It has been more than a month since Villanova experienced what felt like the unthinkable. During Orientation Mass on Aug. 21, a call came in that there was an active shooter on campus. Within minutes, police flooded campus in tactical gear, phones buzzed with texts and calls and doors were locked and barricaded. For students and families who had just arrived on campus, the celebration of a new beginning turned instantly into terror.
This time, it wasn’t real. There was no gunman. No one was physically harmed. But that does not mean there were no victims. Ask any student who was in that Mass, any first-year who had just moved onto campus, or any parent who came to celebrate their child’s first step into adulthood. The threat was false, but the fear was not. That fear still lingers.
“I know myself and a lot of other OSMs and new students are still struggling with the fact that we went through it,” junior Liv Sallaberry, who was at the Orientation Mass, said. “That breaks my heart because gun violence has been an issue for far too long and it needs to be addressed.”
Villanova’s police and first responders deserve praise. Their response was swift, organized and effective. They did exactly what they were trained to do, and their actions prevented a hoax from turning into something worse. But even the best response cannot erase the fact that students on this campus had to live through what they believed could be the end of their lives.
And this is not just about Villanova.
Across the country, universities are being terrorized by swatting calls: deliberate hoaxes designed to trigger police responses to fake shootings. The University of South Carolina, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Kansas State University and Northern Arizona University have also all received these threats. These hoaxes are not pranks. They are acts of fearmongering. They drain resources, traumatize communities and risk dangerous confrontations between police and innocent students. Villanova was one of the first schools hit, but it has quickly become part of a grim trend.
“When we were in our car about to drive out, a group of people started jumping from the second story of the Conn parking garage as if they were in imminent danger, which was pretty scary,” junior Johnny McLaughlin said.
And the thing is, we no longer live in a world where we can comfortably say, “Don’t worry, it’s just a hoax.”
Because, sometimes, it isn’t.
Just days later, on Sept. 10, political commentator Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University. His death was an abhorrent act of violence. In the wake of his assassination, several HBCUs received threats similar to the one Villanova faced. For those campuses, the line between rumor and reality blurred even further.
That is the landscape of college life right now. Alongside midterms, internships and club meetings, we carry the weight of violence that feels like it could strike anywhere. And this didn’t start in college. Many of us grew up practicing active shooter drills before we even hit double digits. I remember the lessons drilled into me as early as elementary school: the “4 Ls:” Locate. Lockdown. Leave. Live.
It’s that last one that still makes my stomach turn: Live. As if it’s something we have to be told. As if survival is a verb children should have to practice. The fact that schools teach kids to “live” says everything about how warped our reality has become. It’s dystopian. It’s exhausting. And yet it’s normal for an entire generation.
This normalization is one of the most insidious parts of the crisis. We’ve gotten so used to alerts and lockdowns that we almost forget how wrong it is to live like this. We shouldn’t. Every drill, every alert, every lockdown chips away at the sense of safety that campuses are supposed to provide. Colleges should be places where students grow, experiment and take intellectual risks, not where we rehearse survival strategies.
And yet, here we are. Villanova is now part of this broader story. The hoax didn’t harm us physically, but it left a scar nonetheless. It forced us to confront how quickly our campus community could be shattered. It reminded us that no matter how safe Villanova feels, we are not immune from the world outside.
That’s why the police response matters so much. Villanova’s officers didn’t treat the hoax as “just another call.” They treated it like it could be the real thing. They chose caution over skepticism, urgency over doubt. That choice should be a model for the rest of us. Because the second we allow ourselves to roll our eyes, to brush off alerts as overreactions, is the second we put each other at risk.
None of this is sustainable. Students shouldn’t have to carry trauma from threats, real or fake, into every classroom or residence hall. We should not have to condition ourselves to run through scenarios in our heads during lecture or Mass.
But until this country takes real action to confront its epidemic of gun violence, we’re left with the broken system we have. And within that system, vigilance is our only choice. Even if it’s exhausting. Even if nine out of ten calls turn out to be false. Because ignoring the tenth one isn’t an option.
That vigilance, though, has to be paired with accountability. Swatting is not a prank. It is an act of violence in its own right. Federal and local authorities must pursue these cases aggressively, and penalties must reflect the real harm caused. At the same time, we must support students who are struggling with the anxiety these incidents provoke. Trauma does not vanish when a threat turns out to be fake. Counseling, communication and community support are just as critical as police response.
Most of all, we must reject the idea that this is normal. Because it isn’t.
The normalization of violence, real or hoaxed, is perhaps the greatest danger of all. If we begin to accept that this is just what college is, that lockdowns and sirens are part of the deal, then we have surrendered more than our sense of safety. We have surrendered the right to an education unclouded by fear.
As students, we cannot solve the crisis of gun violence alone. But we can demand that our leaders treat it with the urgency it deserves. We can insist that hoaxes be taken seriously, prosecuted fully and prevented wherever possible. And we can refuse to grow numb.
The panic from Villanova’s hoax has faded, but the lesson shouldn’t. We live in a world where threats, real or fake, can upend a campus in an instant. That reality is exhausting, but it’s also unavoidable. And so, until something changes, we’re left with only one choice: to take every alert as if it were real. Because the cost of being wrong is one no community can afford.
