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Opinion
Repeat After Me: When It Happens on Our Campus, We Will Be Ready!
4/26/2007
Once the crisis happened, Virginia Tech's leadership did a masterful job of "the right thing." Coincidentally, a work project that I had been at for a year came to fruition. The Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) published a simple monograph, "Lessons from the Front: The Presidential Role in Disaster Planning and Response." That monograph is now in the hands of every college and university president in the United States and soon will be available as a PDF on SCUP's website.
As far as I can tell from the outside, Virginia Techs president, Charles W. Steger, could have been reading from its pages, even though it was not yet published. I applaud president Steger and his administration for their response. Likewise, lacking the physical destruction of the campus, others in the VT administration were able to connect out with colleagues elsewhere and communicate in intelligent ways. The VT website The Higher Education Community Lends Its Support is only one such example.
Even Virginia Tech, though--such a powerhouse of information technology that in some of the early traffic graphics of the Internet, you could see Blacksburg as a major locus of that traffic--did not have in place the very latest communications technologies to warn people of the danger. Probably no place has, yet, but lots of places will soon. Even so, what is currently "the latest" is not perfect and is only a step to where we will be someday.
Some day, we'll be wearing our computer on campus, and an avatar will pop up in the corner of our eye and tell us that there is a crisis nearby and that we are in danger. It will offer us detailed instructions on what to do in order to be safest. How we will get permission from all of our students, faculty, staff, and visitors to notify them, how we will stay updated as to the most likely communications technology that will reach them, and the details of how we know their "address" without violating their privacy are not things we yet know how to do. But we will.
Meanwhile, I think the best thing that I can do in this column at this point in time is share some links to places and resources that might help you and others on your campus be prepared when the next crisis or disaster hits.
- SCUP has a Web document available to all with general crisis and disaster management planning resources; and
- SCUP also has a Web document where we are archiving news stories and other resources that might serve as a reservoir of information from which to derive lessons learned last week at Virginia Tech.
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