What It’s Like to Lead a College’s Response to Disaster

Katie L. Treadwell has spent much of her life close to people who have dealt with horrific events. During her childhood, in Oklahoma City, her father, a physician assistant, rushed to perform triage after the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. In Waco, Tex., where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Baylor University, Ms. Treadwell befriended local residents who had been involved in that community’s response to the 1993 assault on the Branch Davidian compound. As a residence-hall director at Barnard College, she got to know New Yorkers personally affected by the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Such experiences have led Ms. Treadwell, now associate director of the University of Kansas’ Office of First-Year Experience, to take a deep interest in how colleges respond to tragedies involving a substantial loss of life. She recently conducted a qualitative study involving extensive interviews with 11 college administrators — chief student-affairs officers or their second in command — who had overseen their institution’s response to such disasters as mass shootings, plane crashes, or hurricanes.

The Chronicle interviewed Ms. Treadwell her last week about her research. Following is an edited and condensed version of that conversation.

Q. Was it difficult to recruit study participants and to get them to open up?

A. I thought that it would be. I was extremely conscious, going into every interview and every request for an interview, that I was asking a stranger to tell me about the worst day of their life and all of the worst days of their lives that followed. I very quickly received affirmative responses from them. They very much wanted to participate.

Q. Your paper discusses how your participants’ responses to major campus tragedies were guided by gut instincts rather than established emergency procedures. Why did they take such an approach, and what were the benefits and drawbacks of doing so?

A. Unfortunately, in student affairs, we deal with student emergencies on a near-daily basis. Student car accidents and suicides and things like that are a reality of our work. These people had really developed a very strong instinct around how to respond to a crisis, how to manage an emergency, how to help someone who is grieving. They all spoke about that gut instinct that develops over time, and knowing that when the tornado sirens go off, or when you get a call that a bus has crashed or a campus is on lockdown for an active-shooter situation, you don’t sit down and say, “Let me get out my emergency manual and run through my 25 steps for this situation.” You go to the scene and you act.

Q. What had these administrators seen as their top priorities and biggest concerns after tragedy struck?

A. I think it is always about the people. The No. 1 priority is making sure that your people are safe, whether those are your students or your faculty or staff.

Many times they expressed a great sense of fear — not fear of the event itself, but really fear of how their people, their community, would continue to experience the tragedy in the months and years and even decades that followed.

These people were extremely concerned about making sure their staff had adequate time off for counseling and even sleep because they were working such long hours.

Q. What tasks were they most likely to delegate, and which were they most likely to take on themselves?

A. The tasks that they were the most likely to delegate, and the situations where these people felt like their teams were prepared and had adequate support, were moments of sitting down with individual students, or groups of students, and talking through the experience they had just gone through.

The things that chief student-affairs officers expressed needing to handle themselves related to making sure that their staff was cared for, making sure that those people were in the moment with students, and providing food and providing time for grief counseling and everything that involved. Planning memorial services.

The other things that came up were higher-level decisions. For example, a residence hall gets destroyed in a hurricane, and a junior-level staff member might not have the skills and experience to go out and evaluate a new residence-hall option.

Q. How did your study participants psychologically respond to what they went through? Did their personal relationships and home lives suffer?

A. Absolutely. They all would very much admit to bottling up their emotions, ignoring the fact that they were experiencing this personally, doing everything that they could do to not think about themselves as an individual, and just be there for their campus. Many did not sleep for several days. They weren’t getting proper nutrition and proper exercise, things that we know keep us healthy and productive. It was almost like clockwork — six months to a year later — that these people had some sort of turning point or breakdown where they couldn’t keep bottling it up, they couldn’t keep ignoring their own emotions.

They all very much admitted that they were not able to be fully present for those relationships that they cared the most about. Two of the people I spoke with were in romantic relationships that ended.

Q. Did anything that you heard surprise you?

A. I was surprised by a couple of things. I did not approach any of my participants asking about faith or spirituality, but every single one brought up the subject of their faith life and their spirituality as something that played a major role. Every single person that I spoke with very much questioned their faith. One of them walked away from his faith and has not returned. Others have said, “I really struggled with my faith and struggled with the ideals that I had grown up believing.” Others talked about clinging to their faith when they didn’t understand what was happening.

The other thing that I was surprised by [was] the sheer amount of details that people in a chief student-affairs-officer role had to learn in order to do the emergency-response work. These people said, “I had to learn about FEMA regulations and insurance laws” and “I had to learn how to purchase a hotel and turn it into a residence hall.”

Q. Was there anything that could have left your study participants better prepared for what they went through?

A. The people I spoke with said, “Nothing in my graduate program prepared me to do what I did in this situation.” Their suggestion was to really broaden how we approach our work, how we teach young professionals, how we educate graduate students, to look at a broader system-thinking or design-thinking approach. We should teach people how to think creatively about situations and how to learn quickly when you need to know something that you know nothing about. To say, “I have never done this before but I know how to figure out how to do it.”

Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.

Correction (4/13/2016, 9:50 a.m.): This article has been updated to remove a reference to Ms. Treadwell presenting her findings on Tuesday at the American Educational Research Association conference. She made a late decision not to attend the conference.