Hurricane Katrina: Continuing the Discussions A Year Later
Authors: Scully, Maureen; Roberts, Alex; The Aspen Institute Center for Business Education
Source: The Aspen Institute Center for Business Education
Year: 2006
Abstract:
This Featured Collection was authored and prepared by Dr. Maureen Scully, Assistant Professor of Management at UMass Boston's College of Management and Consultant to the Aspen Institute Center for Business Education (CBE), Janice Goldman, Research Associate of and Consultant to Aspen CBE, and Alexander Roberts, Program Manager of Aspen CBE.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the media was suddenly broaching topics such as race inequality and environmental planning that receive little attention in the national discourse. CasePlace.org released a Featured Collection that covered a variety of topics that could be raised in business school classrooms (ranging from how to detect windfall profits to the history of racialized images in the media to budget tradeoffs in the face of warnings about environmental disaster). A year later, the same issues are relevant, but have they lost urgency? From securing levees to securing livelihoods, these topics remain important for future business leaders.
In this collection, we introduce four ways in which business schools have provided hands-on help in rebuilding New Orleans and harvested important insights from the Katrina experience (new teaching cases, research with a call to action, a website that tracks and guides rebuilding, and a multi-disciplinary service-learning project). We invite you to Contact Us with examples from your own business school experience, so we can expand this Teaching Module and share our ideas with one another about what worked (and what did not) in drawing lessons from Katrina.
Two cases written by faculty members at the Darden School have been taught in courses on leadership and on global economies. Business schools can also learn from efforts at schools of engineering, urban planning, or public policy. At Dartmouth, the innovative "Mosaic Project" is centered on an interactive website that invites engineering managers to contribute solutions and updates for the ongoing rebuilding effort. The article on "rebuilding places and lives" provides conceptual grounding for service-learning projects and class discussions. At Bentley College in the Boston area, a service-learning project helped a rural health clinic in southern Alabama develop the operational infrastructure it needed to sustain its service delivery. The project integrated a wide range of courses, including database management, environmental science, cyberlaw, and media and politics.
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