1The Magnetic Fish Story

Sienna is 5 and hertrailing sister Michaelais 2. They are mygranddaughters. Myson is literally holdingup the rear.

2 Casting for Noah: Would You Trust a Professor to Build Your Ark?

3 So, do emergency managers really need academics and what they produce?

Yes and no.

Professors educate your replacements, who will be future emergency managers aspiring to do what you do now.

Professors produce articles and books because they are part of a profession whose members are socialized and expected to do such things.

Professors build courses, and based on demand for those courses, those courses help grow curricula, specializations, concentrations, and eventually undergraduate and graduate degree programs.

4 What professors do that matters to emergency managers

Professors and academics are in the knowledge creation business and a share of the knowledge they create provides theories, tools, concepts, ideas, technological advancements, and innovations EMs may find useful.

Professors as educators work in an environment of mutual learning; meaning they learn things from their students just as they impart their own knowledge to their students.

The best seminars are ones in which students and the professor engage in lively but illuminating exchanges, a wide range of ideas and informed observations are offered, and everyone participates.

5 Commonly held myths many emergency managers have about professors

Professors are locked into the discipline of their major degree field and resist accommodating emergency management as its own “disciple.”

Professors, because they are not practitioners of emergency management, do not really know what it takes to be an emergency manager or do emergency management.

Professors are pests: they constantly ask for information emergency managers cannot freely disclose; they send their students to interview us at absolutely the worst times; they really only want to tap us for government grants for their research.

6 The myth of the “super professor.” Unrealistic expectations of emergency managers

Why can’t professors create and build within their colleges and universities departments of emergency management? Can it be that difficult?

Professors are mostly theoreticians whose level of abstraction, both in theory and quantitative analysis, seemingly far exceeds our own ability and therefore we must live and work in fear or suspicion of them.

Professors are like “oracles,” all knowing, all seeing. Hence they have the capacity to not only identify what we do right, but also what we do wrong. We can’t risk that they won’t criticize us.

Professors can take the long view, when our work is under much shorter time horizons. Since we cannot control them when we give them information and because publishing is such a slow enterprise, we risk being misunderstood or misinterpreted in what they eventually write.

7 The bridge between academic and practice knowledge in emergency management

Academia should be considered a potential post-government employment career path for many emergency managers.

Professors in the field of emergency management are hungry to know what you know and how you do what you do.

Your work as emergency managers creates useable knowledge for professors and students, when you are willing and able to share that with us.

Can FEMA and other emergency management offices (all levels, including non-profit and private sector) reasonably expect to hire and train new employees who have no collegiate knowledge of emergency management or disaster policy?

8 Why emergency managers and academics need to maintain and grow the bond begun by FEMA’s Higher Education Program The free exchange of knowledge about emergency management and

disaster policy benefits FEMA professionals, professors, and students.

The willingness of FEMA people to read and critique emergency management scholarship produced by students and professors produces win-win outcomes.

The knowledge creation made possible by the FEMA Higher Ed. Program generates open, non-proprietary, mutually beneficial, teachable knowledge.

It helps emergency managers to be more self-reflective and more aware of their potential to create knowledge for the public interest and for generations beyond their own.

9 “You’ve got a friend in me” Lyric by Randy Newman.

An astounding number of undergraduate and graduate students, in part owing to the values of their generation, think very highly of emergency management and they see it as important humanitarian work they might like to do.

There is a profusion of academics across disciplines of the social sciences, physical and biological sciences, and engineering who are drawn to the study of disaster phenomena.

More and better scholarly work, presented via books, journal articles, blogs, published think tank reports, government documents, congressional hearings, are growing the field you have embraced.

10 FEMA as role model for emergency management

Just as a mayor is the “personification” of his or her city, FEMA is the personification of emergency management for Americans and for the people of a great many other nations.

How well you do it, how well you adapt and learn from the problems and experiences you address, how well you share what you know with each other and with your friends in colleges and universities, what you demand of higher education to facilitate the advancement of your profession, and your commitment to “reading” your field, will spell the difference between emergency management’s intellectual advancement or emergency management’s gradual decline and fragmentation.

11 Sometimes when you deal with academics you just have to smile and accept the “fish” they are offering you.