Northern Illinois University was prepared for an emergency. They learned the lessons from the Virginia Tech tragedy last April. In quick succession following the alert that a gunman had opened fire on students, police were on the scene, alerts were posted and sent to students and the campus was shut down shortly. The school did everything properly and yet, there were still five victims.

Unfortunately, the unexpected emergency will sometimes happen. As columnist Thomas Shattuck states in his Quick Shot today, “You can't exactly stop a tornado.”

As the events of the past month have indicated, however, we can never be too prepared for the impossible. Notably, by improving upon the alert notification system, the administration is stressing the idea that the policies in place can always be re-examined and re-evaluated for their efficiency, effectiveness and responsiveness.

The upgraded text messaging and email service definitely represents the administration taking note of what turned out to be relatively inconsequential failures regarding the tornados in terms of this campus and making sure the small flaws don’t become major flaws in an even more serious situation.

In keeping with these advances, the editorial board hopes the administration has carried and will continue to carry this careful, discerning perspective over into other aspects of our security on campus. While Steve Kazmierczak, the gunman of the Northern Illinois tragedy, was not enrolled at the time of the shooting, he shared something with Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech gunman: a recent history of erratic behavior and mental illness. In light of this commonality between Kazmierczak and Cho, hopefully Vanderbilt has taken steps to review the psychological evaluation process on campus and the infrastructure for reporting and treating symptoms of dangerous behavior before it manifests into something greater.