Why Campuses Aren’t Safe
By Elissa-Beth Gross
Weak Public-Private Partnerships. Industry, government, and academia work independently, using incompatible systems, and typically without meaningful data exchange. “Public-Private Sector response and recovery efforts are too stove-piped to share timely information, too slow to consult, and as a result, often too late to synchronize stabilization efforts.” - FEMA 2017 Hurricane Season After Action Report
Management Issues. Regulations and programs go into effect before standards are defined for both protective factors and risk factors. Money is thrown at problems before risk assessments are conducted. The solutions implemented are not enforced or reviewed. Who are your security personnel and who do they report to? If the answer is “the athletic coach”, or “they report to campus administrators” then a red flag should be raised. Most organizations forego hiring a single dedicated security or emergency management professional until the entity has several hundred people. Most colleges do have Security and Emergency Management Departments, but they report to campus authorities such as administrators, boards, and/or trustees instead of industry experts. Too often, when a critical event is underway and swift action must be taken, those with final decision-making power are laypersons.
No Unified & Unifying Platform. Efforts made to protect people, the natural and built environment, assets, and information are conducted as separate initiatives, using disparate tools. This results in inefficiency and duplicitous work. When working to solve communitywide problems, there must be an all-in-one tool to coordinate “whole-of-community” -- to assign responsibility, check accountability, and honor deadlines. Without it, primary stakeholders are constrained and in wait for public assistance. They lack independence and self-sufficiency. Campuses rely too heavily on public services to come to the rescue, or specifically on FEMA, with its billions of dollars in debt and interest owed to the U.S. Treasury. Until a comprehensive framework for resilience is adopted, campus will be less safe. This framework is the missing guide needed to increase visibility and determine where security gaps lie.
Lessons Learned are Forgotten. There is no scaffold to capture and retrieve lessons learned across infrastructure domains. FEMA’s Lessons Learned Information Sharing (LLIS) program is not a collaborative tool and the lessons stored are narrowly focused on emergency management. Stakeholders must turn the tide and stop sending the ambulance to the bottom of the cliff.
Lack of Pre-Disaster Resilience. More and more, it is understood that the problems that predate disasters, are the ones that make recovery most difficult. Since many Americans have no emergency savings and their businesses cannot survive a few-day shutdown, once an emergency hits, the chance of a full recovery, if even possible, takes years.
Misconception regarding Risks, Controls, & Priorities. Campus administrators focus disproportionately on high frequency, low impact threats that are relatively easier to address. Leaders aren’t treating campuses as part of the broader community remembering that the greater environment, including critical infrastructure, must be resilient for campuses to be safe and sustainable. They forget that perpetrators don’t have to step on campus to do their bidding. This distraction benefits the insurance industry, but not campuses.
Outdated Project Management Tools. Dynamic work units -- NOT static checklists and dusty manuals -- are required to keep up with today’s challenges. The stakeholder community must be able to collaborate across infrastructure domains to solve problems. Together, community partners must evolve and implement a consensus gold standard for campus safety. Information intensive data lakes and data warehouses are required to thwart and contain unwanted incidents. Law enforcement cannot be the sole provider of preventative and response services in this complex, simultaneous, and cascading threat environment. Similarly, America can’t afford to tradeoff national security by assigning military resources to domestic incidents.
Limited Legal Proficiency. The Department of Education issues and publishes regulations and guidance document for schools to follow that relate closely to “traditional subjects” viewed as impacting the Education Sector. However, many other areas of the law recognized by businesses, tend to be overlooked in academia -- until lawsuits arise. Having a broader stroke when considering the law will help schools avoid incidents, and save money as compliance is less expensive than non-compliance.
No “Lifestyle Approach to Incident Management (LIAM)”. Typically, communities at scale have not adopted the National Preparedness Goal (NPG) or joined under Area Command as trained and capable assets. Therefore, if a catastrophe were to occur, they’re less likely to be part of the solution; or to carry out an effective and timely response as “a unit”.
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