By John Pope
The Times-Picayune
NEW ORLEANS — In New Orleans, a frequent target of hurricanes’ wrath, Tulane University is planning something that no other American university has attempted. Next spring, it will launch a degree-granting program in which government officials and other leaders can learn to take charge when disaster strikes and pick up the pieces after the emergency.
It will be called the Disaster Management Leadership Academy, and its organizers say they hope not only to certify people in such fields as communications and disaster mobilization but also to put students into research programs that will lead toward master’s and doctoral degrees.
The academy isn’t meant for first responders, but for higher-level people in mid-career who want to move into upper management, said Nancy Mock, an associate professor of public health and tropical medicine and one of the longtime advocates for such a center.
“There has been a movement for several years to do this kind of activity,” she said. “Katrina brought it to a head.”
Ever since Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005, government officials at all levels have been sharply criticized for their handling of the crisis.
Backed by a three-year, $2.1 million federal grant, the academy will extend beyond the Uptown campus, drawing on policymaking expertise from organizations such as the Brookings Institution, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the United Nations, said Ky Luu, senior director of the academy.
“They all have a role to play in terms of shaping disaster management and in shaping our programs,” he said. “It’s ambitious, but . . . we have to cast a wide net.”
Luu is coming to Tulane after being the director of the office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, which is part of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Before that, he was vice president of the International Medical Corps, a private, nonprofit organization that trains health-care practitioners and organizes relief and development programs.
Luu, who spoke from Washington, D.C., said he plans to arrive in late August, and curriculum development is expected to start this fall.
Because disaster management requires so many skills, academy graduates should be able to arrange for such immediate necessities as food and shelter, Luu said, “but they have to have the foresight to bring the population back to at least a semblance of normality.”
The academy will cross academic boundaries at Tulane, collaborating with the A.B. Freeman School of Business and the schools of law, social work and public health and tropical medicine. It will enter a field in which there already are disaster-related degree programs. At Tulane, for instance, social-work students can earn a master’s degree with a concentration in disaster-related mental health, and the School for Continuing Studies expects to start enrolling students next spring for a master of professional studies degree in homeland security.
What sets the academy apart will be its focus on leadership and its emphasis on research, said Charles Figley, who is part of the organizing team. He is a Tulane professor of social work who is a renowned scholar of catastrophe and trauma.
In addition to that feature, Mock said, the rigor of a research-based postgraduate program will result in leaders who are better equipped to command teams that would prepare for disasters and help clean up afterward.
The academy’s headquarters is in the Payson Center for International Development, which is part of the law school. The center’s executive director is Eamon Kelly, a former Tulane president who had been one of the academy’s early advocates.
In a telephone interview from Ireland, Kelly said that in reviewing his, Mock’s and Figley’s experience in dealing with international disasters, “a key and critical area was the lack of leadership management, as you saw in Katrina in the United States.”
Helping people gain a big-picture perspective of disaster management “is really key,” he said. “While there are other disaster-management programs throughout the United States, I believe this is the first and only leadership-development program.”
Setting up such an institute has been “a difficult sell with faculties in universities who are opposed to studies of applied areas,” Kelly said. “Certainly, people who had exposure to Katrina are more open to this kind of study.”
Copyright 2009 The Times-Picayune Publishing Company