The Handbook for Campus Threat Assessment & Management Teams

Overview | Reviews | Foreword | About the Authors

$48.00 USD
Purchase options:
-- OR --

Foreword

Years ago, in the aftermath of a student suicide, I came across a message the victim had written to himself in the margins of one of his notebooks: "Can I ever teach? Will I ever cure stuttering? Job interviews, phone calls. People notice or am I blowing this out of proportion?".

In our subsequent interviews with the victim’s friends, none of them thought he had a stuttering problem. He was indeed "blowing this out of proportion."

All of us have comparable internal debates, usually triggered by the powerful role of fear in framing the issues. Fear, of course, has an invaluable function. Our ancestors didn’t have time for extensive cognition when leopards jumped out of the bush. But nature has also blessed or burdened us with a more recent evolutionary development: the prefrontal cortex. This part of the brain relies, in part, on reason to evaluate the nature and seriousness of a perceived threat. One price we pay for such complex neural architecture is doubt. Experience has shown—at least when no immediate physical threat is present—that the capacity for thinking gives us the greatest margin of safety. The inevitable doubts that arise are best resolved by following the guidance of the prefrontal cortex ("higher self") rather than taking counsel of our fears.

The [threat assessment] process is not, by default, adversarial in nature. The threat assessment and management process, where possible, attempts to help people, not punish them. Indeed, if the Team is informed early enough, it can get involved long before an individual may have done any wrongdoing, and prevent such incidents from ever occurring. (p. 25)

Keeping that perspective in mind will help you design and implement a model threat assessment program. It will also allow you to see how the core components of threat assessment—fact-driven analysis, cross-functional cooperation, individualized assessment, and treating students the way we would want to be treated—also define our broader educational mission.

Gary Pavela
Editor, The Pavela Report and Law & Policy Report