Author: jplucas

Major commercial education companies are scrambling to ensure a steady stream of college-level students despite the credit squeeze, with some preparing to offer student loans themselves.

Security cameras and security guards alone probably are not enough to keep a campus safe in these times, one local college official said Friday, the day after a shooting at Northern Illinois University left five students and the gunman dead.

â??What it takes is to identify threats early on,â? said Mike Pieper, vice president of finance and operations at Western Technical College.

MADISON, Wis. — Before Thursday’s shooting at Northern Illinois University, leaders at University of Wisconsin-Madison continued to add security measures on campus.

The latest security measure is a campus-wide text messaging system that officials said will be launched this spring. University officials said they are making sure the system will work before allowing more than 60,000 students, faculty and staff to sign up for it.

University officials also met Friday with both law enforcement and campus groups to help make sure tragedies like the one a NIU and other campuses don’t happen at UW-Madison.

A proposed requirement that colleges warn students and employees of emergencies within 30 minutes has yet to become law. But the prospect that it might prompted sharp rebuke from campus police chiefs and other administrators here over the weekend, at a conference on higher-education law sponsored by Stetson University.

Walter L. Czerniak, associate vice president for information-technology services at Northern Illinois University, was out of town when a gunman killed five students in a classroom last week.

At even the best-prepared universities, there is no playbook for handling the crush of tough decisions that comes after a mass shooting rocks an otherwise quiet campus.

The police tape eventually comes down. But the decisions remain, often with few guideposts.

There are many students from our area who go to school at NIU.

Anywhere you go around Janesville, someone either knows a student at Northern Illinois or has a friend who does.

Former Brodhead standout Kevin Skatrud is on the Northern Illinois football team.

As a parent, Jay Spradling feels the same fear that campus shootings stir up in parents everywhere.

But as the assistant chief of police at Arizona State University, he also knows firsthand the frustration of university officials who say they can improve security, but cannot turn campuses into armed fortresses to prevent assaults like the shootings that killed five students at Northern Illinois University.

DeKALB, Ill. â?? Steve Kazmierczak, the man who walked silently into a classroom here on Thursday and opened fire, was not seen as struggling in college. He was not an outcast. And until recently, at least, he was not brooding.

Even before a gunman killed six people and injured more than a dozen others in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University, a small but growing movement had been underway at universities and state legislatures to allow students, faculty and staff to carry guns on campus.

Twelve states are considering bills that would allow people with concealed-weapons permits to carry guns at public universities. The efforts were sparked by the Virginia Tech massacre last April.

DE KALB, Ill (CBS) â?? A gunman opened fire on a geology class at Northern Illinois University Thursday afternoon, killing six people before taking his own life on stage as panicked students ran and ducked for cover.

NIU President John Peters said a total of 22 people were shot, including the gunman. Four people, including the gunman, died at the scene; three others died later at area hospitals.

A gunman opened fire on a large lecture class at Northern Illinois University on Thursday, killing five people and wounding 16 before taking his own life.

The university’s president, John G. Peters, described the incident as a “very brief, rapid-fire assault,” and said the campus would be shut down until further notice. He and other officials briefed reporters on the incident at two news conferences on Thursday evening.

DeKALB, Ill. â?? With minutes left in a class in ocean sciences at Northern Illinois University on Thursday afternoon, a tall skinny man dressed all in black stepped out from behind a curtain on the stage of the lecture hall, said nothing, and opened fire with a shotgun, the authorities and witnesses said.

Harvard Universityâ??s Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted a policy this evening that requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available free online.

Peter Suber, an open-access activist with Public Knowledge, a nonprofit group in Washington, said on his blog that the new policy makes Harvard the first university in the United States to mandate open access to its faculty membersâ?? research publications.