Date of Award
Summer 2025
Document Type
Open Access Dissertation
Department
Educational Leadership and Policies
First Advisor
C. Spencer Platt
Abstract
Between March 2020 and March 2022, colleges and universities across the globe had to contend with a variety of crises led by the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic. The epidemic presented challenges to safeguarding public health among students, faculty, staff, and their surrounding communities. Institutional spokespersons were responsible for communicating to internal and external stakeholders in response to the crisis.
The classification of U.S. higher education institutions that hold the federal designation of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) confronted additional crises beyond COVID-19, including ransomware attacks that impacted IT infrastructure in 2021-22 and a series of racially motivated bomb threats in early 2022. At the HBCUs, institutional spokespersons were responsible for communicating to internal and external stakeholders in response to the multiple crises of the era. Their work as crisis communications professionals was critical in framing institutional response and brand perception in times of crisis and in times of normal operation, and that work remains so today.
This case study is both a brief historiography of three crises that HBCUs have faced, and a contemporary examination of two public HBCUs in the Piedmont Triad region of North Carolina, their respective chief communications officers, and the communicators’ perceptions of their crisis communications work with stakeholders in response to multiple crises occurring between March 2020 and March 2022.
Rights
© 2025, Jason C Darby
Recommended Citation
Darby, J. C.(2025). Transparency and Trust in Crisis Communications: A Case Study of Two Pandemic Era HBCUs in North Carolina. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/8460