Repeat After Me: When It Happens on Our Campus, We Will Be Ready!

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Opinion

Repeat After Me: When It Happens on Our Campus, We Will Be Ready!

4/26/2007

By Terry Calhoun

[Editor's note: You can leave comments for Terry in the IT Trends forum by clicking here.]

One of the consequences of modern communications technology is that we know of so many more bad things that happen. We know about them when we previously would not; we know about them sooner; and we know about them in more detail than ever before. As the world "shrinks" and the population grows, more and more bad things happen too.

What kinds of bad things can happen on a campus? The list is endless, since many colleges and universities are the size of cities. And as many people pointed out in the last week, the kind of campus on which bad things absolutely could not happen would not be a campus on which many of us would like to learn or work.

There is some regional variation, due to climate and terrain, but every institution has a core list of things that could happen to it, and many have a list of things that already have happened to them. Not all of those bad things involve physical damage to the campus infrastructure, although that is often the primary focus of existing disaster plans. In the 2006 issue of Change magazine, authors Ian I. Mitroff, Michael A. Diamond, and C. Murat Alpaslan, of the University of Southern California, noted:

Hurricane Katrina and the September 11th terrorist attacks alerted university leaders and governing boards to the full danger of both natural and manmade disasters. Yet the lesson should not have been needed. Like their corporate counterparts, in recent years colleges and universities have been beset by a wide variety of crises that, although not as devastating as Katrina and 9/11, have seriously damaged their infrastructures, reputations, and prestige--for instance, the University of Colorado football scandal, the harassment of female cadets at the Air Force Academy, and the 1999 Texas A&M bonfire disaster that killed 12 students and injured 27 others. And then there are the widespread and perennial crises such as grade tampering; the alteration of key files and student records; computer hacking; major fires and explosions; student unrest; civil disturbances; confrontations, sometimes violent, between students of different political, religious, and ideological viewpoints; ethical breaches by top administrators, faculty, and students; the fraudulent use of tutors by student athletes; the stealing of body parts from university medical schools, and so on.
(SCUP website)

I think that we're beginning to get the message, and perhaps, given the latest such crisis took place on Monday, April 16, in Blacksburg, VA on the campus of Virginia Tech, we now understand that we need to be ready for the unthinkable. The campus suffered very little physical damage, but its people suffered tremendously. The terrible shootings that took place there are probably the greatest non-natural disaster ever to strike a college or a university.