Mapping Campus Crises: An Updated Taxonomy for Higher Education

ABSTRACT

Increasingly, higher education leaders must lead from a presumption that they may encounter some type of institutional, national, and/or international crisis, and seek to be as ready as possible for the wide range of crisis types that can befall their institution. Adequate preparation involves having access to updated crisis taxonomies that are relevant to institutions of higher education. Therefore, in this paper, we conduct a literature review and a media analysis, replicating methods from Gigliotti (2020) to review previous categories of crisis types in higher education and identify potential shifts in the intervening years. We also assert that polycrisis—a compendium of crises where one contributes to a domino effect and causes or amplifies other crises—is itself a type of crisis that higher education leaders and practitioners need to understand and contend with. Our findings resulted in an updated 14‐category crisis taxonomy for institutions of higher education, which can be used to shape institutional preparation and response.