Some students had to stay in hotels miles from the Texas Southern University campus. For others, financial aid came late, or not at all. Some feared for their safety. Five hundred light bulbs were burned out at the historically black university in a rough neighborhood in southeast Houston.

Worst of all, there were shootings - four of them, on or near the campus, killing two students.

And at the end of the turbulent semester, the president announced his plans to resign.

As TSU's tumultuous fall draws to a close, the university is in a better place than it was in August, its leaders say. But over the last four months, tension between students and administrators boiled over on social media. Even some university leaders admit that some of the changes would never have occurred were it not for "Take Back TSU," an online student movement.

Similar online campaigns prompted changes at universities across the nation this year, including at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Missouri.

"It's worth noting this renewed activism we're seeing - on many issues, race, systemic oppression - it's clearly amplified by social media," said Kevin Kruger, the president of NASPA, a national organization of student affairs administrators.

At TSU, students had passed around petitions before. They'd written emails or complained to administrators. But the complaints often went unanswered. The difference this time?

"Twitter," said outgoing President John Rudley, who said he was disheartened by the criticism from students - especially after working for eight years to turn the school around.

Nonetheless, Rudley listened. He met with movement leader Christina Letsinger and some of her peers days after the first tweets went out in September. And he worked quickly to resolve the concerns.

Now, as Rudley prepares to leavein August, Take Back TSU faces a new challenge: making sure the administration listens, even during transition.

A 'very dead' campus

Through the first weeks of the semester, Letsinger, a communications junior, noticed a lot of issues in the Martin Luther King Center, where her classes met. Music editing courses that were supposed to use software called Pro-Tools didn't even have computers, she said. Other courses were offered but never taught.

Letsinger also noticed that campus was "very dead." Three Greek organizations had been shuttered by their national organizations, and school leaders had moved a weekly "Hump Day" party from a plaza in the middle of campus to a student center. To Letsinger, it seemed people no longer had any desire to hang out on campus.

Letsinger did some research and found that students at Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C., had taken similar complaints online - with the hashtag "TakeBackHU" - and forced administrators to listen. Now she had a blueprint.

Letsinger pulled together a forum on GroupMe, a text messaging app, with some of her friends. The group went from seven to 130 within hours.

Some said they'd tried to circulate petitions or complain to administrators and nothing was working. They would have to make their complaints public - "If it's public, they can't deny it any more," Letsinger said. She told the group the hashtag they'd use: #TakeBackTxSU.

She didn't want to use the movement to bash TSU. She wanted it to make the school better. "We love our school," Letsinger said. "We could have transferred if we didn't."

Letsinger wasn't sure it would work, however. The GroupMe forum, only seen by those on the texting app, had drawn attention from students, but it wasn't as open a venue as Twitter.

Around noon on Sept. 16, she sent out four or five tweets. She didn't see anyone joining in. Letsinger went about her day and around 10 p.m., she got a call from someone telling her to look at her computer. The hashtag was trending. The next day she was on the news.

"It was like, wait a minute, this is real," Letsinger said.

Movements get attention

Social media-driven student movements have caught the attention of college administrators, in some cases drawing national attention. At the University of Missouri, where black students felt their complaints had been ignored by administrators, a student movement drew national media coverage as the football team joined in. The president and chancellor resigned.

At UT-Austin, social media played a big role in a push by students to remove a statue honoring Confederate leader Jefferson Davis. An online petition garnered thousands of signatures - including those of state and national lawmakers.

"(Students) might take an isolated experience at one institution and through social media they're empowered by students at other institutions," said Kruger, the president of the student affairs administrators group. "That really is changing the nature of activism on campus. It amplifies it and I think it can create pressure on the institution."

As universities compete for students, faculty and research dollars, maintaining a solid brand is important. Because that brand can be tarnished by a viral social media campaign, universities must respond quickly.

That wasn't the case at TSU, which was "behind the proverbial gun" all fall, said Derrick Mitchell, the chairman of the board of regents. Some issues weren't handled before they made their way to Rudley, Mitchell said. Deferred maintenance had stacked up. Students wanted more events on campus. A new dorm wasn't completed in time.

"We took a major PR hit because of the lack in judgment of a few," he said.

Rudley still worries that Take Back TSU may have bruised the university's brand - something he worked hard to rebuild over eight years. Rudley took office after Priscilla Slade, whose handling of the school's finances left her facing criminal charges of misapplication of fiduciary property.

Rudley was receptive in the first meeting with student leaders in September, Letsinger remembered. He seemed surprised at some of the complaints. Some things had been lost in translation between the students and the administrators beneath Rudley.

"This group saying they have these petitions and resolutions that never got to us ... that was really surprising to me," Rudley said. "My job is to get scholarships for this university, to build buildings, to improve academic programs all the way around. 'Hump Day' is not on my calendar to do."

Since the meeting, the TSU administration has worked to respond quickly to student complaints.

The lights have all been fixed on campus and security has been ramped up - with curfews, sign-in sheets at dorms, random room checks and additional patrols.

The school plans to hire more financial aid officers and will move the cramped financial aid office into a spacious new room. The new dorm, with 800 rooms, will open in January and the students staying in hotels will move back to campus in the spring.

Still, the anger from students was disheartening and the shootings in particular took a toll.

"That helped me say, 'OK, Dr. Rudley, you need to think about an exit strategy,' " he said. When Rudley leaves in August, he will have led TSU for nine years - much longer than the average for a university president.

Safety improved

Kye Williams, a communications junior, was one of the first to join Take Back TSU after hearing students, including Letsinger, complain in one of his classes. Williams wasn't staying at his assigned dorm, and the dorm where he was staying had a water leak that was attracting bugs. Maintenance took weeks to respond, he said.

Safety was one of his main concerns. A friend of Williams lives at the Courtyard Apartments, where two students were shot in separate incidents this semester. Before the shootings, residents said, security was lax.

But just before he went home to Los Angeles for the holidays, Williams returned a camera to his friend there. He couldn't get beyond a security officer. His friend had to come down and get it from him.

"I definitely do feel safer," Williams said.