A com­mon refrain on many col­lege cam­puses is that they become a sort of “bub­ble” around their stu­dents, whether it’s a 1500-person lib­eral arts col­lege or a uni­ver­sity with 20,000 under­grad­u­ate stu­dents. Here at Bet­ter­Grads, we spend a lot of time dis­cussing col­lege com­mu­ni­ties and the impor­tance of get­ting involved on cam­pus and explor­ing dif­fer­ent classes, research oppor­tu­ni­ties, activ­i­ties, and events. A col­lege cam­pus can also feel a bit sti­fling at times, espe­cially when com­pared with sig­nif­i­cant real world events that put things into perspective.

Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina struck right around the week that I started col­lege. My first weeks at Oxy were marked by op-ed arti­cles in the cam­pus news­pa­per by upper­class­men dis­cussing (okay, crit­i­ciz­ing) our stu­dent body’s involve­ment in relief efforts on the Gulf coast. I got involved in a sort of ad hoc effort to raise ini­tial funds to con­tribute to local relief orga­ni­za­tions and, with a bit more time, exist­ing col­lege clubs devel­oped tools to edu­cate on the rel­e­vant issues, raise funds, and ulti­mately send stu­dents as relief vol­un­teers. By the fol­low­ing year, Pro­fes­sor Car­o­line Held­man had estab­lished a Dis­as­ter Pol­i­tics course that takes stu­dents to New Orleans to do relief work over win­ter break. This was a con­sid­er­able les­son in “burst­ing the bub­ble” in the sense that stu­dents and fac­ulty took the reins in stay­ing abreast of the sit­u­a­tion and, more impor­tantly, facil­i­tat­ing stu­dents’ abil­ity to get involved in as many dif­fer­ent ways as possible.

I com­pletely under­stand why many col­lege students—particularly in times of national and/or inter­na­tional crisis—feel that their course­work and other oblig­a­tions pale in com­par­i­son to the needs pre­sented by the sit­u­a­tion at hand. Rather than feel­ing inef­fec­tive or unhelp­ful, I would urge these stu­dents to find (or start) the rel­e­vant efforts on their cam­puses and sur­round­ing communities.

I know that this has already started to take place in the after­math of the recent earth­quake in Haiti. Class­room dis­cus­sions, teach-ins, speak­ers, fundrais­ers, sup­ply col­lec­tions, and many fur­ther endeav­ors are all extremely valu­able ways for uni­ver­si­ties to both con­tribute to aid­ing Haiti as well as prepar­ing their stu­dents to be informed citizens—and vol­un­teers and/or pro­fes­sion­als in rel­e­vant fields if they so choose.

Stu­dents, educators—what’s going on in your col­lege com­mu­ni­ties to help Haiti? What would you like to see uni­ver­si­ties do in the wake of a dev­as­tat­ing event like a nat­ural disaster?