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I have read a variety of letters claiming that we cannot judge the VT police for not warning students, locking down campus, or attempting to evacuate students because VT's a big place, the cops had no reason to suspect that their perpetrator was a danger, etc. But let's consider:
1. Someone who has killed more than one person has already diplayed a propensity to kill in general. This means that such a person represents a general danger.
2. Not having secured the suspect, the police were certainly to blame for assuming that he had fled the campus. People don't generally hide in places they're not familiar with, and a student from another country would have been most familar with his school's campus.
3. Failing to inform the remainder of campus of the incident -- and that a suspect remained at large -- is reprehensible, period. Because with either of those pieces of information, in the absence of any other action, the students and faculty would have been in a better position to protect themselves. Note that the shooter poked his head into the German class multiple times before he shot and imagine how different that situation might have been if class didn't meet that day, or if the students knew that a suspect matching his description was at their door.
Finally, I work at a university which is a bit bigger than VT. We have university-wide listservs, we have representatives who are contacted by telephone, and we have the usual public service announcements via radio. We invoke these resources to deal with tornados, floods, hurricanes, bomb threats, and snow. In fact, I was evacuated from my office two years ago on minutes of notice for a storm. It's not impossible. Furthermore, these types of events are rare -- but failing to respond to them aggressively can have dire consequences. Is it too much to ask that a university take all the steps that it can to ensure the safety of those who are there?
