After a string of events on campus last year tested GW’s emergency preparedness, a majority of faculty members said the University’s new safety training completed last month did not provide new information.
Officials implemented the new training through Cornerstone OnDemand, a human resource software, in September with a window of 60 days to complete the safety awareness modules by Nov. 4 and assigned an additional training on active threats due Jan. 10. While one faculty member reported the trainings provided “clarity” on emergency protocol, other professors said the trainings lacked realistic actions, like de-escalation skills, for faculty to take in the event of an active shooter and that the trainings cannot be the only answer to solving campus safety issues.
A year before the University rolled out the trainings, officials issued a campus-wide shelter-in-place order in response to homicide suspect Christopher Haynes’ escape from police custody at GW Hospital in September 2023. Faculty said unclear policies and inconsistent enforcement caused confusion on whether students could have left classes or should have sheltered in place for the entire four-hour advisory.
In May 2023, several faculty and staff members reported receiving minimal emergency preparedness training, ranging from no training to some mandatory videos and virtual modules during faculty orientation upon joining the University.
University spokesperson Julia Metjian said the University developed the safety awareness and active threat trainings last year after “community requests” to increase “awareness” and understanding of University safety resources and procedures.
Metjian said University “safety teams” and “industry experts” developed the trainings to meet the needs of the GW community. She declined to comment on whether the trainings were implemented in response to the hospital escapee incident in fall 2023 or subsequent faculty reports of lack of direction and confusion during the shelter-in-place order.
“GW continues to strive to offer training that is relevant and valuable to our faculty, students, and staff,” Metjian said in an email. “We value feedback and understand that these trainings may be received differently based on individual perspectives and experiences.”
The Office of Emergency Management released an after-action review in December 2023 following the shelter-in-place in September 2023, with feedback from more than 150 staff, faculty and students from 30 academic departments.
The report included 111 recommendations, like providing physical security to protect the University community and keeping GW academic departments updated on safety protocols.
Dwayne Kwaysee Wright, an assistant professor of higher education administration and the director of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development, said he took GW’s active threat training twice this academic year, once through his capacity as a professor and a second time as a master’s student. The Division of Safety and Operations expanded the mandatory training to include students and staff members in an email sent to students last month.
Wright said the training was the “exact same” both times he took it.
“I didn’t learn anything new,” Wright said. “I just learned how GW was adopting certain concepts that I had already been exposed to at other universities.”
Wright, who is a member of the Campus Safety Advisory Committee, said the committee did not assist the administration in creating the active threat training and that members did not have an “advanced screening” of the training before it was assigned. He said the committee has not met since the training went live in January.
Wright said while he is happy the University provided “something” after the incidents last year, the training was “surface level” and not a “comprehensive answer” to the lack of guidance provided during the manhunt in 2023. He said in the future the training might need to be updated to include new technology or active drills.
“This puts us in a good position to get everyone on the baseline to then go back and evaluate some of the things that went wrong last year,” Wright said. “But the training is not and cannot be the only solution.”
Eli McCarthy, a professor of peace studies, said the University’s push to provide safety guidance may be driven by “deeper fears” from officials and a tendency to copy what other institutions or universities “do right” in relation to safety and security.
“I just hope as a University, where we’re working on critical thinking and broadening our imagination and being innovative and so forth, that we take this as an opportunity to broaden the scope of how we think about and practice safety in our community because it can be a model for other universities and other parts of our country,” McCarthy said.
McCarthy, who is a member of the University’s Campus Safety Advisory Committee, said the committee is currently discussing the idea of de-escalation training, like using distraction or dialogue that can help shift energy away from the situation. He said the training would start with “sectors,” like residence hall community coordinators, to create a “civilian-based community” on campus tasked with responding to “conflicts” in residence halls or the Foggy Bottom neighborhood.
“That would really help create the culture where it’s less likely these kinds of emergency moments will happen, and if they do happen, we would be, I think, more equipped to kind of de-escalate and less likely that people would get harmed,” McCarthy said.
The GW Police Department finished its three-stage arming plan in September 2024 following faculty dissent around the Board of Trustees’ April 2023 direction to arm the force’s officers. McCarthy said the Faculty Senate passed a resolution in October 2023 that provided research suggesting arming campus police significantly increases the likelihood that more people will be hurt or killed in situations with an armed person on campus but said some University officials have been “dismissive” of the research, possibly because of the Board’s directive.
“That’s part of what we can grow into here at GW, is trying to take that research maybe a little more seriously and have it influence the way we set up our safety strategies,” McCarthy said.
Denver Brunsman, an associate professor of history and the chair of the history department, said the trainings were online modules with videos and reading sections followed by a short quiz after each section to test comprehension. He said about a third of the training focused on active threat situations, which explained the “run, hide, or fight” checklist for faculty to follow and how to use lockdown buttons in classrooms.
Brunsman said the safety awareness training provided more “clarity” on how to handle emergency situations, like the manhunt in fall 2023. He said the training was “quite clear” and informative in explaining the four protective actions shelter, evacuate, secure and lockdown as well as when and how to execute them.
“The incident at the hospital might have prompted the new measures, but I think they are broader and address lots of different scenarios, everything from weather-related events to a possible shooter on campus,” Brunsman said.
Lorena Barba, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, said the safety awareness training included “completely obvious” descriptions of how to use the emergency buttons in classrooms and that it was a “waste of time.”
“If your classroom emergency button needs advance explanations on ‘lift the casing and push,’ then it is badly designed,” Barba said in an email. “Clicking through the entire course, I continued to cringe at the gimmicky flipcards, animated slides, and forced pathway.”
Patricia Chu, a professor of English, said the active threat training highlighted actions faculty should take during an active shooter emergency, like “‘call 911,’ ‘run, ‘hide’ and ‘fight.”
Chu said the “fight” option, which the training described as a “last resort,” involved attempting to “disrupt the arm” or “incapacitate” the shooter by throwing objects or “aggressively” using force against the shooter. She said there is “no way” a professor of English could fight an active shooter.
“Running, hiding and fighting all seem reasonable, but if you’re doing any of those things, security has already failed,” Chu said.
