When I first heard the news of a shooting at Brown University, I instinctively checked my inbox. Like many other Penn students, I was hoping to be reassured that my own institution understood the weight of what had occurred. What arrived instead, a day and a half after the tragedy first struck, was a mere five sentences from Penn President Larry Jameson to a familiar tone: offerings of thoughts and prayers, expressions of grief, and a closing note about how “precious our community is.” While Jameson took a step that some other Ivy League schools did not by making a statement, it rang hollow — a reminder of just how distant the feelings of students are from our institution’s leadership.
The problem lies in the neutrality of Jameson’s statement. It is the response that University administrators have perfected over years of crisis communication, meant to assuage concerns while avoiding responsibility, specificity, and meaningful action. Writing, “our thoughts are with the Brown University community,” does not make a commitment to improvement. It does nothing to address student wellness, campus safety, and especially the broader reality that school shootings are terrifyingly real. Despite the fact that Brown is our sister institution — a school that many of our friends call home — the statement’s neutral language distances Penn from the reality of the situation.
Worsening this sense of detachment is the timing of the tragedy and response. Coming in the midst of finals season, a time already rife with heightened stress, anxiety, and burnout, news of the shooting was yet another blow to student mental health. To add insult to injury, the email’s suggestion for students to “take care of yourselves and look after one another,” shifts responsibility away from the institution and back onto students. Support within the community matters, but it cannot replace institutional support. A university with Penn’s resources should not rely on students to compensate for administrative inaction.
Unfortunately, though, this behavior is nothing new. Historically, Penn’s responses to cases involving student suicide, gun violence in surrounding neighborhoods, and sexual violence on campus have been far too scant, consisting of discussions and posturing rather than concrete change. The absence of any sort of meaningful, campus-wide response during these tragedies sends the message that suffering is something to be swept under the rug and managed rather than confronted and resolved.
With this context in mind, Jameson’s email about the shooting reads less like a commitment to support and more like placation written out of habit. It recycles overused phrases, creating an impartial narrative that is striking in its uniformity. Reducing the emotional weight of a school shooting to a short acknowledgment paired with an even shorter reminder about wellness resources treats the event as something expected — tragic, but ultimately manageable.
That familiarity emphasizes the unsettling normalization of violence in American institutional life. Violence on campuses now occurs frequently enough that administrators can use practiced lines rather than participate in genuine reflection. At the same time, each incident of violence is a reminder for students that a peer, friend, or family member could be taken away and that campuses aren’t the safe spaces that they should be.
What the University needs in times like this is open communication and a commitment to change. An outline of concrete safety considerations — as peer institutions including Yale and Harvard have — or plans to support students emotionally would have gone much further than the email we received. Even just recognizing that these incidents are becoming disturbingly common and creating spaces to discuss the significance of gun violence would have provided valuable reassurance.
The tragedy at Brown should have prompted Penn’s leadership to look inward. Instead, it was treated as an external event, unfortunate but safely distant. For students who already feel unseen in conversations about mental health, safety, and well-being, that distance is familiar. It is the same distance felt when student deaths are quietly acknowledged, when wellness resources remain inadequate, and when administrative concern seems to end at an email signature.
Universities often speak of community as their greatest strength. But community is not sustained by reminders alone. It is built over time with consistent and committed improvement. Until Penn’s administration moves beyond rehearsed condolences and begins treating student well-being as a lived reality rather than a line in an email, these messages will continue to ring empty, no matter how carefully they are worded.
ANDY MEI is a College first year studying Economics and History from Palo Alto, California. His email is andymei@sas.upenn.edu.
