This past year saw shootings at UC Santa Barbara and Purdue, bomb threats at Princeton and Harvard, and the Boston Marathon bombings in a metro area home to more than 60 institutions of higher learning. Administrators are trained to act quickly and thoroughly during these types of events in order to ensure that the relevant constituencies are both informed and safe. But this is more challenging than it seems: the inherently collaborative decision-making culture in many colleges and universities is often too slow and deliberative, especially compared to the speed at which information, correct and incorrect, travels through the Internet today. In short, university bureaucracies cannot keep up with crises in the information age, and students are left in the gray area between certainty and fear, safety and vulnerability.
The Culture Clash
Gerald Baron, a crisis manager whose clients include the U.S. Coast Guard, BP International, Boeing, and the University of North Carolina, told the HPR that “effective response management is completely contrary to the way that most universities operate on a day-to-day basis. They have a difficult time responding to crises because it doesn’t fit with their culture.” Baron is referring to the fact that universities are collegial in nature, tending to encourage consultation and deliberation in committees, boards, and meetings before making any major decisions. The tension between this collegiality and the need for rapid communication is well outlined by Duke University’s Crisis Communication Plan, which describes their system in non-crises as one consisting of “multiple approvals before we distribute communications pieces, including emails and news releases.” However, the plan itself acknowledges that such a system will not work in a crisis: “Seconds matter in a crisis.”
Harvard’s own Crisis Management Team works with both the Harvard University Police Department and the Public Affairs and Communications Office. Members of these two bodies, along with the university administration, must be in constant deliberation with one another, while also processing information from the relevant outside sources, such as the Boston Police Department. Only after this procedure of prioritization and logistics is sorted out do the students receive information via MessageMe, which dispenses emergency notifications en masse via text messaging and social media.
This type of protocol is, in fact, mandated by the Clery Act, which requires schools to use an effective emergency response system and to issue “timely warnings” of campus threats. However, some students told the HPR that timeliness is often a missing factor in the face of these crises. For example, Harvard senior Emily Lowe recalled that “the reaction to the [2013 Boston Marathon] bombing was slow in the sense that most of the initial information we were getting was coming out of the news outlets. I understand that, given the circumstances, the administration was getting information as quickly as possible, but the response was definitely a bit slower than I expected.” Students were forced to wait more than two hours between the first news report of the incident and the mass email sent by the administration, which merely acknowledged the bombings. Reflecting on Harvard’s response to the bombing, Dean of Freshmen Thomas Dingman acknowledged to the HPR that “we determined post-incident that there were gaps in the reporting to the community. More regular follow-ups would have been better.”
According to Gerard Braud, a crisis manager who worked with the federal government in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, “there is a slow pace of ivory tower decision makers, which can be partly attributed to the overwhelming fear that if they say something, they will say the wrong thing. Therefore, they say nothing.” As a result, any lack of information leads administrators to err on the safe side by remaining quiet until they can assess the crisis with more certainty and go through the proper school communications protocol. This process breeds uncertainty and speculation.
Spreading Rumors
In the digital age, universities compete with the mainstream media and with eyewitnesses who use Twitter and Facebook to take control of the storyline themselves, while school administrators stall. The perils of social media were made evident during last year’s Boston Marathon bombings, when uncertainty and fear caused the users of the online social forum Reddit to wrongly accuse an innocent student of planting the bombs. Social media poses a hefty challenge to administrators. During a university-related crisis, it successfully assuages worried minds by filling in the gap between the moment of the crisis and the moment of school-based communication. However, the filler information is often pure speculation. As Dingman warns, “rumors just take off. You have to be careful you are getting your information from the right source. It is too easy to assume that so-and-so is reliable.”
Social media has also wiped away time and distance barriers. The ability to retweet, share, and up-vote posts allows incorrect information to spread quickly, and at a global scale. Braud told the HPR, “It’s not just speculation being repeated in that locale, it is people chiming in from all over the world and retweeting false info.” It no longer matters if a crisis occurs at home or thousands of miles away. With social networks connecting people all over the world, any event can easily become national, or even global.
Awareness and Safety
Braud claims that problems arising from incorrect social media reporting can be averted if administrators are willing to give the media even a small amount of initial information. By doing so, the school can immediately take away both the media’s and eyewitnesses’ propensity to speculate.
Universities should, at the very least, be continually updating the public as they discover new information or developments during their process of discussions and consultations. Robin Hattersley, executive editor of Campus Safety Magazine, told the HPR that greater transparency can only help: “the missing link is greater awareness among students, faculty and staff. The more that campuses can involve everyone, the safer the campus.” Rather than merely dispensing information after going through time-consuming protocols, universities can include the entire community in their updates at every step of the process.
According to Dingman, “what the Harvard administration does is try to be sure we are communicating as fully as allowed and expressing our concern about the safety and welfare of our own students. It is our job to bring as much peace and comfort [as possible].” Ultimately, however, only the continuous flow of speedy and accurate information can provide peace and comfort during crises. Universities must overcome the delays created by their collaborative nature and subdue harmful speculation by increasing the timeliness of responses and facilitating a continuous line of communication with their campus communities. Next time, whenever “next time” is, Internet speculation ought to give way to a well-informed, up-to-date administrative voice.
