The catch-all
The 1,070 cases in this chapter are the ones that don't fit cleanly into any of the other seven 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, road-closure and campus-operations notices, wildlife advisories, 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 pandemic record
The COVID-19 cases in this chapter concentrate in two moments: the March 2020 closure announcements, and the August and September 2020 reopening-and-outbreak messages as residential campuses came back and dorms hit cluster status. Between and after those two moments, institutions produced a flood of communications (commencement cancellations, quarantine protocols, travel guidance) of which the archive preserves the alert-system slice.
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.
One institution's pandemic record now sits in this collection at nearly full length. Pepperdine University's community updates run as more than forty individual case files, from a January 28, 2020 health advisory about a then-new coronavirus through the closure, reopening, testing, and vaccination-policy messages of 2020 and 2021 and into a January 2022 update. Read in sequence, they show one institutional voice managing two years of uncertainty a message at a time, which no single-incident case can show.
Lockdowns that were not active shooters
Several cases here document campus lockdowns triggered by something other than a confirmed armed person on campus. A recurring trigger in this collection is police activity that spills onto campus from somewhere else: Allegheny College sheltered in place in 2012 when an armed fugitive fled on foot through Meadville during a warrant service, Cal State Fullerton spent roughly eight hours sealed off in December 2012 after a pursuit of armed robbery suspects ended in a crash at the edge of campus, and Mills College locked down in 2019 when two felony suspects crashed their car near I-580 and climbed a campus fence. Community colleges appear throughout this genre, their campuses close to the streets where these incidents start: Southwest Texas Junior College's Uvalde campus locked down in March 2022 when a high-speed chase came through its main entrance, and San Joaquin Delta College's 2023 lockdown began with an armed robbery at the mall across the street.
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 an active-shooter threat description, which would be inaccurate. The genre's standard hedge names police activity and a place, asks people to avoid it, and says nothing about why. Temple University's September 2024 message is the form at its plainest: "TUalertEMER: Police activity reported at Broad St and Allegheny Ave. Use caution. Avoid the area. Police are responding." The release, half an hour later, is just as spare: "TUalertEMER: Police have cleared the area of Broad St. and Allegheny Ave." Whether and when to follow up with a more specific description is the case-by-case judgment call documented here.
Civil unrest
A distinctive subset of cases here document campus alerts issued during civil-unrest events: the 2020 racial-justice protests, the spring 2024 Gaza protest encampments (the Harvard Yard encampment, the Cal Poly Humboldt building occupation, and their contemporaries are case files here), and older cases reaching back decades. 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 because they were sent through the campus alert system and because the language they produced is part of the institutional record.
Shelter-in-place, half a world away
The chapter's newest shelter-in-place cluster comes from outside the United States. When Iran struck Al Udeid Air Base in June 2025, Texas A&M University at Qatar, about twenty miles away in Doha's Education City, ordered its community to shelter in place. When missiles came again on February 28, 2026, the American branch campuses filed alerts the same night: Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern, VCUarts, and Texas A&M in Education City, along with NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Tel Aviv, all have case files from that date. Georgetown Qatar's message, sent before 2:00 AM, is the genre reduced to a single line: "Security threat elevated, everyone is required to remain indoors." The vocabulary of the American campus alert, built for tornadoes and police activity, here covers a ballistic-missile attack without changing shape.
Workplace violence at medical centers
Several cases here document workplace-violence incidents on and around campus, including at academic medical facilities: the 2023 emergency-department brawl at the University of Chicago Medical Center is a case file here, alongside workplace shootings and threats at ordinary campus workplaces (Yale's 2009 Annie Le case and Prairie View A&M's 2023 employee shooting sit in this genre). Where the incident happens inside a hospital, the protective action turns hospital-specific (department lockdown rather than campus lockdown), and the verbatim text uses a vocabulary the rest of the archive doesn't share.
Public-health incidents that were not COVID-19
A larger set of cases predate or postdate the COVID-19 era and document other public-health alerts: the 2009 H1N1 outbreak communications (Amherst, Emory, Kansas, TCU, and Washington State all have case files here), the meningitis B outbreaks at Princeton and UC Santa Barbara in 2013 and the deaths at Drexel and San Diego State in 2014, and the 2014 mumps outbreaks at Ohio State and Fordham. 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 than to a protective action.
Operational notices and the road back
The archive's 2025-2026 capture waves added a genre this chapter barely held before: the operational notice, in which nothing is burning and no one is armed, but the campus cannot run normally. Pepperdine University's file is the deepest single run. In the winter of 2025, with the roads around its Malibu campus repeatedly closed, the university's emergency-information feed tracked the commute as its own alert sequence: a Malibu Canyon Road closure notice on January 26 that moved the next day's classes online, then "County officials have reopened Malibu Canyon Road to all traffic as of 6 AM today, Monday, January 27." the following morning, then weeks of Pacific Coast Highway updates as that reopening was announced, delayed, and delivered one lane at a time. Each message is small; the sequence is the record, a disruption-to-restoration arc that reads more like a utility's outage log than a Clery warning.
Two smaller genres round out the chapter. The all-clear sometimes now arrives as its own filed message: the University of South Carolina's Carolina Alert system closes incidents with a standing form, as in "ALL CLEAR. The public safety incident at 541 Main St on the University of South Carolina's Columbia campus has been resolved." And the wildlife advisory persists as the alert system's gentlest register: Princeton's May 2026 TigerAlert about a black bear at Cannon Green, UC Berkeley's coyote-sighting advisory, and Pepperdine's mountain-lion notice all read as neighborly bulletins carried on emergency infrastructure.
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.