Disasterology: June 2024

This newsletter is a compilation of recent disaster ~things~ that I think are cool, important, or otherwise of interest to people who are intrigued with disaster (broadly defined). There’s a little something for everyone!

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FEMA University 

TL;DR FEMA has come up with the tremendously terrible idea of turning the Emergency Management Institute (EMI) into a university. 

During this month’s FEMA Higher Education Symposium, Administrator Criswell officially announced the creation of the “National Disaster and Emergency Management University”. 

This is definitely going to ruin the tour. 

I’ll start by saying I take no joy in pointing out when FEMA does bad things. I want them to be good. We need them to be good. My entire career has been about how to make FEMA (and emergency management more broadly) more effective, efficient, and just. We should be using our energy to battle Congress and state legislatures over policy reform but, instead, we once again find ourselves having to battle FEMA to save them from themselves. 

The Backstory 

If you have earned a degree in emergency management you will have learned that emergency management is a delicate balance of three things: a profession (the people who are emergency managers), a distributed function (the people who do emergency management like volunteers, contractors, and survivors), and an academic discipline (hi! It’s me!). These three, ideally, inform one another and when they all line up things can go well!  

Are we all aligned all the time? Surely not! But a lot of people have spent a lot of years getting us to where we are today. I revere those efforts. I could not do the work I do without them having done the work they did – we stand on their shoulders. Much of those efforts have centered around FEMA’s Emergency Management Institute (EMI). 

EMI is good! They have a critical mission that fulfills a needed function in our field– to train emergency managers. That’s a HUGE responsibility and a tremendously important one!! 

Sometimes (a lot of times) people in our field struggle to distinguish between training and education. I explain it in my Introduction to Emergency Management course as: training teaches you how to rescue someone and education tells you why they were in a position of needing to be rescued in the first place. BOTH are important (paired with actual experience). I’ve never met an effective emergency manager who doesn’t have a balance of education and training. Unfortunately, because the educational piece (in the form of degrees) is only two and a half decades old, and because educational programs vary so widely in purpose and quality, many people misunderstand what we even mean by ‘emergency management education’. They haven’t had the opportunity for a quality emergency management education so they cannot even envision what it might entail. (This genuinely upsets me and is one of the primary reasons I wrote my book -- to bring emergency management education to as many people as possible). As a result, they seem to think training is everything. This is incredibly dangerous for the communities they serve. 

EMI offers various emergency management training (primarily through the free Independent Study courses available through FEMA and in-person classes at their facility in Maryland) to support an emergency management workforce that historically had no background in emergency management (i.e., retired firefighters, or veterans). Importantly these offerings are considered training, not education. I think it’s good and appropriate for FEMA -- and EMI specifically -- to offer training to emergency management professionals across the country.

I’d, however, be remiss not to mention the criticisms of these trainings – namely that they are not very good. EMI hosts the Academies (Basic, Advance, and Executive). I hear mixed reviews both from instructors and participants. The value primarily seems to lie in the opportunity to be a part of a cohort of other emergency management professionals from across the country. 

Their biggest reach, though, is through their online Independent Study courses. Some are okay but others are missing critical points or, worse, include inaccurate information. I don’t worry about this too much, though because I don’t think many people are actually looking at the content of the courses. For at least a decade, you’ve been able to just Google the answers to every single quiz! Surely some of you are completing them honestly, but the ease with which you can cheat undermines the entire enterprise. Because of the ubiquitous cheating, they have become a running joke in the field. 

As with everything in emergency management, EMI represents good intentions while effective execution is a work in progress. 

The Proposal 

I first heard the idea to rename EMI as “The National Emergency Management College” two years ago at the FEMA Higher-Education Symposium. The discussion that followed among emergency management educators and researchers can be summarized as: “Immediately no, immediately no, immediately no”. 

Not only would FEMA creating its own college (or university) not solve any of the field’s current problems but it would, in fact, create a bunch of new problems. (If that ain't the emergency management way!) To me, the idea was so obviously terrible that I could not fathom it would make it off its PowerPoint slide. 

I don’t think I’m saying anything everyone doesn’t know: this administration is quite interested in projects that sound good even if there is not much substance behind them. The equity and climate efforts are good examples – have we made measurable advances on those issues, or did we just change the terminology in a bunch of guidance? If your goal is good press and staying untouched by political criticism then this is the smart approach. FEMA University seemed like that. 

So, I tried to put it out of my mind, even as I heard the idea repeatedly presented (never with more information than the time before), and hoped it would fall by the wayside as most FEMA pet projects do. Apparently not. 

During the opening of this year’s Keynote for the FEMA higher education symposium (which I could not attend), my phone erupted. There is always some sweet-sweet drama at Hi-Ed. (I assume that’s why most people attend!) This time it was that Administrator Criswell was there to announce that come July 1^st (like, this July 1^st) EMI would be renamed The Disaster and Emergency Management University (not even college!!). 

The first thing you should know is that it is extremely unclear what exactly the plan is here because I’ve never seen more than a slide-worth of information. Presumably, there is some bigger plan out there but no one seems to have seen it (at least the people I know). So, for now, here’s what I have been able to piece together based on various conversations I’ve had with other emergency management educators/researchers and various LinkedIn posts. 

What exactly does this National Disaster and Emergency Management University entail? 

For a while, this was presented as simply renaming EMI. They were still only going to focus on the training mission. An “it’ll sound more prestigious” pet project without any actual substantive change. If this is the case, then the problem simply lies with the use of the word “university”. 

I’m not trying to be an asshole but that’s simply not what the word university means!! Words mean things!! This isn’t just some semantic issue. It will be genuinely confusing for people inside and outside the field who understandably will assume that people who went to something called a “university” will have some kind of education and degree in emergency management when, in fact, they will have only done training. I assume you all see how this is confusing. Right?! You do?! I’m not crazy, right?! This is an effort to market training as education… big YIKES!! Turning the field back to just training and away from the balance of education and training (that we are finally starting to see pay off after three decades of work) will have a detrimental effect on the emergency management workforce! It will make emergency manager’s jobs even harder and lead to ineffective emergency management. 

I am so sure this will happen because this is what we used to have! Historically the field relied just on training. Like, clearly, that didn’t work out super well for us! *stares in the history of emergency management* We have worked for 30 years to build out emergency management education! Now FEMA wants to muddy the waters? What a choice! 

Incidentally, if this really is all just about the name, might I point out that “Emergency Management Institute” is a good, accurate, and impressive-sounding name! “Institute” is prestigious sounding, I think! There’s also the added benefit of FEMA not needing to waste their money on a rebrand.  

This is where we arrive at the second possibility, which is a much greater problem: They are renaming EMI to “university” because they intend for it to become a university. In previous presentations, this had not seemed to be the intent but during this last round, they said that the conferral of degrees is part of their future plans. 

If you believe in academic freedom and the Academy as a check and balance on government, then this is a five-alarm fire. EMI has not proven that they are consistently capable of providing training. Yet, we are now expected to hand over education (and, by association, research) to them?! Be serious. 

You can read a breakdown of ten ways this idea is damaging to the field here. 

Other emergency management educators have referred to this as a “stab in the back”. I think to understand why you have to know about the central role EMI has played in supporting the creation of emergency management higher education. 

Emergency Management Higher Education 

EMI has long supported the development of EM Higher Education at colleges and universities across the country. The first emergency management undergrad program was started in Texas in the late 90’s. Through the early 2000s, an EMI initiative of Dr. Wayne Blanchard was to have at least one emergency management undergrad program in every state. The purpose of doing this was to ensure that we would have not just a trained EM workforce but an educated workforce. This was a huge undertaking and represented what I’d call a co-signing from FEMA that EM higher education was an important part of the field.

Since Dr. Blanchard’s initiative, more programs have been created across the country (a couple hundred). They’ve expanded into master’s programs and a select few PhD programs. Around these programs, a small but dedicated community has formed who are moving mountains – and playing the long game – to ensure the profession is filled with people who have a solid education in emergency management (as we expect of other professions like lawyers and doctors).

And, it is working! We are just now approaching a turning point where it is becoming common for emergency managers to have an actual degree in emergency management! Jurisdictions are beginning to require EM degrees! This is hugely transformative and something we’ve worked towards for 30 years. 

In the past few years, though, emergency management higher education has struggled. Some programs are facing lower enrollment (this is mixed in with general post-COVID enrollment changes) and face being merged into other departments. Emergency management programs are also not immune from the other challenges faced by higher education across the country including attacks on academic freedom and budget cuts. For example, North Dakota State University (my alma mater), the oldest doctoral degree-granting program for emergency management in the country was forced to shut down the PhD program after the North Dakota legislature insisted on budget cuts from the university. 

This is a delicate ecosystem. If the PhD programs shut down then you don’t have anyone being trained in how to do emergency management research which means people stop doing research (or at least good emergency management research). If you don’t have emergency management PhDs then who teaches in the undergrad programs? If you don’t have undergrad programs then where do the emergency management PhDs go to work? And what is the impact of all of this on the profession? 

In a moment like this EMI could be a place of support. While we have always been independent from FEMA, we have had a positive working relationship for three decades. If their goal is to do effective emergency management, then it is necessary to have a strong higher education community (something that up until now they seemed to have agreed with). Instead, they are instigating a coup to actively undermine the work of emergency management higher education. 

Not only does this threaten the future of having an educated workforce but also the very existence of the emergency management discipline. The other critical outgrowth of creating these EM higher education programs was creating the infrastructure for a discipline of emergency management to emerge. This is really important because education needs to be based on something – the emergency management discipline is what gives us that something. I do not believe that one can exist without the other. 

In a last-ditch attempt to prevent these changes, a petition was started. There is also a succinct summary of the major issues re: turning EMI into a university. You can sign it here. 

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