Of the many heart-rending accounts from last year's shooting rampage at Virginia Tech University, one stands out in its poignancy: 76-year-old Professor Liviu Librescu dying of bullet wounds as he blocked the door of his classroom with his own body so that his students could escape the gunman.

Charlie Clarke, president of the Monroe Community College Faculty Association, knows there is no way to make a college campus 100 percent safe. Campuses cannot be completely closed off from the outside world.

Learning cannot take place in an isolated setting. But he also knows that the classrooms at Monroe's main campus, in the Rochester suburb of Brighton, are better protected than most against a repeat of that horrific scene at Virginia Tech.

Every classroom at the Brighton campus locks automatically from the outside once the instructor closes the classroom door. Faculty and staff are encouraged to close their classroom doors.

Faculty members have keys and can unlock their doors, but if the campus security department finds a classroom door unlocked, they will switch it back to automatic-lock mode.

"Once it's locked, no one can get in," Clarke said. "There's a digital phone in each classroom which would allow for an announcement or for placing a call to the public safety department on campus. In terms of an emergency, where you want people to go into a lockdown mode, if you want faculty to receive information or you want to reassure faculty, we've made good progress."

The lock systems and telephones were installed two years ago. Clarke described the system for his colleagues at the NYSUT Higher Education Council meeting earlier this month.

Added urgency

The installation of the locking systems and digital phones at Monroe was initially seen as a way to protect against the theft of increasingly sophisticated electronic equipment in the many "smart" classrooms at the college.

After the Virginia Tech shooting last year, the new system took on a greater significance, Clarke said. "We're dealing with a whole different kind of crisis situation."

Faculty, he said, have generally responded favorably to the changes.

Some locations where Monroe holds classes are not the open-campus atmosphere of the main campus, Clarke said. The site in downtown Rochester is in a building where students and faculty have to wear identification badges and must pass through a security checkpoint before they enter.

Clarke would still like to see the college conduct periodic drills so faculty, staff and students will know how to respond if there's a threat of violence on campus. But overall, he thinks Monroe has taken an important step in campus safety.

"We're much further along than many other schools," he said.

— Darryl McGrath