We are living in pandemic pandemonium, where panic is the prevailing mode of operation. Every college and university is operating with all hands-on deck, altering their operational norms; the result is that campus employees—academics, practitioners, and leaders—are beyond exhausted. Yet, for those of us who have witnessed campuses in crisis, all of this feels eerily familiar. As two higher education professionals and scholars who worked on the ground through Hurricane Katrina and studied campus crisis response, we are extremely reflective and vigilant about how we move forward in this new reality.
When Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast region, it left college and university campuses devastated and desolate. Many campuses evacuated prior to the storm reaching their city, never understanding that they would not be able to reopen the physical campus or to resume normal activities for an indefinite period. Respectively, we were each members of campus communities in Fall 2005—Mahauganee, the assistant dean and director for student engagement and leadership development at Dillard University and Nadrea, a continuing senior at Xavier University (LA). Immediately after graduating in the summer of 2006, Nadrea became a program coordinator in student affairs at Xavier and joined Mahauganee with helping each institution cope in a post-Katrina New Orleans.
While there are major differences between an environmental disaster and a public health emergency, there are some parallels between Katrina’s impact on daily operations and what we currently face with COVID-19. We’d like to explain those parallels and how understanding the response to an incident like Katrina can help inform the response to the current (inter)national emergency. In both instances, campuses made the initial choice to close and, as reality of the situation set in, institutional leaders, their employees, and their students realized those closings could be indefinite.
Then and now we are continuing to push our work forward remotely. However, in 2005 some courses moved online and many students found a sense of normalcy at institutions who welcomed Gulf Coast students for the fall semester until their home institutions were reopened. Today, strikingly different and most alarming, there is nowhere in the world where we can escape to normalcy.
This pandemic has led all schools to move a majority, if not all, of their all courses to remote access, a move that is uncovering several logistical issues.
As first-hand witnesses to the post-Katrina recovery, we understand the importance to move decisively and as quickly as possible in a time like this. Yet, we also recognize that you can’t rush a response to a developing emergency. Katrina continued to develop after landfall, with the biggest issues coming after the levies broke. COVID-19 is yet developing, and there is no telling what will be the “levy breaking point” of this disaster, but given the impact the virus has had in other countries we know one will happen.
Moving forward we recommend the following:
