Hurricane Katrina was an unprecedented disaster for higher education. It forced full institutional closures longer than any on record, and it ravaged a whole region of colleges and universities. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, brought heightened attention to crisis management — leading colleges to develop disaster plans and hire emergency-preparedness coordinators — but Katrina taught colleges new lessons: to plan for the possibility of extended shutdowns and to look beyond their neighbors for assistance.
Even in areas not prone to natural disasters, colleges are now planning for worst-case scenarios: storms, floods, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks. “I would be amazed if there was an institution in this country that’s not going back and reviewing its disaster policy,” says Michael F. Middaugh, president of the Society for College and University Planning and assistant vice president for institutional research and planning at the University of Delaware.
September 11, the threat of further terrorist attacks, and Hurricane Katrina “are all pulling higher education into the era in which crisis management will be on par with endowment management as an institutional priority,” says Martin Michaelson, who directs the higher-education practice of the Washington-based law firm Hogan & Hartson.
Many institutions simulate crises, running exercises to test their emergency systems and spot weaknesses in their plans. With Hurricane Katrina as a live example of disaster response, officials at undamaged institutions have been watching closely — even as they offer various types of aid — to see how affected colleges’ plans are holding up and to identify areas where their own plans could be strengthened. Here are a few lessons they are learning.
-
Have a plan and test it. First and foremost, experts say, colleges must develop a plan, ensure that everyone has access to it, and give it a test run from time to time. “You need to have a binder on your shelf that says what you’re going to do if something like this strikes,” says Michael B. Goldstein, a higher-education lawyer in Washington.
“The only way we can test our plans is to test them under our normal operating conditions,” says Charles B. Reed, chancellor of the California State University System. The disruption brings complaints from some faculty and staff members, he says, “but if we don’t do it, we don’t think our plans are as good as they could be.” One lesson Cal State has learned from these exercises, for example, is to have enough vehicles on hand for an emergency evacuation. The additional vehicles proved critical when the university’s San Bernardino campus was hastily evacuated in the fall of 2003 because of encroaching wildfires.
-
Ensure communications survive the event. One of the most critical elements of any crisis plan is to maintain communications. “Everything at the end of the day comes down to” communications, says Michael M. Crow, president of Arizona State University. A crisis, he says, sharply escalates when there is a “meltdown of the ability of the institution to communicate with itself.”
After Hurricane Katrina, when telephone lines went down and cellphones with Gulf Coast area codes became nonfunctional, communications within institutions broke down. Some officials were forced to borrow satellite telephones from reporters, notes Mr. Reed. At Cal State, he says, all top administrators have satellite phones with one another’s numbers programmed. (“I take it to bed with me,” he says.)
-
Maintain a chain of command and secure a command center. Setting a chain of command is critical to a crisis plan. Especially in a large public-university system, the presence of multiple players — a chancellor, presidents, vice presidents, deans, a state board of regents, local boards of regents, and state legislators — can be a “formula for a potential leadership crisis,” spelling “organizational chaos,” J. Michael Bale, director of risk and property management for the Oklahoma State University system, wrote in an e-mail message. “Make certain your emergency-action chain of command is clear, and if it’s different than the day-to-day corporate structure, ensure everyone agrees or will at least abide by” it, he wrote.
Establishing a command center — or “hot site,” in risk-management lingo — is the first step in resuming the operations of a university. Top administrators “can basically run their campus out of any place, but there have to be sufficient outlets in the wall,” says Kim W. Nimmo, a risk-services specialist at United Educators Insurance. A hotel, such as the one in Houston where the Tulane University administration set up camp after Hurricane Katrina, may not meet the demand for telephone lines and Internet connections. Instead, a university decked by disaster might improve its reaction time by relying on a helping hand from a another college or university.
Many experts recommend that offers of assistance, such as the loan of a room equipped to accommodate an evacuated university’s central administration, be predetermined by mutual-aid agreements. “You put in place a plan that if you need the assistance, it’ll happen in a certain way, and if others need you to assist, it will happen in a certain way,” says Mr. Goldstein.
-
Have options for displaced students and faculty members. A “mutual aid” agreement that lays out a plan for where students and employees will go can “mitigate the risk that an institution will be at the receiving end of rage from its constituents,” says Mr. Michaelson.
After Hurricane Katrina, student and faculty evacuees, with few exceptions, had to decide individually where to go, based on hundreds of offers of support from other institutions. “Things resolved themselves sort of serendipitously,” says Mr. Middaugh of the Society for College and University Planning.
The efforts made after Katrina not to separate evacuated colleges’ athletics teams should be applied to other groups of students, Mr. Goldstein says, citing the “continuity of service” fundamental to the contemporary relationship between a college and its students.
In a rare example of this kind of continuity after Hurricane Katrina, 38 of Tulane University’s architecture students, along with five faculty members, moved together to Arizona State University, maintaining as nearly as possible the structure of their program.
In the future, says SCUP’s Mr. Middaugh, “higher education is basically going to have to come together interinstitutionally and forge covenants that deal with issues” like whether a displaced student’s enrollment at a host institution is temporary or permanent, who pays tuition and to which institution, and how credits transfer.
Such agreements should not be tightly scripted, but instead should allow institutions to respond nimbly within general guidelines, says J. Douglas Toma, an associate professor at the University of Georgia’s Institute of Higher Education. The decentralized nature of higher education, one of the industry’s greatest strengths, he says, allows for on-the-ground responses better suited to the details of any crisis than a strict advance agreement would be.
-
Check your coverage and review contracts. With the possibility of displaced students leading to revenue losses, institutions should ask themselves, if something like this happens to us, “can we survive a semester, can we survive a year, can we survive two years without tuition coming in?” says Mr. Toma.
To that end, institutions should re-examine their insurance coverage, particularly any business-interruption policies. In addition to reviewing insurance policies, institutions should also take a close look at their vendor contracts. Provisions in those contracts can protect against price gouging for essential materials like lumber or siding as a university begins to repair damaged buildings.
Ensuring that suppliers have business-continuity plans is also essential, so that vendors who may also have been affected by a disaster “don’t disappear when you need them the most,” says John R. Harrald, co-director of George Washington University’s Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management.