On Aug. 25, Lehigh’s first day of class, six calls across the United States posing as active shooters on college campuses caused law enforcement to spring into action. Four more followed the next day.
Students at colleges from Texas to New Hampshire — and even as close as our neighbors at Villanova University — experienced the terror of what they believed to be an active shooter on their campus.
While all the threats turned out to be false, the terror and panic was real.
As first-years across the country settle into college, they should be spending time making friends, attending lectures and getting acclimated to their new lives — not worrying about the harrowing fear of, ‘Is my campus next?’
The FBI defines swatting as “the malicious tactic of making hoax calls or reports to emergency services, typically feigning an immediate threat to life.” It’s intended to provoke a large response from law enforcement, causing chaos and endangering people.
Many of these calls even use fake sounds of gunfire playing in the background, escalating urgency and calls to action.
Swatting displaces police resources from real emergencies. The Department of Homeland Security has warned that frequent hoaxes may desensitize officers, potentially slowing their responses to genuine threats.
Villanova’s first swatting incident occurred on Aug. 21 at the Charles Widger School of Law. It left chaos on the campus, with white folding chairs, meant for an orientation, toppled across the open lawn. The university’s second swatting incident followed just days later on Aug. 24.
While no one was physically hurt, the excitement of move-in was shadowed.
And while Lehigh is fortunate to not have experienced that fear this year, seeing headlines of swatting cases increasing are a reminder of the incident that occurred on our campus on May 7, 2023.
When Northampton County police received a false report of an active shooter, the university immediately sent HawkWatch alerts instructing students to “run, hide, fight.”
Universities around the country sent similar instructions this past week. But what follows these three words is much more complex. While the call to Lehigh was proven to be a hoax in less than an hour from the first alert, the emotional distress lasted much longer.
Despite the distance between us and this years’ swatting incidents, many of us have friends and peers who have been affected. This makes the fear feel even more real — and it’s angering.
As students who grew up during an era of frequent school shootings, most of us were no strangers to active shooter drills being taught to us each year.
And while it may have been naive, many of us hoped college would finally be a safe space, free from the threats we were trained to maneuver in high school.
To see that fear still remain, despite the distance we now have from a high school classroom, is exhausting. Now, it’s almost expected that the same overhanging fear will follow us into graduate school or the workplace.
We can’t expect universities alone to mitigate these threats, both real and hoax. Lehigh does have measures in place, including the “avoid, deny, defend” strategy adopted in 2023. The Lehigh University Police Department also offers voluntary 90-minute training sessions, preparedness guides and videos comparing trained versus untrained responses.
In the training video, untrained individuals freeze in panic, while trained individuals are able to recall what they learned and act accordingly. Still, it’s almost impossible to expect someone to react appropriately and calmly in the moment they are told there may be an active shooter nearby.
This isn’t to say these training sessions are useless. There’s certainly value and merit in learning composedness, and as swatting becomes more common, more protocols and preparation are welcome.
But what still lingers at the forefront of our minds is that no matter how many training videos, three-word strategies or guides are at our fingertips, the possibility of another HawkWatch alert hitting our email inboxes remains.
And while, of course, we’d love an answer that erases that fear, it may be more realistic to accept that it will never fully go away.
Instead of focusing on preparedness protocols, perhaps more effort should be put toward supporting one another through the fear and its aftermath.
After all, headlines suggest that fear may never disappear, but at least that means we are more ready to pick each other up if another incident happens.
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