The candlelight vigils on college campuses across Rhode Island began at sundown Monday, just hours after the nation’s deadliest mass shooting in history. The soul searching among college and university administrators was already under way.

They looked at the stricken faces of the Virginia Tech college president and the campus police chief, the grieving students rushing away from the grounds, and saw a reflection of their own nightmare. Here in Rhode Island, they wondered, are we ready if the worst happens?

Administrators at all of the colleges and universities in Rhode Island said yesterday that they have emergency response plans to handle any kind of crisis, including a shooter, on their campuses. They said they have systems in place to contact students, faculty and staff — e-mails to campus accounts, automatic calls to campus phones, postings on the school homepage, signs and staffers sent door-to-door — when they need to alert the entire campus population swiftly.

Students from Roger Williams University, in Bristol, gather yesterday for a Take Back the Night march across campus to bring attention to domestic violence. The program started with a vigil to honor the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre.

The Providence Journal / Kris Craig

They have close ties with local police departments, which patrol the open campuses and may be granted access to the colleges’ surveillance cameras during an incident.

But is this enough, they are asking themselves, as every college and university in Rhode Island examines how vulnerable it is.

“This has raised a whole new level of awareness,” said Dennis Moore, director of public relations at the Community College of Rhode Island. “Unfortunately, it took a tragedy to do this.”

After attending Providence College’s candlelight vigil and giving a homily about the Virginia tragedy at a Mass Monday night, the Rev. Brian J. Shanley, the school’s president, pulled the college’s cabinet members into his office yesterday morning and told them they were going to review every part of the college’s emergency plan, said vice president Ed Caron. The college’s security director, retired state police Maj. John Leyden, was sending out a campus-wide notice to let everyone know the plans were being reviewed in response to the Virginia Tech slayings, Caron said.

Bryant University, in Smithfield, is planning a campus-wide drill to test how well the college responds to the most urgent type of crisis. In his message posted on the Bryant Web site, President Ronald K. Machtley said that everyone on campus would be informed about the university’s crisis plan and the upcoming drill.

Officials from colleges and universities around the state say they’re waiting to find out more about what happened at Virginia Tech.

“It’s a horrific tragedy,” said Maj. Michael Quinn, director of security at Johnson & Wales University. “You know this business and the unpredictable nature of people. I feel bad for the police chief and [Virginia Tech’s] president.”

Security officials from the colleges and universities in Providence met yesterday with police Chief Dean M. Esserman, who offered the department’s help. The chief assigned the department’s school resource officers and several members of the SWAT team to walk patrols on the campuses.

Colleges and universities around the state were re-examining their procedures for communicating with their campuses in an emergency.

CCRI is reviewing its emergency response plan and will most likely recommend a better notification system for each of the college’s four campuses, in Lincoln, Newport, Providence and Warwick, Moore said. Johnson & Wales, Brown University and Salve Regina University, in Newport, are already pursuing technology that could send emergency messages simultaneously through private phones.

Salve Regina began reviewing its emergency response plan in September, after a fatal shooting at Dawson College near Montreal, Canada, said spokeswoman Kristine Hendrickson. The university is also working more closely with Newport police, giving officers copies of the floor plans of campus buildings, and having a Newport police radio, which allows Salve Regina’s security team to instantly contact the police.

Salve Regina is also considering adding a more old-fashioned method of alert — a siren that would sound throughout the campus in the event of an attack or emergency. “Everyone talks about technology, technology, but it makes you dependent on technology,” Hendrickson said. “What happens if the power goes out and you can’t send e-mails?”

That’s also a concern at the University of Rhode Island. Even in the world of instant communications, you can’t reach every person instantly, said URI spokeswoman Linda Acciardo.

“You have to depend on what you know. How do you notify all of the people at once?” Acciardo said. “People have been talking about this since the news came out, even talking about going back to the civil defense [days] and using sirens and bullhorns. I think everybody’s looking at protocols.”

Brown University tested its protocol in December, during a training exercise with the Providence police using a gunman scenario on campus, said Walter Hunter, vice president for administration. Though campus shootings are rare, the scenario is something that every college administrator prepares for, Hunter said.

And what they fear.

Underneath the talk about security and communication remains the worry that campus officials are missing the signs that could prevent a tragedy.

Reports about the Virginia Tech shooter describe him as an angry loner who had been writing disturbing pieces in his creative writing class, disturbing enough that he was referred to counseling.

“It’s important for everyone to take warning signs seriously,” said Maj. Brendan Doherty, the safety director at Roger Williams University and soon-to-be state police superintendent. “Unfortunately, people tend to write them off as anger issues.”

And that is the biggest fear, said Fred Ghio, security director at Rhode Island College. “You have that one person, and you don’t know what’s on his mind, and he doesn’t care what happens to him,” he said.

By then, it’s too late to do anything but react.

jjordan@projo.com