This statement is on page 27 of the addendum to the Virginia Tech investigation released yesterday and it's set off another 'wave the bloody flag' media frenzy.
Here are my questions:
- How did a review panel of "nine highly distinguished members from a variety of relevant backgrounds" misunderstand who was actually in the Virginia Tech Policy Group?
- Who could take the phrase "notify their families of the shootings" and flesh it out as "warned their own families more than an hour and a half before the rest of the campus was alerted"?
- Who would respond to the report with their own media minute by saying, "If university officials thought it was important enough to notify their own families, they should have let everyone know"?
The answers:
- A panel with no experience as an emergency manager and obviously didn't talk to one.
- The New York Times.
- Virginia Governer Timothy M. Kaine.
This is what Mark Owzarski, the spokesman for Virginia Tech, said: (also reported in the New York Times story - beginning way down in the 15th paragraph).
"The revised report describes the two people who alerted their families as Policy Group members, and they were not. It also inaccurately describes the actions of those two individuals who alerted their families as though it occurred with approval of senior officials. It did not."
The consulting group who coordinated the investigation and wrote both the report and the addendum identified two employees: one was the Chief of Staff to the President who told her son when she called to wake him up for class; the other was the Assistant Vice President of Administration who told her mother as she was leaving to return to campus.
Doesn't that make more sense?
It does - unless you're politically motivated to perpetuate the impression there was some nefarious and deliberate conspiracy on campus. Or you want to profit by selling newspapers and/or pull readers to your web page.
Certainly this was a grave and horrific tragedy. There are few phrases that can cause the community of campus emergency management practitioners to take pause than 'Virginia Tech'.
I am an emergency manager on a university campus. I know how shaken the entire campus community was. I spent months fielding calls from companies taking advantage of the event with the "ultimate solution" to my problems. I agonized with my emergency management colleagues over the details and what might have been done differently. I have participated in all the changes that have been made since. I watched the subsequent college campus shooting incidents - Northern Illinois University, Kauhajoki School of Hospitality in Finland and, just a few days ago, Binghamton University in New York
Here is the bottom line: Virginia Tech is getting skewered in the media - once again - for the flawed interpretation of an irrelevant, unlikely and improbable detail.
Listen to the VT Student Government Association president, Brandon Carroll:
"Hindsight is 20/20," he said, "It really upsets me that they're trying to bring back something bad that really hurt our community."
What do you know? A student with more common sense than a governor, a distinguished review panel and a major media outlet.
How sad.
