Anxiety swept across campus Tuesday as MSU released emergency notifications and alerts reporting an “East Lansing active violent incident”.
The alert was sent at 10:52 AM, consisting of text messages, automated calls, and emails — to all students, staff, and parents. Activating sirens across campus, the messages urged everyone to avoid the area and to “run/avoid, hide/barricade or fight/confront” to ensure safety.
Two minutes later, another message was sent claiming the first announcement was “sent in error”, and to “please disregard”. The announcements immediately raised questions and created confusion. Students received different and inconsistent information, as the word “drill” was included for some notifications, and others lacked that clarification.
This untimely mistake occurred just three days before the third anniversary of the MSU mass shooting on Feb. 13, 2023.
Later in the day, President Kevin Guskiewicz and MSU Chief of Police Mike Yankowski addressed the MSU community in an email, issuing an apology and explanation for the false alarm.
“A reliable, accurate and effective emergency notification system is essential to campus safety.” Guskiewicz and Yankowski said, “We take this incident extremely seriously, and immediate actions are being implemented to ensure it does not occur again.”
According to the official statement, the accidental alert was sent during a standard routine assessment, similar to the most recent drill conducted on Jan. 21 at the beginning of the semester. Conducted by MSU Security Operations Center (SOC) and the Department of Public Safety, they insisted the mistake was due to human error, and not system failure.
While both the President and Chief of Police acknowledged the emotional toll that students had experienced, they didn’t answer any supplemental questions voiced by the MSU community — such as the lack of notice in advance, and inconsistencies of alerts between recipients.
“We understand how emotionally activating this incident might have been for members of our university community, and we sincerely apologize for the error”, the statement reads, “the significant impact it had is very real.”
Students in the graduating class of 2026 are the last four-year undergraduates to have experienced the shooting firsthand. This mistake had a much larger impact on them, who have voiced their criticisms towards MSU’s response to the situation.
Siri Reed, a public relations major, felt that MSU treated the situation disingenuously.
“I write for people on their behalf every day,” Reed said. “I can sniff out inauthentic writing immediately — and that is what their response felt like. It felt inhumanly generated.”
As the class of 2026 is set to graduate this spring, they face a difficult question: how will MSU continue to memorialize the shooting in the future?
Seniors Seth Dornboros and Namika Page were shocked to see the way the rest of the MSU community reacted to the alert compared to themselves.
“Seeing the same ‘run, hide, fight’ message that we got back then immediately made me anxious,” Dorboros recounted, “I don’t think people really understand how it feels to be reminded of a traumatic event like that, and I was surprised watching everyone else move on like nothing had happened.”
While both Dornboros and Page saw a disconnect between the students who were and weren’t on campus in 2023, Page still credits the MSU community for their continued efforts to memorialize the shooting to the best of their ability and the solidarity that they have shared with one another.
“The way that the community comes together every year to remember this…It makes me feel very lucky to go to a school with so many students who are willing to protect each other and care for each other,” Page said. “I would attribute our strength more to the Spartan community, rather than the university as a whole.”
