Yesterday, I posted my thoughts about being in the campus Emergency Operations Center during the protests at UC Davis. The students pulled fire alarms, blocked buses and intersections, and confronted a line of police officers when they tried to stage a sit-in on busy Interstate 80.

We didn't plan to open the EOC at all. Nobody was opposed to the student's right to be angry about the tuition fee hikes. The idea was to give them lots of room to demonstrate. We were expecting a peaceful and respectful protest.

Until it wasn't.

The Davis California Aggie did a good job writing a balanced review, trying to capture the sense of conflict in the campus community about what happened.

The fire alarms were pulled in several buildings, forcing all those inside to be evacuated.  The Cal Aggie quoted one student as saying, "It was a symbolic gesture to show that education cannot continue under these circumstances," and another who said, "It was completely and totally disrespectful that they pulled those alarms."

The students blocked the student-run bus service. The Cal Aggie quoted one student as saying: "Business cannot go on as usual," and another who said, "I know a lot of people who were late to school.  One guy missed his midterm. I agree with a lot of [the protestor's] ideas, but we are here for an education and we already paid for it."

The reader comments to the Cal  Aggie story are interesting, reflective, provocative and argumentative. Here is one of the comments from a student responding to a charge that those who did not participate in the demonstrations did nothing.

"Did nothing?!? Just because we didn't choose to take part in your disruptive, childish "protest" doesn't mean we aren't doing anything.  A lot of students and their families have been writing to their lawmakers, which is by far a better way to get things done.   Just because we think that you're idiots for running onto the freeway with bongo drums doesn't mean we don't support the cause."

To be fair, not all the demonstrators are students. There are a handful of folks who, according to the Berkeley Daily Californian, "personify student's concerns that extremists have hijacked a once broad mobilization effort and hurt, rather than help, the cause."  Once motivated ... well, isn't the definition of mob mentality action irrationally in a crowd in a way one wouldn't attempt in isolation? 

In the end, nobody wants students to get hurt or property to be damaged. Down at UCLA, the campus police officers lined up to keep the students out of the Chancellor's office, but not out of the building. "It's been a peaceful demonstration and rally," said the UCLA spokesman. "(Force) is reserved for situations where public safety is threatened."

What does this have to do with emergency management? Mostly that events like these can't be generalized. After having a full-blown EOC on Thursday when we didn't expect it; nothing happened on Friday.

There are more demonstrations planned over the next few months. So, what should we expect?

I'm thinking there will be a lot more caution ... on both sides.

It was so sad to watch.

I was sitting in the EOC at UC Davis, watching the protests on TV. This is common practice - the media provides great coverage; intelligence faster than we can get it ourselves.

The students had been marching around campus, pulling fire alarms everywhere. Our fire department and alarm techs were trying to keep up. They blocked the student-run bus service on campus. They staged a 'sit-in' at one of the popular intersections.

Then they headed for Interstate 80.

We watched live what you can see on video.

The law enforcement officers set up a skirmish line at the freeway entrance and used a loudspeaker, trying to stop a line of students who were using bicycles as shields. This is what they said:

"We are prepared to do whatever it takes to keep the people of California safe. Please do your protests where you are."

"We got your message. We don't want any confrontation. It doesn't have to turn ugly and I am encouraging you, each and every one of you, not to engage with the police."

"Hey, guys. I'm willing to talk to anyone who wants to talk to me. If anyone wants to take responsibility, please come up and talk to me. I'd appreciate that."

Nobody is against the protests. The administration is as frustrated as the students are about the budget situation. Nobody wants the students to get hurt; but nobody wants these protests to be disrespectful and unruly.

If you read the blogs and comments, there are more students irritated and upset by the disruptions than not. Some 200 students kept many times that many from sitting in class, riding the bus, taking midterms.

There were rallys and protests across the country from Kindergarten through University. There were rallys and confrontations throughout California.

This one was different; this was my campus.

It was just so sad.

I've done pretty well as an Emergency Manager. I speak at conferences, participate in professional organizations, hold national offices, teach, publish - write this blog.

Occasionally, I get asked (usually by a student) how I got into Emergency Management in the first place. I'm old enough to remember Civil Defense, but I didn't get here through the military or a public response role. I got here because of one man.

Yesterday, I attended the memorial for an old friend. This friend was what Malcolm Gladwell in his book "The Tipping Point" called a 'connector' - someone with a truly extraordinary knack for making friends and acquaintances. There were dozens of people there who made up his lifetime of connections.

Gladwell suggests you make a list of the 20 or 30 people in your circle of friends and then work backwards in each relationship until you find the name that keeps coming up more than any other. The idea is that your social circle really isn't a circle. It's more like a pyramid. If you work backward, you'll find that one person ultimately responsible for setting in motion the series of connections that led to all those friendships.

This friend was one of those people. He is responsible for who I am and what I've become. I can trace everything I do now back to him.

He was the Director of the Marin County (CA) Red Cross and I was a volunteer instructor. He asked if I'd take a part time job he had open in the office. He was also the ARC representative on the county Emergency Medical Care Committee. When a small grant came in to do a bi-monthly newsletter for the EMS office, he suggested I go talk to the EMS Director. That turned into a part time job doing projects for EMS, which turned into a part time job doing projects for OES, which turned into a full time job with OES. The rest, as they say, is history.

The last time I saw Hank Waschow, he'd been dignosed with lung cancer. I drove down to the Bay Area to spend the afternoon. At one point he said, "I'm really proud of you and what you've accomplished." What can you say to that? I told him it was all his fault.

It is. It really is.

The question on the board is this: Who is going to take over for us baby boomer emergency managers when we finally retire? (Assuming we can retire, given the state of our 401k's.)

My friend, Eric Holdeman, has an article in Emergency Management Magazine about cultivating the next generation of emergency managers. College and university degree programs are giving us a wealth of motivated and educated young people who need an opportunity to get the experience they need to take our place.

One way to do that - one that is really popular for campus emergency management programs - means finding those opportunities for students before they graduate.

Most higher education degree programs for emergency management or homeland security require some form of experimental learning (or service learning or externship) as a requirement for graduation. The format may be different, but they all involve some kind of real-world practice.

Let me pass along a personal experience and then I'll tell you how to mentor your own replacement.

A few years ago, I arranged to take on a summer intern - she needed to complete 200 hours of externship before she could graduate from her emergency management degree program. She flew across country (at her own expense) to work for me at minimum wage for three months. She had coursework related to response, continuity of operations, exercise planning and writing plans; she had taken all the NIMS-ICS courses; she had helped design and staff an EOC for her campus.

She spent the summer creating an inventory and maintenance schedule for my EOC, reviewing and editing plans, designing a program for building/evacuation managers that would apportion responsbility based on occupied space. She took all the training I could get her into (general management as well as emergency management), participated in all our campus and county-wide exercises and absorbed as much as she could.

When she left, I asked her what she had learned and this is what she said:

Her coursework was designed to help her develop critical thinking and solve problems. There were no limitations on resources or time. In real life, though, it wasn't that neat or clean. Or easy.

I ask you - how valuable a lesson is that?

This young woman graduated, did a few other internships, worked on several declared disasters in her community. She now works as a junior representative for one of those well-known, national, disaster management consulting companies. One of these days, Lindsay will replace me as a senior emergency management professional. I am looking forward to it.

This is where you can find out more about experiential learning in emergency management degree programs.

And then, when you are ready to mentor your own intern, you can post it on the IAEM internship bulletin board -- along with NYC OEM, JLW Assoc and the City of New Orleans.

I'm not going to say that I wasn't trying to create some controversy, but ... well ... maybe I was.

Back in November, I posted a blog (with little comment) suggesting that new generations of students, cellular technology and wireless 911 have made those iconic 'blue light' phones on campus obsolete. Last month, I wrote an opinion piece for Emergency Management Magazine and further suggested those phones really don't create a safer campus and we should evaluate them from an ROI (return on investment) perspective. There were quite a few comments.

This is one of the more critical: "I am stunned to see return on investment used as a deciding factor to determine whether or not a student can call for police aid. There can be no value attached to a death or rape."

Let me state emphatically that if the presence of 'blue light' phones could prevent a 'death or rape', we'd all be clamoring for them. Not just on college campuses, either! We'd want them all over our neighborhoods and shopping malls and city streets.

Leaving aside the emotional language and images that distract from the issue at hand, what the responses had in common was defense of the perception of safety. In reality, there is no evidence 'blue light' phones have prevented a crime - or a death or rape. The reality is they aren't used for emergencies, they can be used inappropriately, they do cost money to install and maintain.

The reality is also that perception costs money. Here is my question: Where do you want to spend that money?

If a campus has the funds and staffing to support a system of 'blue light' phones - great! But if a campus doesn't already have the funds and staffing, I - as an emergency manager - certainly wouldn't recommend investing money into them now.

Technology is going to make those units obsolete. Common sense is going to make them obsolete even faster. One of the arguments for keeping them was the lag time to route emergency calls on a cell phone. During orientation, all freshmen are told to program the campus emergency number into their cell phones. Campuses with wireless 911 don't even have to do that.

In fact, common sense was behind the best comment. I'm guessing this was from a student:

"I agree. I wouldn't even know where to look for a blue light phone. Sounds like something helpful after a bad event has already happened, not when I am in danger and need assistance immediately. Kind of like a call box on the freeway. Better believe I wouldn't be caught out after dark without my cell."

The reality is emergency 'blue light' phones don't create a safer campus; they just create the perception of one.

After being on furlough this past two weeks, I knew what I was coming back to today: an inbox full of emails and meetings about demonstrations disrupting the campus.

The student protests against the 32% tuition hikes by the University of California regents, and similar measures planned for the California State Universities and California Community Colleges, lessened over the winter break, but that doesn't mean they disappeared. While most of the UC staff and faculty were taking our mandatory, California-budget-balancing, furlough days, the winter break helped students get a bit more organized.

whose.university.OUR.university is one of the self-proclaimed official sites for notices, announcements, links, news and solidarity statements from students around the world. These are the first events posted for the Winter/Spring quarter:

February 15-20, "SOS - Save Our Schools" (A week of teach-in's silent protests and demonstrations.)

March 4, "National Day of Action to Defend Education" (Coincides with a national day of local actions to defend education.)

Who knows whether these events will impact my campus? Students might ignore them altogether but given the experience of the past few months, I'd say that was unlikely. Even if many students participate, not all campus 'events' need central coordination, i.e.: activating the campus Emergency Operations Center. I'm guessing these will.

The challenge for my campus EOC will be managing the resources and people involved in these events so they don't bother the resources and people who aren't. The goal is to keep the campus running as smoothly and normally as possible; allowing that part of campus not caught up in the event to attend to business and academics. All the while keeping the students safe and the campus infrastructure in one piece.

Would that all our emergencies posted their plans online! Having details about what will be happening is great. That way I can work them into my already busy schedule. Any EOC activation is a priority, of course. Even so, while I'm pulling the strings for a planned EOC activation, I still have to manage my department, complete projects, write papers, conduct training and attend meetings. I still have to attend to the business of the campus.

I won't be planning any EOC exercises, though. I have a feeling we are not going to need them.

I had a surreal experience this past weekend.

My community was providing the second of its H1N1 vaccination clinics. As a good emergency manager - not to mention a good neighbor - I volunteered to help, as did a goodly number of the campus staff and students (those not already gone for the winter break).

The clinic was advertised for the 'high risk' group - children and students 6 months to 24, pregnant women, parents of infants. There were 150 volunteers, organized in proper ICS fashion by the city emergency responders. When the clinic opened at 10am, there was a large crowd of people who were quickly processed through the griage, evaluation and vaccination stations.

After the first hour, customers had dwindled. Those 150 volunteers were waiting to protect their fellow citizens with no takers and a fair amount of vaccine left to be distributred.

That's when the miracle happened.

The Public Health Officer conferred with the clinic organizers and they decided to open the clinic to the public. They would welcome anyone who wanted an H1N1 vaccine. So - with two hours left, they set out to find more customers.

Volunteers called the local radio stations, sent the message through the Saturday morning Farmer's Market, convinced the local grocery stores to make announcements, called their own families. The local school district used its parent notificaiton system (an automated call tree) to call every household in the district.

The message said simply - everyone is welcome to come down in the next two hours and get your H1N1 vaccination.

People began arriving within 20 minutes: families with children of all ages in tow, couples who'd been grocery shopping, singles who'd been strolling through the Saturday morning Farmer's Market. The line once again zigzagged through the school gym.

At the end of the 4-hour clinic, just over 1500 people had been vaccinated - almost exactly what the county Public Health department had targeted. It might not have been the high-risk population originally targeted, but it was 1500 more people vaccinated than before.

As someone used to activating much more complicated electronic notification systems - I was completely taken by surprise. It was a humbling lesson in remembering the basics.

This statement is on page 27 of the addendum to the Virginia Tech investigation released yesterday and it's set off another 'wave the bloody flag' media frenzy.

Here are my questions:

1. How did a review panel of "nine highly distinguished members from a variety of relevant backgrounds" misunderstand who was actually in the Virginia Tech Policy Group?
   
2. Who could take the phrase "notify their families of the shootings" and flesh it out as "warned their own families more than an hour and a half before the rest of the campus was alerted"?
   
3. Who would respond to the report with their own media minute by saying, "If university officials thought it was important enough to notify their own families, they should have let everyone know"?

The answers:

1. A panel with no experience as an emergency manager and obviously didn't talk to one.
2. The New York Times.
3. Virginia Governer Timothy M. Kaine.

This is what Mark Owzarski, the spokesman for Virginia Tech, said: (also reported in the New York Times story - beginning way down in the 15th paragraph).

"The revised report describes the two people who alerted their families as Policy Group members, and they were not. It also inaccurately describes the actions of those two individuals who alerted their families as though it occurred with approval of senior officials. It did not."

The consulting group who coordinated the investigation and wrote both the report and the addendum identified two employees: one was the Chief of Staff to the President who told her son when she called to wake him up for class; the other was the Assistant Vice President of Administration who told her mother as she was leaving to return to campus.

Doesn't that make more sense?

It does - unless you're politically motivated to perpetuate the impression there was some nefarious and deliberate conspiracy on campus. Or you want to profit by selling newspapers and/or pull readers to your web page.

Certainly this was a grave and horrific tragedy. There are few phrases that can cause the community of campus emergency management practitioners to take pause than 'Virginia Tech'.

I am an emergency manager on a university campus. I know how shaken the entire campus community was. I spent months fielding calls from companies taking advantage of the event with the "ultimate solution" to my problems. I agonized with my emergency management colleagues over the details and what might have been done differently. I have participated in all the changes that have been made since. I watched the subsequent college campus shooting incidents - Northern Illinois University, Kauhajoki School of Hospitality in Finland and, just a few days ago, Binghamton University in New York

Here is the bottom line: Virginia Tech is getting skewered in the media - once again - for the flawed interpretation of an irrelevant, unlikely and improbable detail.

Listen to the VT Student Government Association president, Brandon Carroll:

"Hindsight is 20/20," he said, "It really upsets me that they're trying to bring back something bad that really hurt our community."

What do you know? A student with more common sense than a governor, a distinguished review panel and a major media outlet.

How sad.

I really don't want to hold UC Berkeley up as an example, but as an icon for student protests, it didn't let us down this past week. How long was it before the first videos of that clash between students and UC Berkeley campus police hit YouTube? Minutes maybe? Students are becoming experts at mobilizing the media and getting their message out first. Of course, that is also true for students at UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis.

Students in the UC system are very publicly angry and frustrated about the 32% tuition increase approved by the UC Board of Regents last week. Much like the UC staff and faculty were angry and frustrated about the layoff's and furloughs of last month. The difference is that student protests tend to be somewhat sheltered in public opinion by their age, their passion and their ability to use the internet as their agent.

Campus administrations recognize the student's right to be frustrated and angry about the fee increases. They support the student's First Amendment rights and freedom of expression. What they can't tolerate are actions that do "little more than divert precious resources while denying others their rightful access to campus facilities and services." Actions like blocking roads, occupying buildings, vandalizing offices, setting off fire alarms.

Enter the campus police.

Just like in the real world, police officers on campus are charged with ensuring safety and maintaining order. They are not the administration; they support the administration. The Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs at UC Santa Cruz established the playing field for campus police with this letter to the campus:

"Be advised that if you choose to participate in demonstration and protest activities that result in violations of University policies and applicable laws, you may be subject to disciplinary action up to and including suspension and dismissal and/or criminal prosecution."

If you watch those YouTube videos carefully, it is pretty clear the clashes between students and campus police started out as one of those vicious circles: I push you, you push me, I push you back, you push me back … who started it depends on your point of view. In no time it turns into something ugly, and leaves more scars on the participants than skinned elbows and knees.

Campus police don't want to engage with students like that. I heard one officer last week talking about strategies for removing students from a building they had occupied. He wanted to make sure everyone was careful. "These are our kids," he said.

It's a lose-lose situation. Nobody wins.