The language of uncertainty
Bomb threats and swatting calls force a problem that active-shooter alerts never have: the threat is almost always not real, and the institution knows that statistically as it composes the message. The alerts in this chapter document how universities have learned, slowly and unevenly, to take a credible-but-improbable threat seriously without telling 30,000 students that the building they are in is about to explode.
The 194 cases here cover three overlapping genres: phoned or emailed bomb threats (the genre HBCUs faced in waves in 2022 and again in 2025), suspicious-package incidents, and swatting calls (false 911 reports of an active shooter, designed to elicit a tactical police response).
The HBCU bomb-threat waves of 2022 and 2025
In January and February 2022, historically Black colleges and universities across the country received bomb threats in clustered waves: one around January 4, a larger one on January 31 and February 1, and a tail through February. Institutions canceled classes, evacuated dormitories, and held shelter-in-place orders for hours. The FBI's investigation attributed the bulk of the threats to a single juvenile suspect. The messages preserved here span the genre's whole register, from North Carolina Central's evacuation order ("A BOMB THREAT has been reported on campus. Please proceed immediately to the nearest exit and vacate the building. Leave campus.", closing "THIS IS NOT A DRILL") to Coppin State's quieter "If you are on campus, please, shelter in place, and wait for further instructions."
A second wave hit in September 2025, concentrated on September 11 and again on September 30: the archive's case files from those days cover Alabama State, Bethune-Cookman, Clark Atlanta, Spelman, Morehouse, Florida A&M, Hampton, Southern, and Virginia State, with Alabama A&M, Delaware State, Morgan State, and Prairie View A&M in the later cluster. A difference readable in the texts themselves: some of the 2025 messages respond to the wave as a wave. Spelman's alert opens "We are aware of threats received today by several HBCU’s, including Clark Atlanta University here in the AUC"; Florida A&M's begins "FAMU Police Department is aware of recent email threats reported across the higher education community". The 2022 texts each answer a threat to one campus. Both waves are preserved side by side for exactly that comparison.
The genre's two failure modes
Bomb-threat response is one trade-off with two failure modes, and institutions land on both sides of it.
Failure mode one is the over-tell. Treat every threat as a campus-wide emergency notification, including the unattended backpack in a library carrel, and the cumulative effect is alert fatigue: recipients who get several false-alarm messages a year have no way to tell the seventh from the real one.
Failure mode two is the under-tell. An institution anxious about that fatigue handles a building evacuation by foot and megaphone and sends nothing campus-wide. When this works, no one notices. When it doesn't, students in adjacent buildings watch a sea of police cars arrive with no explanation, and the trust cost is high.
Swatting: the alert that has to assume the worst
Swatting calls describe an active shooter at a specific building, sometimes with specific casualty counts, in convincing detail; the purpose is to provoke a tactical police response. A concentrated wave hit campuses in April 2023, and this chapter documents it across more than a dozen institutions, including Boston University (April 9, 2023), the University of Pittsburgh (April 10, 2023), and the University of Oklahoma (April 7, 2023), whose first alert read "OU-Norman Emergency: There is an active shooter at the Van Vleet Oval. Take immediate action now. Run. Hide. Fight!"
The institutional question is whether to treat the call as real, and the alerts in this chapter answer: yes, until proven otherwise. A swatting first alert is textually indistinguishable from an active-shooter first alert, because at the moment of composition nobody knows which one it is. The difference appears in the follow-up, sent after building sweeps come up clean. BU's second message concedes the ambiguity in real time: "Although we are still investigating, at this time we are confident that there is no threat to our community." OU's closes it: "OUPD has issued an ALL CLEAR. After a thorough search, no threat was found." Somewhere between those two registers, investigating-but-confident and searched-and-found-nothing, every swatted campus has to land, in writing, the same night.
One boundary the archive is strict about: a message is an all-clear only if it actually lifts restrictions. The collection preserves dozens of messages labeled "all clear" whose body still asks readers to avoid an area; this archive types those as updates, and readers studying resolution timing should watch for the distinction.
What this chapter teaches
Bomb threats and swatting cases are where institutions learn how to be honest about uncertainty in writing. The verbatim language in this chapter rewards careful reading because it documents an institution's evolving epistemology: how does the alert distinguish what is known (a threat was received), what is being investigated (whether the threat is credible), and what is being asked of you (a specific protective action)? Bad alerts collapse all three into vague urgency. Good alerts keep them apart.
When you scroll through the case list below, the cases worth comparing side-by-side are the ones where the same institution issued multiple bomb-threat alerts across different years. The drift in language tells you what that institution learned.