Shots rang out from a dark SUV speeding past a parked car in broad daylight, then vanished into the fog with ghostlike indifference.
This was not a scene from Grand Theft Auto VI. It happened across from the Oakland University campus near the intersection of Walton Blvd. and Squirrel Road on Jan. 7, at approximately 1 p.m.
According to CNN, there were 75 school shootings in the United States in 2025, the lowest total since 2021. Still, that number far exceeds pre-pandemic figures. In 2019, the previous high was 52. In 2008, it was just 18. Progress, perhaps — but only in the bleak arithmetic of normalization.
Anxiety is high at OU. A superstitious observer might even say the campus feels cursed. After being closed for nearly a month due to a heating system failure, students returned only to hear gunshots shatter the first week of the university’s reopening. Parking lots were crowded, tempers were short and the humdrum of campus life was violently interrupted.
Although the shots were not fired on campus, the specter of campus violence loomed large over a student body still working to recalibrate. OU issued a brief statement informing students there was no direct threat to campus but offered little in the way of a follow-up.
Such a milquetoast half-measure does little to reassure.
This is one instance where the university community would have benefited from more words, not fewer. A truly succinct message could have read: ‘Shots were fired off campus. There is no known threat. Updates will follow.’ Clear, direct and stabilizing.
Instead, ambiguity filled the vacuum.
“As soon as my phone went off, I knew my students were going to be distracted,” Vincent Stabile, a graduate student at OU, said. “I read it and thought — was that all?”
“I got the alert. I kept expecting some sort of update,” psychology major Rex Featherstone said.
In conversations across campus, one theme emerged from the university’s communication: confusion.
The vagueness may be understandable. Universities and police departments often fear saying too much too soon. But context matters. The campus community is still healing from the sudden closure, lost access to facilities and academic disruption caused by the heating failure. Trust is fragile.
In that context, nonchalance does not read as calm. It reads as negligence.
Oakland University has long prided itself on intellectual diversity. Some of the work done here is edgy enough to be called punk rock. But behind every punk anthem is a system it pushes against — a “man” holding the levers of information.
Sometimes, all it takes is levers to be thrown on a soundboard to change the sound entirely.
Oakland University could take this moment — shaped by distrust after the facilities failure and confusion following the off-campus shooting — as an opportunity. It could lay out a template for what a trustworthy academic institution may look like in the modern era: transparency, good faith and a sense of shared investment between administrators, faculty and students.
Clear communication in moments of uncertainty is not optional; it is a responsibility. Right now, students are not asking for alarmism. They are asking for clarity.
