When they achieve the trust and confidence of students, school resource officers may be in an ideal position to provide programs aimed at breaking the culture of silence that has characterized many of our schools in the past. Resource officers typically walk the corridors, make connections with the students, and provide educational programs that provide an effective response to natural disasters as well as armed intruders. In March, 2009, a student at Merrimack High School in New Hampshire approached Michael Murray, a resource officer who had served at the school for more than nine years and was trusted by faculty and students alike. The student informed Murray that he had heard two of his classmates planning to take hostages at the school through the barrel of a gun. Within a few minutes, the two suspects had been apprehended. School resource officers have also contributed to the resolution of potentially violent school rampages in areas from Anchorage, Alaska to Bedford, Massachusetts; from Tehama, California to Lexington County, South Carolina; from Sarasota, Florida to Laurel, Maryland.
Publishing academic research is the mother of all money-spinners precisely because of the way that academia is set up. Professors and lecturers are not paid merely to teach and take long summer vacations, contrary to popular belief. They are expected to conduct research and publish their findings in academic journals: the mantra "publish or perish" is often quoted, and with good reason. Not publishing research is a quick and effective way out of a job. And this is true for academics working in all disciplines, whether one is patenting a design for the next moon rocket, estimating the total surface area of an Indian elephant, or researching scrotal asymmetry in man and ancient sculpture. You should, by now, be beginning to cotton on to the ruse. Academics research and publish as part of their job. They produce content, effectively for free, which is then aggregated by publishers and sold back as expensive subscriptions to the libraries of the very same universities where the very same academics are employed. It is, in short, a work of genius as a business model. Morally, it is a knuckleduster short of a mugging.
Of the 23 executive orders on the table, at least two will have a direct impact on higher education: our on-campus emergency response activities and how we address issues of mental health. For many campuses, these issues have been on our radar since 2007, when the mass shooting at Virginia Tech brought the issue to our doorstep. At Union College, the safety of our campus community has always been important but Virginia Tech moved the needle for us in terms of our mindset and in the way we prepared ourselves for what we hope will never happen. Less than four months after the shootings, we had intensified up our emergency policies, added sirens and loudspeakers and launched a much more robust program for all of our campus constituents -- students, faculty and staff. We've added regular table-top drills with local police agencies and we bring in specialized trainers, the most recent, to help us in the event of an active shooter on campus. We work with campus offices and departments in preparing customized emergency responses, ranging from 'Who do I call in an emergency?' to the very basic, 'How do I exit this particular office safely?'