When Threats of Violence Come to University Libraries

On the morning of July 11, several employees of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA received an emailed bomb threat from someone unaffiliated with the university, specifically naming the university’s library and dining commons. It might be called a typical bomb threat in which no bomb was found: local police and FBI evacuated students and staff from the library and summer campers from the dining hall before moving the rest of the campus to safe sites. Law enforcement determined the threat was not credible, and the university lifted the evacuation order later that day. It was disruptive, but not violent.

What followed over the next two weeks, though, was unusual. Four days later, and two days after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, a university library six hundred miles away received a similar threat. This one came hours after Bellarmine University in Louisville, KY announced the suspension of Professor John James for an “offensive and unacceptable” social media post sharing a screenshotted article about the Trump shooting with the words “If you’re gonna shoot, man, don’t miss.”

This time, the email came with the subject line “My manifesto,” and was sent to more than 90 campus addressees. “In the name of Donald Trump I have hidden highly lethal lead azide devices in the library and cafeteria,” the email read. Once again, a college campus was evacuated, searched by local police, and soon given the all clear.

Three days after that, on July 18, Arkansas State University’s library and student union were named. Again, university and local police, K-9 units, the sheriff’s office, and counter terrorism unit evacuated and searched, finding no credible threat.

The fourth university bomb threat in two weeks came a week later, this time at Hampton University in Virginia. Again, a campus’s operations were disrupted as local law enforcement evacuated the campus until they were satisfied that once again, there was no bomb.

These four threats across the country have one building in common: the university library. That more than doubles the number of such threats in 2024, (from three between January and June). Reporting has stayed local, notifying the public that the threat was being investigated and to give the all clear once police determined there was no explosive. Public servants haven’t addressed the pattern, and news seems to be focused elsewhere, notably, in this two-week stretch, on the shooting of one presidential hopeful and the retirement of another.

Libraries, of course, are under constant existential attacks, facing book bans, Draconian budget cuts, and lawsuits to stop the lending of digitized books. Support for public libraries has not wavered, despite these assaults on intellectual freedom, yet the danger has ramped up in recent weeks from political talking points to what seems, at least in one case, like a politically motivated violent threat.

Bomb threats to university libraries are nothing new. My father, an emeritus professor, remembers threats being called into his university library so often in the 1970s that he says he simply stopped evacuating after a while. Perhaps I have been conditioned to take threats seriously, as the thought of school violence crosses my mind even when there is no threat called in. After all, I am a lecturer at UC Santa Barbara, where Elliot Rodger, now an incel hero, went to a sorority house and opened fire in retribution for no one having had sex with him. All night long I checked the news to make sure none of my students had been there.

It’s important to note these recent threats are based in anti-intellectual and anti-library rhetoric during a contentious election season, rather than school shooter rhetoric. It’s no accident that these are specific to university libraries, symbols for free speech and intellectual exchange. The timing of these university library threats—after Biden stepped aside and the political climate changed, the evocation of Trump at Bellarmine University, and the targeting of universities and libraries, famously two institutions conservative lawmakers often scapegoat in speeches and policies, feels significant. Of course we don’t know who called in these threats or why, exactly. The FBI, in their School Shooter Threat Assessment, says violence against schools can happen for any number of reasons. “[Threats] may be intended to taunt; to intimidate; to assert power or control; to punish; to manipulate or coerce; to frighten; to terrorize; to compel someone to do something; to strike back for an injury, injustice or slight; to disrupt someone’s or some institution’s life; to test authority, or to protect oneself.”

The FBI doesn’t have a similar assessment for threats to libraries, though the American Library Association wrote an open letter to Director Christopher Wray in 2022 after five public library systems had to close down to investigate threats of violence. “We are gravely concerned for the safety of library workers and the millions of Americans who visit libraries each day,” the letter reads. Threats of violence “may lead to actual violence towards library workers.” To this, I would add library patrons, and in the case of university libraries in particular, towards the students, faculty, and staff who rely on the library to research, study, and retreat.

School shooters want to be remembered for what they did. They might leave behind manifestos, as did Elliot Rodger before he went to the sorority houses near where I teach, as did mass murderers in non-academic settings: Dylann Roof at Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, and Payton Gendron at Tops Friendly Markets in Buffalo. Their rhetoric is explicitly rooted in victimization, and are often white supremacist, anti-Black, anti-Semitic, and anti-woman. Their ideologies are frequently fascist but garbled. Still, they sign and publish them, leaving them behind for us to puzzle and rage and weep over after their own deaths.

Emailing university library bomb threats is an anonymous act, not meant to last past the disruption caused by the inevitable evacuation and investigation. There is something furtive in the act, which conceals itself through lack of action. These threats aren’t  extensively reported, or directly addressed by politicians. The names of the perpetrators are neither released nor remembered, if they were ever known. These are  political warning shots.

As Americans return to school, including myself and for the first time, my oldest child, who is heading to elementary school, I’m thinking a lot about the various dangers facing students. My daughter, like me, loves to read, and I know that her school library will be a refuge for her, as mine was for me.

Last week, when my daughter came home from preschool for the last time, I found the emergency kit I’d packed at the beginning of the school year. There was her change of clothes, the snacks in case her class was trapped for an extended period of time, and then, with a sickening jolt, I found the letter I had written to her in case of a school shooting. I couldn’t stop myself—I reread it. I can’t bring myself to throw it away, though I don’t know why on earth I want to preserve such a horror.

She was three years old when I wrote her a letter in case of violence at school, and I deliberated over the last words my daughter might ever hear from me. I wanted to reassure her I loved her, and was so proud of her, and was always with her. I said I couldn’t wait to be with her again. I remember having to take a walk after I wrote that letter, breathing deeply to stem the nausea of committing that thought experiment to paper. Now that she’s in elementary school, I will be asked to write her another letter. I don’t know what I want to say to her about the violence that could befall her in school.

My instinct is to be straightforward with her about my anger that parents are asked to send their children to school with goodbye letters and family photos tucked into their backpacks. I know I won’t say any of that. I’ll just say she is loved and deserving of a life without fear of being shot or scared to use her school library. But I can only make so many promises as her mother. That is the heartbreak of raising children in America.

We don’t know the motivations of the people who called in the university library bomb threats this summer, nor the political affiliations. But as we often say when there are mass shooters, these people are not merely mentally ill, nor are they lone wolves. There is a deep distrust in American politics and culture of all that education offers and represents. Even the mere threat of violence is a response to political talking points, to fear of what might happen if people read and learn all that colleges and libraries can offer. In an era of mass shootings, every bomb threat is more than a simple disruption. It’s sending a message that education can be dangerous, and we must never take it for granted.