Students grieve last night at a candlelight vigil at Virginia Tech (Taylor Howard/DP)

Monday’s shootings at Virginia Tech have prompted several pressing questions. What was the shooter’s background? What was his motive? Was there an accomplice?

While all of these questions indubitably require answers, what concerns me most is the Virginia Tech administration’s actions yesterday. To that end, I have one simple question: How could the University have responded the way it did?

Let’s review Monday’s chain of events. At 7:15 a.m., a gunman shot two students in West Ambler Johnston dorm. Police were called to the scene. Though the police didn’t apprehend the suspect, they believed he had possibly left the campus and even the state.

This assumption led to blatant idiocy on behalf of the administration — they didn’t send an e-mail warning students until 9:26 a.m.

Then, at 9:45 a.m., the second round of shootings began at Norris Hall, an engineering building. In total, the gunman shot 32 people, and then killed himself.

Tech’s administration defends its actions, saying it thought the shooting was a “self-contained case.” How could University officials have come to such a conclusion when they didn’t even have the suspect in custody? Why was an e-mail not sent at 7:16 a.m., warning students that a gunman was on the loose? At the very least, the administration should have evacuated the dorms or shut down campus.

Indeed, students were still in classes at 8 a.m. — after the initial shooting — and many students say that had no idea what was going on. They went to class, as usual, because no one had alerted them not to go.

Thankfully, Maureen Rush, Penn’s Vice President of Public Safety, has announced that Penn’s course of action would be to shut down if a similar situation occurred on campus. She also called for increased communication efforts to ensure the safety of Penn’s students and faculty in such a crisis.

Virginia Tech’s administration can defend itself all it wants — but the parents whose children died as a result of its inadequate response may not accept its excuses so readily.