While the Dartmouth community has largely escaped the heightened fear surrounding the nation's rising number of anthrax exposures, discoveries of suspicious substances -- sand, coffee creamer and construction residue among them -- have prompted scares at Columbia, Penn, Harvard and Princeton.
Reports of suspicious mail have grown common at many schools in recent weeks -- Cornell alone has logged eight reports of this kind since Sept. 11.
Campus police at the University of Pennsylvania received no fewer than five calls concerning potential anthrax exposures last week.
Oct. 18 saw two incidents on the West Philadelphia campus, as authorities were called to the School of Dental Medicine and biomedical research buildings. The City Fire Department's Rapid Assessment Team conducted field tests at both locations, all of which came back negative.
"At first blush, at least, the substance is believed to just be sand," University Police Deputy Chief of Investigations Williams Danks told The Daily Pennsylvanian.
Three days earlier, authorities evacuated Penn's Ivy Grille for several hours following a waitress' discovery of an unusual substance at a table.
In this case, a light bulb was deemed the culprit -- a day earlier the Engineering Department had pulled a bulb out of the wall to change it. Some dust fell onto the table, and the engineers neglected to clean it up.
Penn University police officers and members of the Fire and Occupational Safety and Environmental Safety department also investigated a suspicious substance found in a campus office building on Oct. 15. Authorities quickly identified the powder as coffee creamer.
Harvard experienced a more sustained security concern last week, when Rosovsky Hall, home to the Hillel organization, shut down for four days after an employee opened an envelope containing a white powder.
The Harvard University Police Department, its Environmental Health and Safety Team and the Cambridge Fire Department's Hazardous Materials Team all arrived on site to evacuate and decontaminate the building. Two Hillel employees were promptly sent to an area hospital in case of exposure.
Before reopening the building on Monday, Hillel officials announced in an e-mail message that the offending substance was likely "a form of packing material."
Fear is running especially high at Columbia University, due largely to the school's upper Manhattan location.
The New York Police Department shut down entrances to halls on the main quad of Columbia's Barnard College for a half-hour around midnight at Oct. 15. Authorities arrived on campus after freshman Margaret Chen discovered a quantity of white powder between pages of her copy of Time magazine -- specifically, next to an article entitled "Sons of the New World Order" accompanied by photos of Tony Blair, George Bush, Vladimir Putin and Ariel Sharon.
Chen told The Columbia Spectator that the substance was "flaky, like dried salt from a science experiment."
The combined effect of the Barnard incident and off-campus scares, such as a report of noxious fumes at a midtown subway station, has led a few students to take extreme measures, including avoiding the subway and buying bottled water, according to The Spectator.
The most recent incident came Monday night at Princeton's Frist Campus Center. Local authorities sealed off the first floor for two hours following a graduate student's discovery of several large pieces of an unidentified material around a computer terminal.
Members of the Trenton Fire Department's Task Force One Hazardous Materials team, clad in chemical protective suits, removed the substance and bleached the surrounding area. Authorities advised the graduate student to change his clothes and look out for flu-like symptoms.
Concerns at Princeton come in part from the university's close proximity to the Trenton, N.J., post office from which the anthrax-tainted letters to NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw and U.S. Senator Tom Daschle were sent. Trenton's busy Task Force One team had already responded to two prior calls Monday evening before they arrived at Princeton.
At Yale University, President Richard Levin created a task force composed of city and college authorities to address campus security.
"The heightened awareness [to bacterial contamination] is less than desirable ... Not everything is anthrax," New Haven Director of Environmental Health Paul Kowalski said to the Yale Daily News of the frequent distress calls.