Two robberies have been reported at Eastern in the last two weeks. That’s as many robberies I can remember in such a span of time in the four years I’ve been here.

The robberies cause a bit of worry, but aren’t as troublesome as the nation-wide bomb threats reported in the past week – all of which were unfounded, most occurring on college campuses.

On Tuesday, a dormitory at Arkansas State University was evacuated after receiving a bomb threat in the afternoon, the Associated Press reported. Police found nothing, but arrested a 44-year-old man accused of making the threat.

There were two threats Monday. First, at JFK Airport in New York, from an anonymous caller who claimed there were explosives onboard several flights bound for the airport, the AP reported. What exactly was said is unclear, other than the fact that it was a hoax. The AP reported one thing, while The New York Post and other media outlets reported armed hijackers were onboard hiding somewhere.

Louisiana State University received a bomb threat Monday morning, forcing students, staff and faculty to evacuate, but police found nothing, The New York Times reported.

Three more campuses evacuated Friday, including the University of Texas in Austin, North Dakota State University and Hiram College, near Cleveland, Ohio.

In Texas’ situation, a person with a Middle Eastern accent called the visitors’ line at the university and said he was with Al Qaeda and bombs would go off 90 minutes from them, The Times reported.

Bomb threats were also called in nearby North Dakota State, police told The Times – the Fargo, N.D. international airport last Tuesday, an airport near Grand Forks, N.D. last Wednesday and a hotel in downtown Fargo on Saturday.

Finally, a student at the University of Texas in Brownsville, who was converting to Islam, was arrested Sunday after he called a national veterans’ crisis hot line and threatened to detonate a bomb on campus after being offended by a fellow student who made a derogatory comment about Islam, The Times reported.

While each case demands its own, separate, attention, the threat in Austin may be the most talked about because of the complaints the administration received afterward, based on its emergency notification system.

Students received an emergency text message at 9:48 a.m., nearly an hour after the call and what would’ve been 30 minutes until the bomb(s) was said to be exploding, The Times reported.

The director of communications for university operations, Rhonda Weldon, took the call that morning and explained why the university waited so long to notify students.

“I think there has to be a lot of thought and careful evaluation before you make a decision to empty 165 buildings and put 75,000 people outside,” Weldon told The Times.

While the criticism was of the university’s decisions using its emergency notification systems, Eastern had a mishap last fall after initially notifying students of a man, possibly with a gun, driving around, possibly near campus.

Eastern didn’t hesitate to notify people, but when it came to alerting students that the person had been apprehended, The Daily Eastern News found that the notification system failed to text or email students.

It was a problem the university had to address and it seems it has – this year, most students I’ve talked to received a text message or email, or both.

It’s easy to sit back and criticize the University of Texas for waiting to notify its students, especially after nothing happened, but the whole situation should be a lesson to all universities, including the ones that had these experiences in the past week.

All universities should take notice of what happened and plan accordingly. The number of threats made in the last week is dumbfounding and universities need to prepare for how it would proceed if it happened on its campus.

There are a lot of questions that come up when you look at what happened: Why is it happening in the days and weeks after the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks? Are the threats connected? The answer is, we don’t know.

But the message is clear.

Universities need to be prepared, whether it’s receiving bomb threats or reporting robberies.

Alex McNamee is a senior journalism major. He can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].