Emergency Management In Universities

In recent years, due to dramatic social changes, universities are faced up with increasing complicated social environment. Social transformation as well as educational reform lead to more turbulence in universities, which easily triggers some crises incidents and has a bad influence on universities’stable and efficient working mechanism. Meanwhile, fast booming network media bring us a brand-new era, i.e. network information era. Network communication media like internet, mobile networks, streaming media, BBS and etc. become important carrier for people’s exchange and play an increasingly crucial role in public society, politics, economy, culture and other domains.The fast development of network media changed the patterns of manifestation and process mode of crisis to a large extent. In the environment of network media, information of crisis disseminates faster, wider and easier, and public takes more initiatives in response and interaction to crisis than before. At the same time, network media with characteristics like real time, openness, interaction and sharing make the information source of crisis more complicated and information control and monopoly more difficult, which is more likely to expand the crisis. Therefore, it is required that university administrators promptly change the concept of crisis management, reasonably utilize network media to tackle crisis and adapt to constantly changing new environment.The rise and expansion of network media bring new opportunities and challenges to university crisis management. At present, university administrators in China are deficient in the ability of tackling crisis with network media. Processing mode of crisis tackling is static and inflexible, which makes universities stranded in a passive situation when dealing with some crisis and has a negative influence on universities and society to some extent. In consequence, how to fully utilize network media to deal with crises incidents efficiently on the basis of mastering crisis management theory becomes a new and urgent research topic faced by university administrators.Based on the introduction of the univesity crisis management and network media concept, this thesis aims to illustrate the positive influence and challenges of network media on university crisis management through a large number of case studies with the help of relative crisis management theory. Through interview and empirical analysis, combined with detailed case study, the thesis analysizes the current situation and existing problems in universities employing network media to cope with crisis in China. Meanwhile, drawing on the merits of4R crisis management mode, the thesis tries to put forward application mode of network media in university crisis management. With the fully grasp of network media characteristics, university administrators can be fully prepared for danger in times of safety and take precautions for a rainy day, namely, they can collect and distribute information and make pre-warning and pubilic opinion guidance before crisis; through collection of public opinions, they can calmly and properly handle the crisis through mastery of psychological response of the public towards crisis as much as possible, which facilitates the scientific and appropriate decision making during the crisis; they can also draw experience from a painful lesson and make necessary improvement by efficient usage of network media advantage and proper handle of crisis recovery and evaluation after crisis.