found on campus)
- Last Friday, 2 students were shot at Delaware State University.
The good news is that lessons learned after the tragedy at Virginia Tech last April seem to have been implemented in both cases.
As I mentioned before, I spent time this summer researching and writing an article about crisis communication for the October issue of University Affairs, Canada’s higher ed magazine.
Now available online, the article titled “Crisis Communications 2.0” draws information from Canadian and American sources such as Dawson College and Virginia Tech among others.
For this piece, I also tried to interview somebody at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique where 14 women were killed and 13 injured by a single gunman back in 1989, but my request was declined as the institution still doesn’t give any interview about the topic almost 20 years after the facts.
University Affairs being a bilingual publication, the article has been translated in French as well. The French version is also available online.
Karine, We were on location at St. John’s University yesterday, and the atmosphere was wonderful, their Emergency Messaging system was extremely successful. All the students were saying how EFFECTIVE it was. Great job