Exploring the Colgate Model: A Case Study of the Role of Crisis and Risk Communication in Higher Education

This study of a return to in-person learning during the COVID-19 pandemic at a residential, liberal arts university examines the role communication played to facilitate the safety of students, faculty, staff, and the surrounding community. The study uses a grounded-theory approach to frame the communication situation, and a thematic analysis to highlight the dynamics of risk and crisis message development in the case. Results indicate that messaging was developed through engagement activities in a two-stage process, moving from an informative, two-way engagement stage to a branded, strategic stage that resulted in almost universal success, measured in low infection rates, in the messaging campaign. How did they do it? This article explores that question and, based on this case, concludes that the role of crisis and risk communication is to enable this two-stage process of message development. The article contributes to mental model and situational crisis communication theory by revealing the interplay of the two theoretical approaches.


1) Communication goals
2) The communication team 3) Models of expert, risk-mitigation knowledge 4) Models of stakeholder decision-making style in regards to hazard mitigation 5) Messages that target gaps between expert and stakeholder decision-making Communication goals. The health-information needs and communication goals that guided the Colgate Together campaign were identified in a Task Force Report on The Return To Campus, submitted to the president for approval on June 13, 2020 (Executive Summary, 2020). The report contained a complete and detailed plan for risk mitigation under the admittedly dynamic, complex, and uncertain circumstances of the COVID-19 situation at that time (Norros, 2004). While the report was preoccupied with risk-mitigation guidelines for health, travel, operations, teaching, housing, and athletics, among other areas, it provided clear directions for communication as a component of risk mitigation. For example, the report called for "clear communications" noting that, "We hope that, together, we can promote a campus culture centered on public health awareness and selflessness that will put us in the best possible position for the types of on-campus experiences that are central to a Colgate education (Executive Summary, 2020). The report specified, in the appendix, that "conversations" should be "multi-layered" and "on-going," focusing on "enhancing understanding" and "fostering ongoing exchange of information." The direction was set to focus communications on two things: "awareness" (of health measures) and "selflessness" (as a motivational theme) (Executive Summary, 2020). president of the university led many of the meetings and was the primary voice for the vision of the campaign Communication leader: operations vice president and dean of students co-chair of the task force charged with planning the return to campus who served as the voice for students and staff Communication leader: expertise associate professor of biology co-chair of the task force charged with planning the return to campus who served as the voice of the in-house scientific and epidemiological expertise Stakeholder expert: student body president of the student body represented the voice of the primary stakeholders: the students Stakeholder expert: faculty provost of the university represented the voice of the faculty stakeholders Stakeholder expert: village mayor of the urban community surrounding the university represented the voice of businesses, schools, and landlords in the surrounding community Models of expert risk mitigation knowledge. Modeling expertise in risk management and mitigation was represented in the Colgate case by a number of factors being not just in place, but easily accessible to leadership and communication planners: a faculty of scientists and an active EOC comprised of health and safety professionals, faculty, and staff (EOC Staff List, 2020). These groups consisted of trusted members of the stakeholder community. Additionally, the university possessed the financial resources to accommodate space, testing, and staffing needs; it could use the services of a communications design team with influence at the vice-presidential level; and it could rely on a well-established community connection (with Hamilton, NY) going back 200 years (Weaver, 1970). These factors are represented in Figure 1 under "Expert modeling: Mitigation factors."

The communication team.
These mitigation factors played an important part in shaping the later branding of the Colgate Together campaign. For example, the university had funding resources that many organizations and communities did not have, spending upwards of $5 million in its mitigation efforts. The university could afford to purchase, install, and run its own COVID-19 waste-water monitoring equipment in university residence halls and in the Hamilton community. It could purchase an entire quarantine hotel, tents and other space accommodations, and it could and did hire additional staff. Information about these resources was shared frequently in town halls and forums. This information created a climate of factors in which communication as a mitigation intervention was likely to succeed.
Identifying models of stakeholder decision-making style in regards to hazards. Stakeholder understanding and decision-making in the case of the Colgate Together campaign is represented in Table 1, under the column header "Knowledge area." The members of the communication team represented the thinking of these stakeholder groups and the media channels needed to reach them. According to Stein et al., and others, narratives and messages develop from the relationship between internal and external forces and "active participation in the development process" (Fontainha et al., 2017;Stein et al., 1997). The shaping of narratives and messages that resulted in the Colgate Together campaign developed primarily through the interaction of these thought leaders and their constituents in town hall meetings and forums that were conducted between June 13 and August 23 (see Figure 1: "Stakeholder modeling").
Designing messages to target gaps between expert and stakeholder decision-making. The communicative engagement approach frames message design as a process of finding and addressing gaps between expert models of thinking (risk management and scientific assessment) and stakeholder models of thinking (stakeholders, transactors, audiences, and other groups). These two elements, keys to strategic communication, are discussed above (Comes et al., 2011;Heath & Dan O'Hair, 2020). At Colgate, the message warrants that helped bridge the thinking of the expert and the stakeholder models of the COVID-19 threat lay in three areas: the residential mandate, the learning mandate, and the moral imperative (see Figure 1 "Message design"). The following are examples of statements of these mandates found in transcripts of forums and town halls from the summer of 2020.
• Residential mandate. Unlike some some state and private universities where dorms are optional, Colgate is a live-in university or residential educational environment. This environment, and having on-site waste-water and other testing equipment, afforded Colgate the opportunity to create a very large "bubble" community (Appleton, 2020).
Example of residential mandate (27 examples total): "We begin as a community thinking about how do we continue what we know is what we do best-in-person residential education with a liberal arts focus-in a way that also acknowledges the public health limitations of SARS Co V2 and the potential of contracting COVID-19." (June 24) • Learning mandate. The university, understandably, had a learning mandate that functioned as a co-accelerator of the residential mandate. As mentioned above, the fact that this was a university suggests that messages advocating innovative, knowledge-accumulating measures would find a receptive audience. They did; in the fall months after the campaign was officially launched, student and faculty groups were making their own videos as learning exercises in their classes to support mitigation identities.
Example of learning mandate (21 examples total): "We have to think about good communication and that's caused me to think about one of the things we do best here at Colgate and maybe best in the United States." (July 8 Town Hall meeting) • Moral imperative. Notions of the common good or a higher calling wove through the engagement communications about COVID-19 at Colgate during the summer of 2020. The dynamics of working together, self monitoring, and enforcement of basic mitigation efforts, became, as we will see in the analysis below, voices in an echo-chamber of communication, within which the Colgate Together campaign could be spawned.

Thematic Analysis
The third result of the case study consists of an analysis of documents in the Colgate Together corpus. We suspected that, because the branding of the Colgate Together campaign occurred relatively late in the communication window, an analysis of a representative text from early in the communication window and a representative text from later in the communication window might demonstrate how the themes from the earlier communicative engagement phase coalesced in the later branded phase. Accordingly, we analyzed two documents: one was an early transcription of the first address by the president to the entire community on June 23, 2020, shortly after the Task Force recommended a full return to in-person instruction in the fall. The second document was the last document in the Colgate Together corpus, dated August 23, 2020, that served the same "orienting" function, but reflected the decision for universal quarantine, recommended by the EOC on June 21, 2020. This second document was influenced by the discussion with off-campus students in a town hall meeting (announcing and discussing the quarantine) on August 6. The August 23 document also follows the president's decision to brand the Colgate Together campaign, announced internally to the VP of communications on August 9. The result of the analysis of these two documents is shown in Table 3. "We all must acknowledge that to open fully will place a heavy burden on Colgate's tremendous staff who will support all of these efforts." rules "Every one of us faculty, staff, and students will be asked to agree to a community compact that sets forth a series of principles and direction specifically designed to safeguard the health of our campus community and of the village of Hamilton." plan "As you will see in the plan there are some matters still to be worked out and it's important to note that the plans will have to adjust to changing state and federal guidelines and circumstances." "It's a great report!" August 20 All Student Address together (residential mandate) "Now I can't monitor every move of every student. That's an impossibility. So our ability to be on this campus this year will rely on the thousands of decisions each of us will make every day for the next 90 days. What someone does in the townhouses will affect those in Gatehouse. Curtis Hall is now deeply linked to La Casa. East Hall residents are united with 110 Broad St. The decision to wear a mask in the Village means a third grader can go to one of our village schools. We're all fundamentally connected now. All this relies on each of us." together (learning mandate) "So why do this? At the most fundamental level, we are doing this to get you back to the form of education that we believe in, the form of education we know to be the most powerful. This is something worth fighting for. Your education, your preparation for the future, and the fight we will undertake together will be a lesson in itself." together (moral mandate) "We have a different approach to welcoming you back. We have a plan and we have you. We live in a world that seldom asks us to work together in service of something important, something you can't achieve on your own. We live in a time of hyper individuality. We also live in cynical and partisan times. We are divided more often then were called to join together. But sometimes we're faced with something that is about the common good and sometimes there's a chance to achieve something that's only possible through joint effort." This thematic analysis is not intended to be scientific. The themes that developed from the early "read the report" messages to the inspirational "we're in this fight together" tone of the later messages understandably reflect the experience of the president and communication team having gone through a two-month crucible of communicative engagement. The message mandates are top of mind as a result. Also, as we will see in the next section, the decision to lead the story have conferred a confident, unified tone to the messaging.

Corroborating Evidence
If we look even closer at the events and communications later in the communication window, we can see evidence of a noticeable change or shift in emphasis in the messaging by the president.
This development of this messaging strategy is anticipated in an email sent by the president to the vp of communications at this time (August 9) suggesting, for the first time on record, the branding of the campaign as "Colgate Together": One thing that we all learned from the "I am quarantining" video message last week is that people respond very well to a call to higher purposes. And, we also learned that, without such a higher purpose, we will get  Vol. 11, No. 5; presented themselves in communicative engagement activities during the "communication window" in the summer of 2020. We may even suggest that all crisis and risk communication scenarios can similarly take advantage of a communication window, no matter how long or how brief.
What may be new in our results is the simple confirmation of how one-way, branded messaging developed out of the informational, two-way communicative interaction. This shift, almost like a tipping point, is an important indicator of the role that communication has played in this environment. It indicates, first, that an environment like this is itself conducive to changes or revisions in message design. Seeing that dynamic occur, again much like a tipping point, reveals insight into how the behaviors encouraged by crisis and risk communication messaging are meant to be taken symbolically even when they are presented as "just information," or the remediation of existing information. Wearing a mask while one is jogging, for example, is largely a symbolic act of compliance, just as not wearing a mask, in some situations, may be seen as a symbolic act of non-compliance. Scholars have identified instances of the symbolic nature of risk mitigation behaviors both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (Lupton et al., 2021), but they may not have been able to see it represented clearly as it is in our case because of our grounded approach and our focus on how the messages developed, which are themselves unique to the Colgate University situation.

Declaration of Interest
The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.