Graphic by Ella Viti
Julia Arboleda
News Ardebola
Last week, college students across the country were evacuated from their dorms and university campuses due to bomb threats. Yale was the first to receive a bomb threat, then two Ohio universities, Miami University, New York University, multiple UC schools, MIT, along with Ivy League schools such as Brown, Cornell, and Columbia.
Cornell’s newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun, reported that at 3:40 pm on November 7th, students were “bombarded” with bomb threat information through text, email, and phone calls; students rushed to return home in a panic.
Students were advised to avoid the Art Quad and Goldwin Smith Building. Later, the Law School, Upson Hall, and Kennedy Hall were under the careful eye of investigators and law enforcement officers. However, by the end of the day, the search was done, and the threats never came to fruition.
According to Brown University’s newspaper, the Brown Daily Herald, at 3:50 pm on November 7th, students were sent a message that read, “Brown and Providence Police are investigating multiple buildings on campus involving a bomb threat. All Main Green buildings, Rock/Hay, List, Lyman.” Suspicious packages were also sent to the school but were later found to be a hoax. Students returned to campus shortly after investigators determined that the campus was safe to return to.
This pattern continued, most noticeably at Columbia and Yale’s campuses, where students received threats in the afternoon of November 7th; all threats were found false by the end of the day.
USA Today highlights Cornell law student, James Brennan who recalls that “he and other law students joined an online group chat, trying to sort out the fiction—there were initial erroneous rumors of an active shooting incident.”
As told to Newsweek by Julie Carr, the mother of a first-year student at Cornell, her daughter was “was emotionally distraught—high anxiety, crying, talking about leaving school,” and is “constantly terrified” of potential attacks. Carr herself was “shaken by the ordeal, particularly, as two days later, the campus went into lockdown again following reports of an active shooter on the ground.”
Although all bomb threats should be taken seriously, it is difficult to know what threat is real or not when it comes from social media. In the cases above, all the threats were sent via social media, calling into question how social media has increased threats and emergencies at universities and how, or if, these institutions will change to adapt to the threats.
