"If I'm harsh in my criticism of Virginia Tech, it's because in August they had a serious incident in which a 24-year-old escaped convict shot and killed a prison guard and a police officer," Bath said. "There was a massive manhunt on the edge of campus, and they did not inform the campus community for six hours.
"It was so after-the-fact, it wasn't a warning," she said. "When this happens twice . . . I can't feel sorry [for the administration]. I feel sorry for the victims' families."
The symposium, planned more than a year ago and held at the Doubletree Hotel in Center City, just happened to coincide with this week's tragedy.
Yesterday's session began with a moment of silence for the victims.
Addressing about 180 campus officials, most from colleges and universities in the Northeast, the keynote speaker, U.S. Attorney Patrick L. Meehan, warned against a rush to judgment. He said it would take time to analyze all the elements of the police response to the Virginia incident.
On the need for better ways to notify campus communities of emergencies in progress, however, he was forthright.
"It seems to me to be absurd," he said, that virtually every golf course has a warning system for impending lightning strikes, "and yet right now on campus there's a murder that occurred, and people don't know about it one floor below."
And the focus needs to be on more than murder, said Meehan, citing statistics that show campus rape is rampant.
The panel discussions focused mainly on how to count, collect and classify campus-crime statistics to comply with the federal law that requires colleges to produce annual reports about public safety.
The law was sponsored by Sen. Arlen Specter as the Campus Security Act and renamed to honor Jeanne Clery, whose parents, Howard and Connie, founded SOC the year after her death.
