When a National Spotlight Falls on a Campus, Public-Relations Officers Feel the Heat

By SCOTT CARLSON

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The television trucks and newspaper reporters, like sharks, have swarmed to Blacksburg, Va., where Virginia Tech is located. The university's administrators and, especially, its public-relations staff members are probably steeling themselves for what will be a long and intense feeding frenzy.

For the men and women who speak for colleges, being thrust into a national spotlight can be a trying time.

"Your adrenaline is going to carry you, but only so far," said John F. Burness, senior vice president for public affairs and government relations at Duke University, whose office was running almost 24 hours a day during the height of the lacrosse scandal that erupted on his campus a year ago. "There were days when I was sending people home. It was 3 in the morning, and I could see that people were fried."

In recent years, Duke and many other prominent universities -- among them Ohio University, Tulane University, and the University of Colorado at Boulder -- have been involved in scandals or disasters, and have become fodder for the 24-hour news cycle, the infotainment circuit, and the blogosphere.

The problem, experts say, is that institutions are often ill-prepared for crises.

One public-relations representative, who was involved in damage control in a recent well-publicized university scandal and who asked not to be identified, said that major disasters quickly become "pressure cookers."

"It's hard to imagine looking at a media sheet that has 1,500 messages ... and there are two of you," the representative said. "Part of the challenge for universities is that many of them don't have crisis plans at all. You don't get run over by these sorts of things very often. The tendency is to close ranks."

"Internally, there are very difficult discussions going on right now" at Virginia Tech, the representative said. "Those conversations get passionate and heated."

The PR specialist left the university after the scandal was over, both because of burnout and because the representative had become "damaged goods" within the office after some of those heated conversations.

John Hachtel, associate vice president for university marketing and communications at Case Western Reserve University, has dealt with a number of scandals in recent years. He arrived at Case Western in the midst of a financial scandal, three days before faculty members issued a vote of no confidence in the university's president, Edward M. Hundert. Those problems led to Dr. Hundert's resignation last year (The Chronicle, March 24, 2006).

Mr. Hachtel also handled media relations at Auburn University in 2003 when its president, William F. Walker, was caught in what appeared to be a secret search to replace the football coach, Tommy Tuberville (The Chronicle, December 12, 2003). Auburn fans were livid.

"That was more fun than a person is allowed to have," Mr. Hachtel said wryly.

Colleges should have a solid crisis-communications plan, he said, but they should also remain flexible. His advice: Keep the crisis-response team small -- limited to key players and key administrators -- to cut down on the effort needed to coordinate a response. The media and the public are bound to second-guess administration decisions, so learn from those suggestions and reactions, but don't let them paralyze you.

Mr. Burness, of Duke, said public-relations officials should also try to harness the Internet and other new technologies to communicate with the news media and the public more quickly. A Web site not only disseminates information quickly, he said, it also can be a record of a college's statements about and actions during a crisis.

Unfortunately, the Internet is also an effective conduit for misinformation, and during a media frenzy, reporters will want college representatives to speculate and say more than they know, Mr. Burness said. "You have to be careful to transmit only things you know are true."

Most of all, public-relations experts say, in the midst of a crisis, tell the truth -- both to the public and to people inside the college.

"I've been in situations where the knee-jerk reaction is, How do we protect the institution? My answer always is, You protect the institution by being open and honest with its constituencies," Mr. Hachtel said. "The truth almost always finds an outlet. It's best that it be you."

• After Deadly Massacre at Virginia Tech, Students Question University's Response (4/17/2007)

• Major Shootings on American College Campuses (4/17/2007)

• Financial Failures Lead to Resignation of Case Western's President (3/24/2006)

• Auburn President Met Secretly With Louisville Football Coach (12/12/2003)