On May 9, not even a month after the tragedy at Virginia Tech, the school’s president Charles Steger requested that three internal reviews take place to analyze the event but more importantly, to analyze the school’s actions and responses the day of the incident. The panel could find no reason to assign blame to the school’s infrastructure, staff or procedures for any negligence or wrong-doing. It found good cooperation between the school and local emergency officials, adequate performance of the school’s communications networks and could not find fault with the school’s system of identifying and supporting at-risk students. The report also included plenty of recommendations for preventing future tragedies at Virginia Tech and other schools. Among them are some measures I find pretty surprising. Not because of their extremity, but because apparently the campus is lacking them. I’m talking about automatic door locks, a key card access system and CCTV. Maybe I’m just out of touch with the average university campus, but these seem like systems and measures that should have already been in place. My college, while a bit of a different situation as it was located in Chicago’s Loop, had all of these systems, even six years ago. While we’d sometimes complain when the classroom door-ajar alarm would go off in the middle of a lecture or we’d whine when we had to dig our access ID cards out of our pockets, at least we always knew that these very visible measures were in place to keep us safe. It seems almost incomprehensible to me that something as simple as a CCTV or access system isn’t in place on every campus across the U.S. While nothing that Virginia Tech officials did exacerbated the situation on April 16, perhaps some more proactive and preventive security upgrades could have minimized the enormous scale of the tragedy. Hopefully, facility executives and school officials at all universities will take the review’s recommendations to heart. The three full review sections can be found on Virginia Tech’s Web site.