Last month I sent you Leading a Divided Campus: Ideas and Illustrations and a checklist for students to extend support to their friends. I write today about a resource just published — Joint Campus-Law Enforcement Preparation for Campus Demonstrations and Hate Incidents amid Violence in the Middle East: Ideas for an Agenda, https://go.osu.edu/dcpgle. We in the OSU Moritz College of Law’s Divided Community Project are hoping that you, as your universities’ dispute resolution experts, will forward the publications to the academic, security, student affairs, communications, and government affairs folks on your campus.
The newest publication is a checklist of sorts. We cannot predict whether campus tensions will boil over into larger-scale crowd events and even more hate incidents between spring break and exams this spring. But should these develop, they may unfold quickly. Law enforcement agencies that have not worked with the campus before may become engaged. Experience indicates that joint campus-law enforcement preparation will matter. On the campus side, it will be important that campus academic leaders become directly involved in planning and during the event, as they can play a key role in programming, messaging to faculty, reminding of values, setting the tone, and more. Leaders in student affairs, campus security, government affairs, and communications will also play crucial roles.
This newest guide is based on input from: mediators who have worked in large-scale crowd events and hate incidents, current and former campus security and city police chiefs, and our review of a variety of after-action studies of large campus events and hate incidents that occurred recently and over decades. We have erred on the side of making the agenda ideas comprehensive on key issues, knowing that leaders can omit any items that do not apply to their situations.
Please let us know if you have ideas about other resources that we might be able to create (thanks to a grant from the AAA-ICDR Foundation) that would be helpful to your campus leaders.
