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.
Body of Knowledge
The bulk of today's literature, thinking, government focus and hiring practices - if and where they exist - continues to overemphasize the operational aspects of the response and recovery phases, as well as issues first responders have related to the mitigation and preparedness phases.
This is perhaps the most glaring shortcoming in the federal government's creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the continuing effort to subsume the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) under the DHS umbrella.
That ill-advised effort has driven many institutions to rethink or reframe program elements to ensure they qualify for direct or indirect funding under DHS requirements.
Consequently EM and its core liberal arts knowledge, skills and abilities are replaced by the need to design programs to meet these arbitrary funding requirements.
The end result? We're creating programs that produce operationally qualified "super first responders" - people who are ready to fulfill the 16 emergency support functions of the National Response Framework and are equipped by their education to function in an interagency environment under the National Incident Management System.
We are not, however, producing folks who can contribute to the economically and environmentally supportable development of their communities.
With the exception of elected officials, no one else in modern society is required to acquire and maintain as wide a body of knowledge as emergency managers. In fact, the military effectively breaks the EM job into dozens of military specialties.
Some knowledge areas require a student to take several courses, and the list contains 24 identifiable courses - somewhere in the neighborhood of 102 credit hours of what are considered general education requirements. Most college programs today - not just EM programs - cap general education at 60 to 66 hours for a baccalaureate degree.
At the same time, in their role as purveyors of behavioral changes - and advocates for community development based on local geography and history - emergency managers must possess superb communication skills and a broad education.
Much like their peers in other government sectors (e.g., public service, public safety and public protection), emergency managers must constantly deal with elected officials, private citizens, nongovernmental organizations, utility companies, all levels of government regulators, various social agencies and many other advocacy groups. And to deal with such a diverse group of people requires knowledge and skills found in the liberal arts: economics, psychology and sociology, human behavior, written and verbal communication, government and civics, environment and ecology, geography and geology, weather and climate, and urban development, to name several.
Core Competencies
A 2005 survey of core competencies and courses included in baccalaureate EM programs, sponsored by the FEMA Higher Education Project, shows how deeply the traditional liberal arts are embedded in the core of EM.
The research's purpose was to identify the 10 core competencies and the 10 core courses that academicians who are running existing EM programs felt should constitute a model EM program: The top competency was critical thinking, and No. 2 was verbal communication. Legal and written communications were No. 4 and No. 5; management, leadership, financial management and human behavior also made the list.
All of these core competencies are taught in the liberal arts, and they are not crucial solely to the EM community, but also the public at-large.
What's the difference between a degree in homeland security versus a degree in emergency/disaster management? In our spring issue, Bob Jaffin distinguishes between the two courses of study
