This past week revealed a disturbing trend at UF, something that the entire Student Body should be concerned about. Apparently it is becoming common practice around campus for students and bystanders to leave suspicious-looking backpacks lying around public areas and for the Gainesville Police Department bomb squad to respond accordingly.
Or at least that's the message UF administration is sending when it shut down part of the Reitz Union for almost an entire day to a bomb threat but failed to utilize the emergency notification system it touts each year as crucial to our safety.
It seems that the administration either doesn't consider bomb threats serious enough threats to notify us or it simply is so inefficient at running things that it failed at sending out a simple text message and/or e-mail on its emergency notification system.
But seeing as these are many of the same administrators who argued the addition of minus grades to our grading scale would magically "raise" the overall GPAs of UF students, I am leaning toward the second option.
Regardless, there are two reasons this failure should go corrected in the event of a similar incidence.
Most importantly, it is flat-out dangerous. Thousands of students use the Reitz Union each and every day for various reasons like studying, eating and visiting the Career Resource Center. By not notifying students that a large portion of the union is shut down, there are two negative impacts.
First, students take a significant amount of time out of their days to travel over to the union only to get kicked out or re-routed. Second, and even worse, the situation becomes potentially even more dangerous when a glut of students is left hanging around a potential bomb.
The second major reason why UF needs to actually utilize its emergency notification system in instances like this is because it is simply annoying when the university doesn't.
With spring registration just around the corner, ISIS will surely be asking all of us to verify our emergency contact information.
If UF thinks being able to actually e-mail and/or text us in potentially dangerous situations is important enough to prevent us from registering for classes, then use it.
But when I drove past the union twice earlier this week and had no idea either time why it was blockaded completely, despite having my phone and e-mail open all day, there arises a major issue.
And if you are lucky enough to have actually received one of the many test text messages or e-mails sent out by the administrators of the system, you know it works, just like I do.
So a question arises: How much does student safety have to be endangered before we are notified? If a bomb threat at the heart of campus doesn't pass that test, then does an armed gunman roaming around campus qualify?
These are all questions students are left wondering about after Monday's debacle. Hopefully we all find out before it is too late.
Kyle Robisch is a political science and economics junior. His column appears on Friday.
