Still, security measures on college campuses are not uniform, and approaches continue to evolve.
“We tend to be very reactionary,” said Jason Russell, the president of the Michigan-based security assessment firm Secure Environment Consultants. “When you see a shooting at a college, for the next two weeks, we get tons of calls from colleges saying we should probably check our security.”
Brown is the latest example.
Its administration recently announced it would lead a top-to-bottom review of campus safety procedures amid mounting questions about whether the school had enough cameras on campus, or if it was using them properly, and how the shooter managed to go undetected even as he had reportedly been casing the campus for weeks before the attack.
A recent example hit close to home for Russell at Michigan State University, where a shooter opened fire in 2023, killing three students and injuring five others.
After a security review, in which Russell did not take part, the campus added new locks to classroom doors, updated its alert system, and created a Security Operations Center, which he said were necessary steps that could make the campus safer.
Securing colleges is often difficult because their buildings sit on sprawling campuses, encompassing large common areas, and with lots of people coming and going throughout the day, experts said.
There is also the risk that new security measures can change how it feels to attend an institution, which few want, even after the trauma of a mass shooting, some experts said.
There is a long history of shocking acts of violence spurring new security measures at American colleges.
Higher education saw a sea change in campus crime monitoring in the 1990s, after the passage of The Clery Act in 1990 following the grisly murder of a college student in a dorm room. The act requires certain reports on violent incidents be publicly available to students.
In 1999, the shooting at Columbine High School led to an overhaul of law enforcement policy, which now calls for police to confront shooters without waiting for a SWAT team to arrive.
The mass shooting at Virginia Tech 18 years ago also led administrators to rethink how they were preparing for worst-case scenarios involving shooters, spurring the widespread adoption of alert notification systems, which are now used to ping the cell phones of university community members when there are active shooters on, or near, a campus.
The day of the shooting at Brown, the first emergency alert went out at 4:22 p.m., roughly 17 minutes after the first 911 call. From that first Saturday night through early Sunday morning, 10 more alerts were sent out, through “phone, text and/or email” to 20,000 people, according to university officials. Earlier this week, the Trump administration announced it was reviewing Brown’s use of cameras and emergency alerts.
More recently there has been an emphasis on stopping shootings long before they start, including by leading training programs that encourage students to report and identify possibly troubled peers, and deploying “care teams” that can steer them to mental health supports and other resources.
“You really have to rely on the people that are interacting with others,” said Steve Kaufer, president of Inter/Action Associates, a security consulting company based in California. “Those kinds of things are important, that they recognize there’s a potential there to head someone off before they do something awful.”
Physical security efforts, meanwhile, have still been a centerpiece of safety measures, particularly after a school is hit with violence.
After it was targeted by a mass shooter in April of this year, Florida State University made “significant enhancements in campus safety technology,” FSU spokesperson Amy Farnum-Patronis said, including “panic buttons, lockdown buttons, and new door lock mechanisms.”
Other schools are also trying out new tools, which claim to use artificial intelligence to look at live security footage for threats like guns in people’s hands.
But there is a limit to what even the most ambitious overhauls of security infrastructure can accomplish, experts said.
Metal detectors in buildings, for example, can be onerous and costly, and can disrupt the regular flow of people in and out of buildings, said Russell.
Installing new cameras can help when it is time to identify an assailant after an attack is over, but aren’t likely to do much to prevent someone who is bent on harming others from carrying out violence, he said.
Adding new requirements that people scan key cards to access buildings can help, but aren’t as effective if people routinely hold doors open for others. Plus, plans need to be made for when the key cards inevitably go missing.
“When you’re thinking about putting something in for security, don’t just think about the security side. You also have to think about the operational side of it,” Russell said. “I have kids in college. They’re going to lose that key card 100 times in a semester.”
Spikes of interest in campus security worry civil liberties advocates, who fear that in the rush to make changes, “there are not appropriate safeguards for making sure that these technologies are used appropriately,” said Madalyn McGunagle, a policy associate for the ACLU of Rhode Island, who works on surveillance and privacy issues.
While technology can be helpful when tracking down a mass shooter, it can also be used in the wrong hands to achieve policy outcomes people don’t actually want, she said.
She pointed to the fact that Providence this year passed an ordinance that limits the use of license plate-readers in immigration enforcement, for example.
“Public safety shouldn’t come at the cost of privacy,” McGunagle said.
The instinct to beef up security in the wake of a tragedy is natural, but can also come into conflict with the mission of a university if done too zealously, said S. Daniel Carter, president of safety consulting firm SAFE Campuses.
“American colleges and universities are open and diverse places. When serious incidents happen, it seems like there are always calls to lock them down, to turn them into armed camps,” Carter said. “But that’s not what American higher education is, and I don’t think American higher education is willing to lose that.”
Spencer Buell can be reached at spencer.buell@globe.com. Follow him @SpencerBuell. Katarina Schmeiszer can be reached at katarina.schmeiszer@globe.com. Follow her on X at @katschmeiszer.