lawrence university

Junior Jesse Schneider recorded his first collegiate victory as the No. 2-ranked New York University men's cross country team captured the Connecticut College Invitational on Saturday in New London, CT.

Ranked No. 2 in the United States Track and Field and Cross Country Coaches Association (USTFCCCA) Division III poll, the Violets produced their third team victory in as many meets this season. NYU notched 33 points to easily outdistance Stonehill College (88), St. Lawrence University (90), the University of Connecticut (101), and Southern Connecticut State University (158).

Stone Hill (No. 6) and Southern Connecticut (No. 23) are ranked among the USTFCCCA Division II Top-25, while St. Lawrence is ranked No. 3 in the NCAA Division III Atlantic Region.

A 2006 NCAA All-American for the Violets' national runner-up squad, Schneider (25:02) accelerated the pace over the last mile, pulling away from seniors and 2006 All-Americans Hany Abdallah (25:08) and Ryan Williams (25:15) to win the 8,000-meter competition. Seniors James McCarthy (12th, 25:46) and Spenser Popeson (13th, 25:53) rounded out NYU's top-five finishers.

Freshman Matt Turlip also ran a strong race, placing 16th in 26:01.

"Our guys got themselves in the lead pack. In the third and fourth miles, they started to stretch it out and take control," NYU head coach Nick McDonough said. "Jesse ran a great race. With a little under a mile to go, he started to push and broke away from Hany and Ryan and they couldn't catch back up. This is him continuing from where he left off last year in the regionals and nationals."

NYU returns to action Friday, Oct. 5, when it competes in the Metropolitan Championship at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. The starting gun will go off at 10 a.m.

A Massachusetts community college reports it has received a $1 million donation to fund a campus health and technology center.

A foundation established by Ibrahim El-Hefni, a native of Egypt, has gifted the money to Northern Essex Community College to establish the Allied Health and Technology Center in Lawrence. The college's board of trustees voted to name the center after El-Hefni, who died in 2005. El-Hefni earned a bachelor's degree in engineering from the University of Cairo and a doctoral degree in electrical engineering from Sheffield University. He worked at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory.

Northern Essex Community College, which enrolls 13,000 students annually, has campuses in Haverhill and Lawrence.

As Purdue University appears to take the cautious route in considering the effectiveness of text-messaging alerts in emergency situations, St. John's University took the plunge on Wednesday. In the process, the college prevented any possible bloodshed and added much to our understanding of how text messaging works in crisis.
When a masked man with a firearm in a bag was arrested. At 2:30, there were reports of a second gunman, so campus officials decided to use inCampusAlert, the text-messaging system it recently bought from California-based MIR3 Inc.
More details from Ellen Barry and Winter Miller of The New York Times, who describe "the ultimate test run":
Within minutes, Thomas Lawrence, the university's vice president for public safety, had dictated this message: "From public safety. Male was found on campus with a rifle. Please stay in your buildings until further notice. He is in custody, but please wait until the all-clear." An information technology specialist pressed the "send" button at 2:38.
"We didn't sugar-coat it," said Mr. Lawrence, who said his years as a police officer ― he is a former deputy chief of New York Police Department's Brooklyn South Patrol Bureau ― convinced him that issuing complete information to the public is "the safest way to go."
Purdue's emergency-alert test was mainly concerned with speed, and its text-messages took 7 minutes to reach phones. At St. John's, the "messages were sent so quickly that a student who helped subdue the suspect felt his cell phone vibrate with the information while he was restraining the gunman," according to The Associated Press.
In other signs of the potential of the text messaging route, the alert quickly spread from people signed up for the messages to those around them, and the incident encouraged many more students to sign up in the aftermath:
Though only 2,100 students were signed up for the program, the text message, and two more that followed, spread within seconds, which Dr. Pellow said "allowed us to manage this mini-city of 20,000 people."
Students and faculty waited for three hours while police determined there were no additional gunmen, and were released just after 5:30.
By yesterday afternoon, administrators said the number of subscribers had reached 6,542.
Jonathan Azara, 18, who was helping enroll students in the program yesterday, said many of his peers had initially hesitated because they were afraid of receiving spam. Others thought the system would convey more ordinary information, like snow days.
St. John's has earned wide praise for its take-charge attitude and sleek new toys. But rest assured, all you potential heroes out there: there's still plenty of room for people like you.
Five months ago, James Pellow, the chief operating officer of St. John's University, numbly watched the panic at Virginia Tech. Students were dropping from upper-story windows, cowering under desks, scrambling for cover or freezing where they stood.

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Campus Suspect Showed No Warnings of Violence (September 28, 2007)

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Go to City Room ? The sight appalled him, bringing painful reminders of Sept. 11, when the St. John's campus in Lower Manhattan was chaotically evacuated.

So this summer, when St. John's carried out its annual review of security procedures, Dr. Pellow lobbied for a change he had long been considering: a text-messaging system that could send information about an unfolding crisis to individual cellphones.

That system underwent the ultimate dry run on Wednesday when a gunman in a mask strode onto the St. John's campus in Jamaica, Queens. Though no one was hurt, the incident showed that large, dispersed crowds ― at least 10,000 students were on the campus at the time ― could respond calmly in the face of alarming information.

Yesterday the technique was praised by everyone from Gov. Eliot Spitzer to Assemblyman Rory I. Lancman of Queens, who presented legislation requiring text-messaging systems at college and university campuses across the state.

After the crisis at Virginia Tech, "everything from bullhorns to texting was considered," said Dr. Pellow, who is also the university's executive vice president. "How do you communicate instantly? Because the expectation now is instant communication."

The campus yesterday was suffused with relief, a rare celebration of something that did not happen. A lawyer for the gunman, Omesh Hiraman, said his client had suffered a psychotic episode because he was unable to digest medication prescribed for schizophrenia. He will be arraigned today at his bedside at Bellevue Hospital Center on charges including fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon, said Richard A. Brown, the Queens district attorney.

St. John's president, the Rev. Donald J. Harrington, said Mass under glowing stained-glass windows as students stood in rows two deep at the back of the packed chapel. He prayed for Mr. Hiraman, and praised the actions of "ordinary people in extraordinary times."

"In yesterday's incident, we observed, I believe, God's gentle hand protecting and preserving our university," he said. "God can work in our midst, and when he does so, he does it through other people."

The emergency messaging initiative is so new that administrators were debating whether to send a sample message out as a test when Mr. Hiraman, 22, strode onto the campus, wearing a mask and carrying a rifle.

That was at 2:20 p.m. At 2:30, Mr. Hiraman had been apprehended, but there were reports of a second gunman. Within minutes, Thomas Lawrence, the university's vice president for public safety, had dictated this message: "From public safety. Male was found on campus with a rifle. Please stay in your buildings until further notice. He is in custody, but please wait until the all-clear." An information technology specialist pressed the "send" button at 2:38.

"We didn't sugar-coat it," said Mr. Lawrence, who said his years as a police officer ― he is a former deputy chief of New York Police Department's Brooklyn South Patrol Bureau ― convinced him that issuing complete information to the public is "the safest way to go."

Though only 2,100 students were signed up for the program, the text message, and two more that followed, spread within seconds, which Dr. Pellow said "allowed us to manage this mini-city of 20,000 people."

Students and faculty waited for three hours while police determined there were no additional gunmen, and were released just after 5:30.

By yesterday afternoon, administrators said the number of subscribers had reached 6,542.

Jonathan Azara, 18, who was helping enroll students in the program yesterday, said many of his peers had initially hesitated because they were afraid of receiving spam. Others thought the system would convey more ordinary information, like snow days.

But those ideas were swept away by Wednesday's incident, said Tanesha Wright, 19, who was helping Mr. Azara. If students at Virginia Tech had received similar bulletins, she said, "lives would have been saved."

The growing popularity of cellphone text-messaging, which once seemed to be the exclusive domain of teenagers, has opened up new possibilities for mass notification, said Amir Moussavian, president and chief executive of MIR3, the San Diego company that designed St. John's system.

Similar systems have long been used in government agencies and large-scale logistics operations, but they were cumbersome and difficult to use. To receive a text message, by contrast, a person does not even have to answer the phone, Mr. Moussavian said.

The April murders at Virginia Tech vastly increased interest in Mr. Moussavian's technology. He said it is now in use at 70 universities, 10 times as many as before the attacks in Virginia. MIR3 sends messages via pager, fax, e-mail and satellite phone, as well as text.

Mass notification systems bring with them their own risks, chief among them the spread of rumors or bad information, said security officials at several area universities. James F. McShane, associate vice president for public safety at Columbia University, said it can be difficult to "craft a message in the heat of the moment."

"You don't know who's out there," he said. "If you tell people to run, you're telling people to abandon secure cover without really knowing what the risks are."

John Carroll, the director of safety and security at Fordham University, said he would always consult with the police before issuing instructions to students. "This message is not going to go out in the first two minutes."

Columbia is developing a system similar to the one used by St. John's.

Administrators at Fordham can send 40,000 text or voice messages within 10 to 30 minutes of an incident, Mr. Carroll said.

Meanwhile, authorities at St. John's are so satisfied with their notification system that they may decide to make participation mandatory, Father Harrington said after yesterday's Mass.

Added Dr. Pellow: "To have 18-year-olds react very responsibly and very calmly was very pleasing to us. It's consistent with our plan, but that's one of the elements we can't control."