It's All About Risk

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It's All About Risk

5/11/2007

By Doug Gale

"The torment of precautions often exceeds the dangers to be avoided."
--Napoleon Bonaparte

The recent shootings at Virginia Tech have focused public attention on the safety of students on our campuses. Just how safe are they anyway? What do we need to do?

The Real Risk
Ironically, FBI statistics show that the murder and non-negligent manslaughter rate in the United States has been steadily falling since 1993, from 9.5 per 100,000 people in 1993 to 5.6 in 2005. College and universities are even safer. In 2005 there were five murders and non-negligent manslaughters on campuses out of a population 6.3 million students. The resulting 0.08 per 100,000 students is less than 2 percent of the national average. Even after this month's horrific events, our campuses are five times safer than the national average. Stated differently, even if an event like the one at Virginia Tech were to happen every year, a student is far more likely to be murdered while home on summer vacation than on campus during the academic year.

Business Continuity Management
The shootings at Virginia Tech are a textbook example of the need for Business Continuity Management (BCM). And, yes, terrorist attacks, whether by a group or a deranged individual, are part of textbook discussions of BCM. BCM is more than disaster recovery. Disaster recovery is the act of recovering from a disaster, whereas BCM is a broader term that includes anticipating and planning for bad things as well as disaster recover itself. (See my article in the April 2005 Issue of Campus Technology magazine, "Before the Disaster.")

BCM typically consists of four steps:

Project Initiation and Organization;
Risk and Vulnerability Identification;
Business Impact Analysis and Risk Reduction Strategies; and
Business Recovery Planning and Testing.

Most of the current discussions in the popular press about what happened at Virginia Tech have focused on portions of step 2 and 3. How can we identify and mitigate risk?

The Real World
The problem, of course, is that people don't respond rationally to risks. They respond to perceived risk. The fact that our campuses remain relatively safe havens hasn't prevented a wave of second-guessing, such as, "Why didn't campus officials lock down the campus sooner," or, "If (insert your organizational target here) had only done (insert your personal quick fix here), lives might have been saved." That there may be rational responses to these questions doesn't change the fact that those outside education just "want the problem fixed."