The catch-all
The 265 cases in this chapter are the ones that don't fit cleanly into any of the other six categories: police activity that was not active-shooter or armed-person, building lockdowns triggered by something other than a violent incident, shelter-in-place orders for civil unrest, evacuation orders that were neither hazmat nor weather, threats of violence that did not produce an active-shooter response, workplace violence at university medical centers, public-health incidents that did not rise to the level of a disease outbreak, the COVID-19 institutional communications of 2020-2022, and the small "other" bucket of incidents that fit nowhere else.
This is the chapter's role: every campus alert genre has its edge cases, and the cases here are where institutional writing does its most exploratory work because there is no template to fall back on.
COVID-19: the largest sub-genre
The COVID-19 cases in this chapter, most concentrated in March, April, and August of 2020, with a second wave in November 2020 and a third in January 2022, are the largest single-event documentation in the entire archive. Most institutions issued more than thirty COVID-related campus communications during the pandemic's first eighteen months: the initial March 2020 closure announcement, the April 2020 commencement-cancellation message, the May 2020 summer-session online-only notice, the July 2020 fall-reopening plan, the August 2020 quarantine-protocol guidance, the September 2020 outbreak alerts as residential dorms hit cluster status, the November 2020 Thanksgiving-travel guidance, and onward.
The cases preserved here are a small sample of that vast institutional-communications archive. The selection criteria favored messages that were either consequential (the first closure, the first reopening, the first dorm-outbreak alert) or stylistically distinctive (institutions whose voice during the pandemic was visibly more candid, more uncertain, or more empathetic than their neutral institutional voice). The verbatim text matters because COVID-19 was the first pandemic in the SMS era, and the institutional writing that emerged was self-consciously aware of how strange a campus-wide email from the president had become as a literary form.
Lockdowns that were not active shooters
Several cases here document campus lockdowns that were triggered by something other than a confirmed armed person on campus. Examples include lockdowns issued during off-campus police pursuits where the suspect was believed to have entered campus property, lockdowns issued during multi-agency tactical responses to incidents at adjacent buildings, lockdowns issued in response to bomb threats whose response was operationally identical to an active-shooter response, and lockdowns issued during the rare but real cases of escaped psychiatric patients in proximity to campus medical centers.
The verbatim alert text in these cases is interesting because the institution has to communicate the protective action (shelter in place, lock doors) without communicating the active-shooter threat description, which would be inaccurate. The genre's standard hedging is "Police activity in the area. Avoid [location] and shelter in place until further notice." Whether and when to follow up with a more specific description is the case-by-case judgment call documented here.
Civil unrest
A small but distinctive subset of cases here document campus alerts issued during civil-unrest events: the 2020 racial-justice protests, the post-2024-election demonstrations, the spring 2024 Gaza protest encampments, and a handful of older cases including the 2014 Ferguson-aftermath protests at Saint Louis University and the 2020 Kenosha-aftermath communications at the University of Wisconsin–Parkside. The institutional writing here is a different mode, neither emergency nor timely warning, but a kind of campus-update genre that is closer to a press release than to an alert. The cases are preserved here because they were sent through the campus alert system and because the language they produced is part of the institutional record.
Workplace violence at medical centers
Several cases here document workplace-violence incidents at academic medical centers, most notably the 2022 Tulsa hospital shooting at the Saint Francis hospital complex (which produced a parallel alert sequence at the University of Oklahoma–Tulsa Schusterman Center), and a handful of incidents at university teaching hospitals where a patient or visitor became violent in the emergency department. The alert genre here is its own thing. The protective action is hospital-specific (department lockdown, code grey), and the verbatim text uses a vocabulary that the rest of the archive doesn't share.
Public-health incidents that were not COVID-19
A few cases predate or postdate the COVID-19 era and document other public-health alerts: the 2014 Ebola scare communications at Texas Health Presbyterian and the University of Texas Southwestern, the 2018 mumps outbreak alerts at Temple University, the 2021 Norovirus outbreaks at several Northeast residential campuses, and the 2024 measles exposure communications at Florida State. The institutional voice in these cases is closer to the timely-warning genre than to the emergency-notification genre: slower, more careful, more likely to direct readers to the campus health center rather than to a protective action.
What this chapter teaches
Two patterns:
The catch-all chapter is where genre conventions get invented. When an incident doesn't fit a template, the institution has to compose the message from scratch, and the cases preserved here are some of the most interesting institutional writing in the archive precisely because of that.
The COVID-19 sub-genre will eventually be its own chapter. The pandemic produced more campus communications than any other event in the modern alert era, and the writing that emerged is distinctive enough that future versions of this archive may break it out as a standalone category. For now it lives here, with the other ones-of-a-kind.
The case list below is the most varied in the archive. Read it for the institutional voices that broke their own templates.