OVERVIEW
 
“Crisis Leadership in Higher Education addresses issues of great urgency and importance to higher education leaders.  It combines the tremendous intellectual resources of our colleagues at Harvard Kennedy School with the Harvard Institutes for Higher Education's long-standing knowledge of academe. I can't think of a better partnership to deliver such a timely and valuable program.”
 
 -Joseph P. Zolner
Director, Harvard Institutes for Higher Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education
 
Crisis Leadership in Higher Education is designed to help college and university presidents, their senior leadership teams, and other campus administrators in key leadership roles manage, survive, and recover from unexpected events successfully. 
 
Colleges and universities are unique institutions. By design, they are often decentralized and intended to serve as open, welcoming, inviting, and stimulating places for discourse and interaction. Campus populations are typically diverse, creative, fluid, and ever-changing—important ingredients for a vibrant teaching and learning community. These conditions make higher education institutions challenging to manage in the best of times, and distinctively perilous in times of crisis.
 
By definition, a crisis situation is not routine. It is characterized by a substantial degree of novelty—an unforeseen incident, an emergency of unusual scale, or a situation when a number of unanticipated incidents happen simultaneously. No “script” exists for how to act in a crisis, and attempts to impose protocols developed for more clearly defined situations often prove counterproductive. Crises force individuals and organizations to improvise and innovate, usually under acute time pressure and high stress.
 
In a college or university setting, a variety of different events can trigger a crisis. On-campus violence, natural disasters, disorderly protests, hostage situations, and controversial statements or actions by faculty or staff members are just a few of the many circumstances that are crises in institutions of higher learning. The quality of an institution’s response can have a lasting impact on its people, culture, and reputation.
 
Crisis Leadership in Higher Education helps higher education leaders develop the skills—gathering critical information, adapting to unique circumstances, and prioritizing actions and responses—needed to respond to and manage crises effectively. The program covers communication strategies among members of the senior leadership team, and from the senior team to the campus community and larger public. Techniques and protocols that can be tailored to a wide range of different institutional circumstances will also be addressed. The program also presents perspectives on proactive planning and training so institutions can have effective crisis management systems in place in advance of a critical event.
 
Crisis Leadership in Higher Education has been jointly designed by faculty from the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) and Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). The program draws on the complementary expertise, knowledge, and practical experience of both schools to help senior administrators plan for, respond to, and recover from a range of crises that can beset institutions of higher education. The joint HGSE/HKS faculty draws on concepts and materials presented in the Harvard Kennedy School Leadership in Crises Executive Education program (offered annually since 2002), along with other information developed to address the particular challenges faced by higher education leaders. The rich combination of HKS faculty experience in crisis management and HGSE faculty knowledge of higher education creates a powerful opportunity to engage these important issues in considerable depth.