When the Iowa River overflowed its banks 12 years ago, inundating the campus of the University of Iowa, Donald Guckert, associate vice president for facilities management, learned some important lessons in adapting to climate change.
The university had been prepared for a 100-year flood like the one that had hit the campus in 1993; it wasn’t ready for the 500-year flood it got, Guckert said.
“We fought the flood for 10 days — it kept building and building,” he recalled.
After the unprecedented flood, the university stopped relying on sandbags stacked by crews of volunteers and started using machines and trained staff members to put up barriers quickly. It stockpiled critical equipment and supplies such as pumps, generators, and shovels to get ready for the next flood.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
But the most important things that Guckert learned during the catastrophic flood of 2008 were to plan for the worst and adjust quickly to changes on the ground.
Those lessons could come in handy today, as the University of Iowa and campuses nationwide confront the coronavirus, a pandemic of uncertain severity and duration. It’s a threat that — like the historic flood — keeps “building and building.” Dozens of colleges have already canceled in-person classes and sent students home; many have shifted to online learning.
As more colleges contemplate such moves, it’s worth hearing from some institutions that have lived through closures resulting from natural disasters. Though the circumstances are different — there’s never been a pandemic that’s shut down so many of the nation’s colleges — the strategies for responding are, in many cases, the same.
Communicate. This may seem obvious, but in the midst of a crisis it can be easy to overlook a constituency or to send mixed messages, college leaders say.
When Rice University conducted a review of its messaging in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, in 2017, it found that some of its communications weren’t clear, and that faculty members wanted messages specifically for them. This time around, the university is crafting its messages centrally, to ensure consistency, while customizing them to specific audiences.
“You have multiple groups that have to be communicated to differently,” says Jerusha Kasch, director of institutional crisis management, noting that undergraduates have concerns distinct from those of graduate students.
As students ask questions of the crisis-management team, via social media or a web page dedicated to Covid-19, leaders post the answers so everyone can see them.
Regular, transparent communications reassure the campus community that “you’ve got a grip on the situation and you’re managing it as well as you can,” says Scott S. Cowen, who was president of Tulane University when Hurricane Katrina hit, in 2005. 40? During the semester-long shutdown that followed Katrina, he sent emails daily.
“People are anxious, they are uncertain, and the more they hear from you, the better off they are,” he says.
Samia Yaqub, president of California’s Butte College, which closed for 18 days during and after the extensive Camp Fire, in 2018, agrees. “Communication is critical, and we find it’s never enough,” she says. “You might send something out on Friday and then get a message on Monday saying we haven’t heard from you in years.”
But Mary Anne Nagy, vice president for student life and leadership engagement at Monmouth University, which lost eight teaching days following Hurricane Sandy, in 2012, says crisis communication is a balancing act. Communicate too much, and you run the risk of people tuning you out; stay silent, and they may become worried and stressed.
And remember, she says, “nothing is more powerful than having face-to-face conversations” — so communicate in person as much as the rules of social distancing will allow. “You can never, ever, forget about the human element.”
Collaborate. When disaster strikes a region, disruptions to the supply chain can make it hard for colleges to secure critical supplies.
That’s why the Universities & Colleges Caucus of the International Association of Emergency Managers created a “national intercollegiate mutual-aid agreement,” says David J. Hubeny, the caucus’s chair. The agreement, reached in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, allows colleges to share resources and services across state lines, “with all the rules and reimbursement policies worked out ahead of time,” says Hubeny, who is executive director of emergency management at Binghamton University.
It’s not that colleges weren’t sharing resources before. After Sandy, one college sent diesel fuel to the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (since absorbed by Rutgers University), to counter a shortage there. But such arrangements were more informal. With the agreement, “we already have the framework, so we can move a lot faster at getting resources to campus,” says André P. Le Duc, chief resilience officer and associate vice president for safety and risk services at the University of Oregon, which sent a team to Umpqua Community College after the mass shooting there in 2015.
Before, there was this sense that the chance of it happening was remote. Now we know it could happen at any moment.
But making use of the agreement in a global pandemic could be tricky, Le Duc adds. “In hurricane season, we might be able to aid somebody on the Eastern Seaboard. The challenge today is that everybody is in the same boat.”
Still, collaboration is continuing in the current crisis. The Disaster Resilient Universities network, which Le Duc leads, has created a “virtual emergency-coordination center” where its 800 institutional members can post plans, messages, and real-time information about their status.
Members of the Universities & Colleges Caucus have made use of its email list to share resources and a spreadsheet tracking how colleges are responding to the virus, says Eric Hodges, the caucus’s vice chair and director of emergency management at Illinois State University. “We have been leaning on each other through the listserv,” he says.
Cram — or go online. Many of the colleges that have canceled classes so far have announced that they’ll shift to online learning. Others will have to figure out how to fit a semester’s worth of material into a shorter time frame.
That’s what the University of North Carolina at Wilmington did after Hurricane Florence destroyed 13 apartment-style residence halls, tore a hole in the roof of the main science building, and toppled 400 trees in September 2018. During the cleanup, the campus was closed to students for four weeks, cutting the semester from 15 weeks to 11.
To make up for lost time, the university added weekend classes and online programs and eliminated the fall break. With permission from its accreditor and the governing board to make “substantive changes” in its programs, it refocused lessons on core material, says Jose V. Sartarelli, the chancellor. “We chose to be intensive on those things that are critical and not bother on the things that are supportive, explanatory, additional,” he says.
Pepperdine University, which closed for several weeks following the Woolsey Fire in 2018, took a different tack, putting its classes online. The university, which canceled classes in mid-March because of the coronavirus, is now in the enviable position of having already trained its faculty members to teach online.
President James A. Gash’s advice to colleges now moving their courses online: Be patient and be flexible. Faculty members accustomed to the “chalk and talk” style of teaching may take some time to adjust to online learning. And they may need to reschedule courses for personal reasons or family illness.
“Be patient, be nimble, and give people the benefit of the doubt when challenges arise,” Gash says. And faculty members, remember that students will pick up on your cues, he says: “If faculty appear frustrated and confused and bitter, that will rub off on students.”
Plan for the worst. In the 12 years since the Iowa floodwaters receded, Guckert has traveled the country, advising other colleges on how to prepare for the worst. His message: “Plan for your next disaster, not your last one.”
“The lesson is to think really big on where disaster might take you,” he says. “In the case of coronavirus, we have to be imaginative about how big this could be and how quickly it could get there.”
Cowen, the former president of Tulane, suggests starting “with the worst-case scenario that you could come up with.” Consider not just the immediate impact but the longer-term fallout as well: “What if we have to close campus to students for an entire year? What if a significant portion of students do not return to campus? What if the size of next year’s entering class is smaller than expected? Do we have enough cash to get through this crisis?”
Gayle E. Hutchinson, president of California State University at Chico, which closed for 18 days because of the Camp Fire, says colleges “can never practice enough for emergencies.” After the wildfire struck, Chico conducted more “tabletop exercises,” with staff members meeting in groups to discuss their roles during an emergency and their responses to particular situations. “It feels more real now,” Hutchinson says. “Before, there was this sense that the chance of it happening was remote. Now we know it could happen at any moment.”
Pivot. One thing that sets the coronavirus crisis apart from those that affected higher education in the past is the uncertainty. Natural disasters are discrete events, each with a clear beginning and end, and they’re generally confined to a relatively small geographic area. Colleges prepare if they can, and then respond in the aftermath.
With this global pandemic, “it’s a much more fluid situation,” says Gash, the Pepperdine president. “We have new facts and data not just every day, but every few hours.”
That means colleges will have to adapt — and re-adapt — their plans as the situation evolves, says Monmouth’s Nagy: “There is almost no playbook for what is happening now.”
And two last pieces of advice:
First, pay attention to student needs. When Butte College closed, its leaders learned that “many of our students depend on school for more than their education,” Yaqub says. “It was their place of safety, it was there they eat.” Colleges should keep food pantries and other services running as long as they can, she says, even if they cancel classes.
Most important, take care of yourself, says Nagy. Eat right, get some sleep, take a break.
“There’s something called ‘compassion fatigue’ — you can’t take care of others if you don’t take care of yourself,” she says. “People who are managing crises have to take time to clear their mind and re-energize, so they can continue to do the work they have to do.”
