Emergency Management Training Must Include Liberal Arts Education

As an instructor for more than 30 years, I've become increasingly discouraged as more and more students demonstrate they can't apply conceptual thinking to relatively simple scenarios. And this is compounded by their inability to write coherent sentences and paragraphs that can be assembled into cohesive, focused and comprehensible papers.

As a current doctoral student at North Dakota State University said, "The quality of the research being done, and the quality of the papers and books being published, are an embarrassment to the emergency management profession."

Obtaining a liberal arts education - studies at the university level that provide general knowledge and develop intellectual capacity - promotes success and growth in the field not only on an individual basis, but also for the discipline as a whole.

Ensuring Survival
A liberal arts education is the critical foundation that allows for additional and specialized professional education. Regardless of the academic discipline, there is an overriding imperative at the highest levels of the academe to create knowledge that forms the discipline's core, which garners peer recognition and acceptance.

The essence of a doctoral dissertation is the ability to pick an appropriate topic, undertake research that can be replicated, and then report the research in a way that can be understood and accepted (though not necessarily agreed with). Accomplishing this requires an education that extends far beyond emergency management (EM) and includes a solid foundation in the liberal arts.

Nevertheless, liberal arts education has been given short shrift in most discussions about the development of newer, technologically complicated professional degree programs.

This lost focus on the liberal arts is proving more than just short sighted for EM: It's also detrimental to the development of knowledge that's critical for the long-term success and necessary growth and maturation of the discipline. Lack of this education hinders the development of learning that is required to define the EM discipline, which ensures its survival and acceptance as a legitimate field of study.

Critical Elements
Emergency managers must become adept in elements of many, if not all, of the social sciences in order to become effective change agents who can promote socioeconomic and scientifically-based community improvement, development and redevelopment. They must also actively develop their communication skills. It is an absolute requirement for every emergency manager to communicate effectively both orally and in writing. This is not optional - it's a crucial element to success.

EM continues to evolve as both a discipline and a career. Most writings on the subject characterize EM as a closed loop consisting of four phases that never end: mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. If you read beyond that accurate but vastly oversimplified model, you'll quickly discover that EM, in its purest and most simplistic form, is all about the creation of sustainable communities.

We should use the creation of sustainable communities to define and develop the elements of an effective and efficient undergraduate program that can produce fully functional emergency managers. A strong liberal arts education, in turn, is the necessary prerequisite to produce truly qualified emergency managers.

Sustainable communities are designed and developed based on their histories - in terms of naturally occurring events such as weather, earthquakes, floods and forest fires.

The emergency manager also must understand the urban/exurban interface; economic development; the community's socioeconomic needs; and civic affairs and local government, including the inherently adversarial relationship between unfettered development and environmentally sound development.