There’s no doubt about it: Dalhousie University in Halifax has been having a bad spell of adverse publicity in the last several months.
First, dentistry students were found to have posted degrading comments about female students on Facebook. A task force appointed by the university found in a report in May that the dentistry school fostered a culture that permitted sexism and misogyny.
More recently, a medical student facing expulsion told his psychiatrist about a plan to stab an associate dean and her daughter and shoot up to 20 people.
As well, a student about to start medical school is facing charges of murdering another student.
“Dalhousie is having a rough year for PR. Holy mackerel,” noted a tweet, as reported by The National Post.
Marketing asked PR experts how Dalhousie should respond to the situation.
Greg Power, president and general manager, Weber Shandwick Canada
It’s risk management, not crisis management that matters most today. A serious crisis is often like a lightning strike that illuminates a landscape of unpreparedness. Many issues that rise up to savage a reputation are well known to the organizations, but left simmering in the background in hopes they’ll never ignite. Executives can see the danger coming from a long way out, but hope for the best instead of planning for the worst.
The goal in any crisis should be to take as much pain as fast as possible and move quickly to reputation recovery. That’s a lot easier to do if you go into a crisis with your eyes wide open and a clear understanding where to find the exit. Dalhousie would be wise to take a deep breath right now and commit to comb through its operations and plan more effectively for new and potential risks down the road. When a crisis is over you get judged by the character and empathy you display in your worst moments and it’s a lot easier to be transparent and lead a conversation if you are prepared to manage the risk.
Stephen Murdoch, vice-president of public relations, Enterprise Canada
It’s tough to put a positive spin on this. Dalhousie has to take effective action to keep students safe, now and for the longer term. In addition to beefed up security, the university needs to expand mental health services on campus, train staff to identify students with potential issues, publish a student code of conduct that outlines discipline to those kids selling drugs on campus, and so on.
If they have, or when they do, they should let students, parents and especially the media know what they’re doing, what administration will put up with and what is expected of kids. If possible, the school should hold weekly media updates for interested local outlets.
As well, it seems like we haven’t heard or seen much from the president and senior leadership of Dalhousie. Just putting out a statement isn’t enough. A tougher and higher profile, stand by the president and university leadership would go a long way toward reassuring students and especially parents, many of whom saw Dalhousie as a safe place in a smaller city in Atlantic Canada where kids couldn’t get into too much trouble.
Daniel Tisch, president and CEO, Argyle Public Relationships
Dalhousie’s challenge is a common one in the world of reputation: the university is being buffeted by forces and events it can’t control. The added problem is that brands and reputations have both rational and emotional influences. Even if our rational minds know Dalhousie is an excellent school and that violence could happen anywhere, this clustering of events can influence key stakeholders’ views of the safety of its community.
People will judge the institution by the one thing it can control: its response to the various crises. This has various dimensions — the tone that’s set from the top, and the values that are inferred; the combination of messages and credible evidence the school uses to reassure its publics; the concrete actions it takes to reduce the risk of future crises and the way it reports on progress.
Dalhousie’s leadership – including both the administration and the board – should be fully and visibly engaged. Senior leaders must be seen as accessible, human and humane. Statements should be both comprehensive and clear, and delivered in person, not in writing. Leaders should be ready for face-to-face dialogue on the issues at play. They should consider how they might go beyond the expected (e.g. “We are cooperating with the investigation”) and think creatively about how they can exceed stakeholder expectations.
Dalhousie should also balance its response to these crises with a period of more aggressive, proactive promotion of the university’s value to society, as demonstrated by the research of its faculty and the achievements of its students.
I have seen many organizations turn their darkest hours into opportunities for long-term learning and leadership. For example, at Queen’s University, where I am on the board, the heartbreaking suicides of several students some years ago inspired major changes in the way the university community provides both institutional and peer support to students struggling with mental health challenges.
Carol Levine, CEO and co-founder, Energi PR
Is Dalhousie a victim of a world gone mad? Did it do everything possible to provide a safe environment? Is it hand-cuffed by a legal system that says “innocent until proven guilty”? As we figure out the root cause, Dalhousie’s triple whammy of crisis makes short-term reputation management a major challenge.
From a PR lens, one crisis was easily preventable. Fostering a paternalistic culture within the University’s dental school should have been detected and corrected well before it was exposed on Facebook. The task force set up after the story went public suggested the school was oblivious, even complicit. Shame on them! In the aftermath I would have advised Dalhousie to take bold, concrete actions in the form of a mandatory, intensive re-education program for the campus community and institute a robust psychological screening process for applicants and faculty. There is a nice section on the Dal website promoting a Culture of Respect, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough to create the kind of recognizable momentum needed to turn a history of “boys can be boys” behaviour on its head.
When it comes to the two incidents related to murder in the same faculty within the same time frame, Dalhousie may have been at the wrong place at the wrong time or simply asleep at the wheel in terms of accurately qualifying its candidates. A common perception is that getting into medical school is a rigorous process with criteria that go well beyond a high GPA. I would advise Dal to investigate what happened in the case of these students — it may put to rest doubts that there entrance system is flawed.
But their options for allying the fears of parents, the campus community as well as the community at large, not to mention attract or retain students and faculty, are limited by a legal system that allows one of the perpetrators to live in his father’s home and even venture onto campus if under supervision. Here I would advise Dalhousie to aggressively fight to keep this individual off campus.
Dalhousie needs to have realistic expectations, adopt practical measures and look at the long term. They need to invest in “over the top” security, continuously and pro-actively communicate developments to their constituency and look at simple tactics like a monthly anonymous Survey Monkey to gain insight into how people are feeling. Above all they need to appreciate that regaining trust comes second to protecting the physical and psychological well being of their community.
