An open letter to the Carolina Community regarding the tragic events on the Virginia Tech campus

On behalf of the entire University of South Carolina family, I have expressed our collective condolences to the Virginia Tech faculty, students, staff, and alumni. Our thoughts and prayers are specifically extended to the families and friends of those who have been directly affected by this tragic event. We pray that their faith and the universally expressed sympathy they must feel will help them as they work through these difficult times.

Please know that Carolina responded immediately to the crisis by assembling our senior management team to monitor the situation at Virginia Tech for any implications for us and, at the same time, provided a local response. It began with sending a message on Monday to the greater Carolina community—including alumni and our students' parents—offering counseling from our University Counseling Center or from our Campus Ministries to those who were adversely affected by the events. Our residence hall staff met with students in their residence halls that afternoon and evening, and communicated factual information as we received it to provide rumor control. A session previously presented many times to our faculty is being repeated; it teaches professors how to deal with classroom disruptions and be sensitive to students who may exhibit distress in their behavior.

To the greater Carolina community, let me share my strong belief that we have a campus that is prepared to respond in the unlikely and unimaginable possibility of a similar tragic event. On a college campus, where we have an open and fluid population, it is extremely difficult to control access to the campus, or even to individual buildings. But we can all be continually alert to those members of our University family, or to visitors, who exhibit behavior that warrants the attention of our law enforcement division, our counseling center, our residence hall staff, or our crisis intervention team.

To reassure all our Carolina constituents, please know the University of South Carolina has an active crisis management team, with a designated command center, and has been working diligently to advance current operational knowledge, policies, response systems, communications systems, approaches to crisis interventions of all descriptions, counseling and recovery services, and public relations. It would not be practical or wise to describe in detail the multitude of strategies, techniques, technology, and plans in place for deploying personnel, for in doing so we would provide potential perpetrators a roadmap that could unintentionally assist them in the intended crime.

The Crisis Intervention Team has been meeting throughout this past year, engaging in tabletop simulations to prepare and practice a University response to critical situations, including building relationships with other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, local trauma centers, and first responders. We have designed notification systems to communicate with students living on campus and with our residence hall staff, as well as our faculty and staff. These systems include our internal television network crawler, voice mail, e-mail, Web pages, and social networks such as Facebook—which are important to reaching all our students, including commuters. In our residence hall facilities we have voice and sound broadcast capabilities, and undisclosed areas of our buildings and outdoor spaces have camera surveillance. We are working continuously to improve our notification systems in our classroom and other buildings and are expanding our campus notification systems to include a text message system and an outdoor broadcast system.

Also, the University has many referral and intervention systems to address troubled or distressed members of our community. A Behavioral Intervention Team is in place to determine if a distressed person, whether a student or other individual, is a danger to himself or others, so that appropriate treatment, including hospitalization in extreme cases, may be necessary. It is important that every member of our community assume responsibility for being observant and for reporting unusual behavior to a University official or our law enforcement staff, including threats or a suggestion by any person that they intend to engage in dangerous behavior. As we have now learned, the perpetrator at Virginia Tech exhibited such behavior. Please be aware that we have the systems in place to intervene with such distressed or troubled persons.

The University of South Carolina has always taken seriously the safety of its student residents, its faculty, staff, and visitors. Yet we must all acknowledge that it is virtually impossible to prevent a catastrophic event such as the one we witnessed at Virginia Tech. We must strive to make our campuses inhospitable to such an occurrence and we must provide intervention services to aid distressed individuals prior to any violent action. We must be prepared to respond to the most unusual of situations in a split second, using all the resources and planning, and all the strategies we have practiced, to—if possible—prevent or respond to such events.

I conclude by emphasizing that we have been properly preparing for the unthinkable, and you have my commitment that we will continue to prepare our ability to provide a safe campus. We ask all of you to join us in being vigilant, being observant, and being responsible for reporting to the appropriate officials any person or circumstances that might be disruptive to our campus. It will take all of us working together to ensure our campus—a place of learning, a living environment, and a work place—is the place we all desire it to be.

Thank you for your continuing support and interest in advancing the University of South Carolina as a premier place of learning, to which all members of the Carolina community contribute by being responsible citizens, concerned not only for their own welfare, but for the welfare of others.

Yours truly,

Andrew A. Sorensen