Forum Takes on Disasters

University President Lawrence H. Summers stressed the importance of academic discourse and scholarship over direct University aid in the cause of disaster relief at a symposium on natural and unnatural disasters yesterday.

The “In Harm’s Way” symposium, sponsored by the Harvard University Center for the Environment, featured four panel discussion groups, which considered topics ranging from social vulnerability patterns to the pending threat of avian bird flu.

Summers, a featured speaker at the symposium, said that Harvard’s focus should not be on providing direct financial and logistical assistance to relief efforts. He cautioned against duplicating the work of groups such as the American Red Cross.

“Ultimately, we would make the largest contribution through our teaching and scholarship rather than being a kind of general philanthropic organization,” he said.

Summers added that there is a disproportionate focus given to the highest-profile disasters.

“There are millions of people who suffer,” he said. “Why should the amount of assistance and help that you receive when you suffer be greater if your suffering is linked to a disaster than if your suffering just happens?”

Summers went on to encourage a broad approach to disaster management and said that when considering how to allocate resources for disaster prevention, it is important to “think about disasters in a holistic way.”

“There is a need for universities to provide the intellectual framework necessary for preventing and responding to disasters, Summers added.

He called this sharing of ideas “the center of what we talk about when we talk about the university being at the center of serving the world.”

Former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) James Lee Witt keynoted the symposium, delivering a scathing indictment of the Bush administration’s management of the federal emergency preparedness system.

Witt, the Clinton-appointed director of FEMA from 1993 to 2001, also called for active student and academic involvement in disaster management.

Citing a maxim from an Argentine Baptist minister, Witt said that “if we are not part of planting the trees of the future, we do not deserve to stand in the shade of the trees of the past.”

Witt oversaw the elevation of FEMA to a Cabinet-level agency under former President Clinton.

He lambasted the Bush administration for gutting the agency and criticized the rise of political appointments at agencies such as FEMA.

“Our country has never seen a response that failed so bad,” Witt said of the government’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina. “Thirteen hundred people did not have to lose their lives.”

Witt also called for carefully orchestrated urban planning in the reconstruction of New Orleans and a commitment to rebuild the wetlands of the Mississippi delta.

Approximately fifty people, primarily faculty and graduate students, attended the symposium.

Panelist Frederic Schwartz, a New York-based architect and a former visiting design critic at the Graduate School of Design, regretted the lack of undergraduates in attendance, saying that “when you learn, you can also help.”

Diane M. Brockmeyer, a primary-care physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said she attended the event out of an interest “in how the medical community can respond to disaster.”

An Extension School student studying architecture, Vikki Lew, praised Summers for his references to “human and social capital,” calling the issue “something that is often ignored.”