Last Tuesday, Georgetown University announced that it will hire David Morrell, a former employee of the U.S. Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security, to be the first Vice President for University Safety. The announcement comes after a year-long search for a person to handle the unique job of managing the safety needs of a school in the nation’s capital. Senior Vice President Spiros Dimolitsas has been managing most University security efforts since the need for such planning was highlighted by the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Ensuring the safety of a school placed in the middle of a city that is an obvious terrorist target is a difficult task-so difficult that some consider it impossible. But while it is far from guaranteed that the University will be able to adequately prepare for any possible disaster, we clearly have to do everything we can.
The challenge is considerable. In terms of the diversity and proximity of threats, it is comparable in many ways to managing security for the government, even if the scale is greatly reduced. For Georgetown to be prepared, the University will have to have contingency plans for all manner of terrorist attacks. These plans will have to consider how to effectively identify terrorist attacks, how best to communicate with students and faculty to get them to respond, how to coordinate with government authorities, and how to make decisions about any of this. The list goes on and on.
These tasks are clearly well beyond the purview of the Department of Public Safety, an entity better suited to dealing with late-night parties and the occasional bike theft. A full-time University vice president is a more appropriate response. Hiring a person with extensive security experience in government is the best the campus could hope for.
This year, Georgetown has already been confronted with one major emergency-Hurricane Isabel. While about as far from a terrorist attack as you can get (everyone had advance warning, and it was actually kind of fun), the hurricane was nonetheless a challenge for the University’s safety efforts. Georgetown effectively communicated with resident and apartment assistants and other authorities to ensure that students were ready for every contingency, demonstrating that progress has already been made. The University is clearly committed to developing a comprehensive emergency response plan, and an administrator with Morrell’s experience could meet this challenge.
