BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Two Baltimore-area universities received anonymous threats within days of each other, prompting school officials to send students text alerts and hire extra police with bomb-sniffing dogs to guard the campuses.

The crowd of sweat-shirt-clad students shuffling Monday into Linthicum Hall at Towson University was thinner than usual, as many decided to skip classes after learning about an anonymous threat targeting the academic building.

“A lot of kids are freaked out,” said Staci Silverstein as she walked to her 11 a.m. family studies class at Linthicum.

“But others might just be using it as an excuse not to come.”

Silverstein’s professor e-mailed students telling them it was safe to attend class and to remind them of a quiz.

Campus police, Baltimore County police and state troopers patrolled both inside and outside Towson’s academic halls. Several hand-held metal detectors sat unused next to state police in the foyer of Linthicum, a social sciences building where students take language, English and political science courses.

Half of the students never showed up for professor Mike Melloy’s freshman writing class.

“It’s hard to blame the kids for not coming today,” he said.

“But the irony is this is probably the safest building in the city right now.”

On Friday, officials at the University of Baltimore beefed up security and sent students text alerts about a threat that “some kind of harmful action would take place on campus,” said Samuel Tress, university police chief.

This marked the first time Towson and UB used their new text-alert systems to notify students of non-weather-related emergencies.

The “indirect, anonymous and ambiguous” nature of the Towson threat cast doubt on its credibility, said Carol Vellucci, spokeswoman for President Robert Caret.

“Yet, with the heightened sensitivity to campus security across the nation, TU exercised extreme caution to maintain safety and security,” she said.

Vellucci couldn’t say whether the two universities’ threats were linked.

kvolkmann@baltimoreexaminer.com