It is very easy to be a Monday morning quarterback. Being able to be an expert without any responsibility.
I guess we will just disagree on this one. But I will add that for every event like this, there are probably 100 that the FBI gets to before the public is aware.
FWIW, this issue is very personal to me, and I am not arbitrarily dismissing it. I know some of the kids injured at VT and had a class taught by Librescu many years ago.
Having a student at UChicago I have a firm opinion on this one. UChicago absolutely did what it had to do.
I also appreciate the citizen who called in the information and FBI agent who responded. And also the UChicago and City police who mobilized to protect the campus.
There’s much that can be said about what happened and why it happened, but for me a friend of mine said it best when he said that these are the times we live in, unfortunately.
U Chicago erred on the side of caution, as it should have.
They would have had NO excuse if this “idiot” actually DID have a gun and had hurt or killed even one student.
A threat is a threat- regardless of whom is it against or where it comes from. Thats the price of the times we live in. .
Given your personal knowledge of some injured students at VT, DSH, I dont see HOW you can actually advocate AGAINST the use of caution and justify “shrugging off” a threat made against any college students.
that just boggles the mind…
Once the FBI informed it that there was a credible threat, the University of Chicago had no option not to take the threat very seriously. No one there was going to second-guess the FBI. Maybe it could have done something short of shutting down, but shutting down was pretty clearly going to be the best choice.
It’s another question entirely whether the FBI really had to conclude that this was a credible threat requiring extreme security measures. In hindsight, that looks like a really lazy, cavalierly wasteful conclusion. Not something Alex Parish would have done!
Again, hindsight is 20/20.
If UC had not shut down and something awful happened the same people criticizing the decision would be calling the FBI incompetent for not recommending shutdown.
The shutdown of Hyde Park was probably a really expensive event. It wasn’t just three educational institutions (at least, maybe more – I don’t know what happened with schools in HP other than the Lab School), it was businesses and activities at the hospital, too.
Long term, it can’t be that you shut down huge sections of a city for a work day whenever someone puts something outrageous on Facebook for 10 minutes. I am surprised the FBI decided that this was a credible threat without any additional investigation. Maybe their profilers think they know what a real threat looks like on Facebook . . . but they were wrong.
I’m not saying ignore it. I am saying investigate it immediately. You could scramble a small army of FBI agents and police for a teensy tiny fraction of the economic cost of this shutdown. And they didn’t need a small army – a couple of people would have been plenty.
Again, hindsight is 20/820.
I expect better-written threats from a U Chicago student, even in engineering.
UChicago doesn’t have an engineering school. The alleged poster of the threat is an engineering student at UIllinois in Chicago according to posted reports.
The Univerity of Illinois at Chicago said that one of its students was arrested, according to http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/30/us/university-of-chicago-closed-threat/ .
Seems that there have been several probably-false racially-inflammatory threats of violence made at university campuses recently, including Western Washington University and Kean University as well as University of Chicago.
That’s a big relief, you would expect it from a non-elite school.
Why would eliteness or lack thereof of the school matter in whether a student may be prone to trying to incite fear and terror?
I think sorghum was referring to the poor spelling and certain other miscues.
As in post #34:
For a student at elite school, this standard of writing would surely be utterly unacceptable.
My company’s security firm mentioned that 99% of bomb threats are made by people who do not even have the capability of make a bomb. However, it is that 1% who have the ability and who might carry it out that is the problem. Therefore, every time there is bomb threat, it was taken seriously. Not sure, why people do not understand the same should apply when the threat device is a gun, which one has the right to own, thus is more accessible.
Don’t worry sorghum, at the rate things are deteriorating, there will soon be English classes on how to write a convincing threat.
What this means in practice is that when you react to it, 99% of the time the people you’re trying to protect will complain about you “overreacting.”
And when the worst happens, the very same people will be the first to shout about how you underreacted, and demand, bitterly, “why did you fail to stop this?”
Re post no. 50.
That was very poor reporting by CNN. It seems that they intentionally led viewers to believe that the perpetrator was a U of Chicago student. The CNN reporter slyly kept referring to the perp as “an off-campus student.” Well, the alleged perp isn’t enrolled at U of Chicago, so I guess that makes him an off-campus student. No wonder people don’t trust the media.
^^maybe its not “poor reporting”, but just plain ignorance, which the media excels at. J-schools don’t exactly teach reasoning and critical thinking skills. 