What do you mean by "crisis"?
Any event that disrupts the normal operations of an organization and threatens organizational resources (including: human, physical, financial, and reputational) is considered a crisis. There are differing levels of crisis, ranging from small (referred to as a critical incident) to astronomical (referred to as a disaster or catastrophe). Postsecondary institutions experience many types of crises. Some of the most common include:
- campus protests
- environmental disasters
- building fires or floods
- active shooters
- threatening visitors
How did you start to study this?
It is often said that many social science researchers are actually engaged in "me-search," meaning that researchers are engaging topics that are personally significant. This resonates here. It was my experience as a campus administrator at Dillard University in New Orleans that propelled me toward creating a minor in Crisis Management alongside my PhD major of Higher Education and Student Affairs. I left my position at Dillard two years after Hurricane Katrina struck the city and incapacitated our campus. As I began my doctoral studies, I found myself constantly engulfed in thoughts of what we, as a team of campus employees, got right and what we missed in our efforts to respond and recover. I began studying crisis management as a way to work through my own reflections on Katrina response, but quickly realized that the implications were much broader and applicable to the general responsibilities of campus professionals.
Why is what you study important?
Working in higher education and student affairs is an exercise in consistently managing varying levels of crisis throughout each semester. Yet, we rarely use this language to describe the job of a campus professional. With my scholarship, I aim to:
- infuse this language into educators' lexicon, and thus into the process of how we prepare educators for their roles;
- develop and provide context-specific teaching tools for lessons on crisis management in educational environments; and
- help campus professionals to practice proactive crisis management.
