Outside the Box...Lonely Sometimes, but Always Exciting

Presentation for the 2004 Higher Education Conference, National
Emergency Training Center, Emergency Management Institute, Emmetsburg,
MD

By: Craig A. Marks, MSFEMA, CEM, Director

Community Preparedness and Disaster Management Program

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

If there is a sentence that should be stricken from the American
language, and one that is responsible for the death of millions of great
ideas, it would be: "But we've always done it that way." Our inability
to visualize the future and ride the wave have cost us in intellectual
capital, loss of lives and property, and was directly responsible for
9-11 and similar horrific events in our country over the last 10 years.
If left unchallenged, the old ways will be the death of us all as we
succumb to the familiar vs. boldly finding the challenges of today and
tomorrow.

As a police officer, fireman, emergency medical services practitioner,
emergency manager and academic, I see how academic circles are both
helping and hindering the disaster management profession. This short
paper will talk to some of the pitfalls and paint a proposed picture of
the programs of tomorrow.

At The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we are pretty
standard among the thousands of universities and colleges. We preach
that our school is about *educating, researching* and bringing those two
areas to the world in *public service*. Unfortunately, in many programs
at universities around this country, we teach people the wrong stuff,
research topics for which there is no need nor interest, and bring to
the practitioner studies that they neither understand nor use. I would
offer the analogy of public health as a model of where emergency
management is today.

30 years ago, public health was a job. The public thought of them as the
people that treated venereal disease, gave shots to poor people and ran
the TB and Small Pox quarantines. There were no schools of public
health, no career tracks for aspiring public health professionals. There
was little funding and no vision. In the 1970s that all changed. With
the vision of a few, a career model was put forth. Schools of Public
Health, of which UNC-CH is number two in the nation, were formed. Key
leaders proposed standards, accreditation and professionalization. There
are now credentialing organizations for practitioners. There are
accreditation for programs and educational bodies. There is a plan, and
the plan dealt with the future, not the past.

Emergency management education stands at the same crossroads as did
public health 40 years ago. Emergency management programs are spread
across the spectrum -- in Political Science, Sociology, Engineering,
Fire Science, Law Enforcement, Environmental Sciences, and yes, in Pubic
Health. These programs all share one thing in common; that being the
drive and passion of a few people who saw the vision and worked to find
emergency management a home on their campus.

We have come from no programs less than a decade ago to over 100
programs today. But what is our common bond? It must be more than an
annual meeting at Emmetsburg to socialize and congratulate ourselves on
another successful year. We must be leading the charge in building this
profession, and leading it through education, research and public
service.

The emergency management field is an immense compilation of jobs, made
larger by the new monster called The Department of Homeland Security.
How do we learn to teach different job skills to this diverse group of
people while still beating down the stovepipe hierarchical organizations
that will employ them? How do we find the best practices and communicate
these to our customers -- our students? How do we reduce the "time to
expertise" from anecdotally accepted 10 years to 5 years, while
accounting for the fact that specific events may be less frequent due to
robust prevention programs? Outside the box thinking includes partnering
with community colleges, and private industry. Outside the box thinking
constantly asks is the past relevant? Is 9-11 a benchmark in what we do
and how we do it? If so, what are we doing now that is different than on
9-10, and how do we teach it in light of the new paradigms? Do we have
advisory boards to our programs? Are we seeking input from the public
and private sector? Is the bar upon which we set our standards a high
jump bar...or a limbo bar?

As I stated at the beginning, one of the biggest challenges I face in
talking to the folks at the pointy end of spear, is convincing them that
research can help them. They are too used to receiving reports for which
they did not ask, nor in verbiage they understand. How are we at the
schools, at least schools with a research capacity, work to define what
needs to be figured out from a practitioner level? At Carolina we are
tuned to both. We want to study the ability to train, teach, and impart
knowledge as an internal, academic pursuit. At the user level they want
to know how surge capacity would work in a bio-terrorism event. They are
interested in how we can develop data base systems to track widgets to
assist them in a disaster. They want to know for every "X" in
population, how much time does that add on I-40 for evacuation of the
beaches.

What are our schools doing to shape the conversation for research? At
Carolina we have partnered with the NC Division of Emergency Management
to facilitate the research agenda development. We are bringing together
county emergency managers and state people for one-day seminars to
refine ideas and develop a database of research ideas. These will then
be shopped around for either students, faculty or grant proposals.
Buy-in by the end-user is critical to the success of the research and
eventual implementation of the findings. In our membership to the
Educational Consortium with U.S. Northern Command, we are a player in
helping this Department of Defense 4-star general develop and execute
research with a national and international view. We anticipate topics at
the national level that will have applicability on the local level.

We believe it is critical to teach research skills at the bachelor's
level. In teaching this facet to entry-level disaster managers we
provide an understanding and appreciation for our research mission at
Carolina. We provide them a vision for seeing how research is used to
find tomorrow's solutions today.

Finally, how are we working with the public and private sector to
further our new profession? We've all tried to build programs to help
the local, state and federal responder. We all know government is broke
and not likely to commit money for academic pursuits. In our program,
only about 20% of the students receive tuition reimbursement from their
agencies. However, the private sector is growing their disaster
management programs in leaps and bounds. Bank of America doesn't care if
it costs them in-state or out-of-state tuition. Their question is "Can
we get 20 seats." The private sector is not a funding panacea; however,
it is often overlooked.

Business continuity, continuity of operations, risk analysis...whatever
the buzzword, it all starts with all-hazard understanding, preparedness
and assessment. How many of our programs are tuned in to the needs of
the private sector emergency manager? What are the differences in the
public and private sector? How do we bring them together?

Within teaching, are we doing enough to bring public-private
partnerships into education? Insurance companies have a huge stake in
having loss prevention taught in a manner that portends results in the
private sector. What are we doing to ensure this need is met? Is your
program looking for areas to collaborate with the private sector? Often,
we get hung up in the belief that because a company is in business to
make a profit that they are tainted and unable to participate in the
education process. A little creativity can go a long way in propelling
your program.

At Carolina we are partnering with Electronic Data Systems (EDS).
Through Kay Goss, who graced these hallowed halls at EMI for eight
years, she has worked tirelessly to bring the corporate culture of EDS
to understand the dynamics of working with educational institutions in
areas of mutual interest.

Similarly we have partnered with The International Association of
Emergency Managers (IAEM) and have received authorization to offer the
Certified Emergency Manager (CEM®) as part of our curriculum. We have
the exclusive rights to figure the bugs out, but the ability to offer
academic certificates and degrees and to bundle that with a professional
credential is a large draw for our program. We need to be intimately
involved in National Emergency Management Association (NEMA) and IAEM.
NEMA being the association of programs and IAEM being the association of
practitioners. These are the two most important professional
associations and we need to mutually build each other up. Initiatives
such as student chapters of IAEM, attending their conferences, and
serving on committees are key areas where we can advance our collective
causes, our universities, and the profession.

Really, there were no silver bullets listed here. There were however,
ideas put forth that many academics would not readily think applicable
to this profession. Our real challenge, and what, in the final analysis,
is the outside the box item, is how we integrate ourselves with the
profession to become the catalyst for change, expansion and growth.
Educational institutions are the only entity that can be the
multi-disciplinary, multi-objective facilitator in the mix. Generally
outside the politics that are first responders, the university should be
viewed as the neutral, objective partner to all the parties that make up
disaster management. The outside the box methodology is really about how
well we can conduct the orchestra that practices for the big symphony we
call disaster.