Hurricane Katrina, by all accounts, is legendary. The 2005 storm made history as the deadliest and most destructive Atlantic hurricane of the season, and it ranks as one of the worst hurricanes in U.S. history (Blake & Gibney, 2011; Knabb, Rhome, & Brown, 2005). In terms of human tragedy, more than 1,800 people died as a direct result of the storm and flooding. That number is most likely low, however, since “the names of hundreds of the dead remain a mystery and the death toll is mired in dispute” (Olsen, 2010, para. 1). In addition to casualties, more than a million people were relocated in what Ladd, Marszalek, and Gill (2006) referred to as the largest Diaspora in the United States.

Yet, while the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other groups organized their initial plans to respond to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, citizens as first responders were “on the ground” immediately and offering their personal assistance and professional expertise (Jordan, 2007). In San Antonio, Texas, for example, the city government and local universities partnered in a grassroots effort to offer aid to the initial 10,000 evacuees who began arriving at Camp Kelly,Footnote 1 a former Air Force Base; later reports estimated the number of evacuees to be 25,000-35,000 (Faegre & Benson, 2006).

Many of the first responders to offer aid to Hurricane Katrina evacuees were local college and university personnel and students; and many of those were trained in counseling, counselor education, social work, psychology, and some in trauma response. Their response was laudable, and it is noteworthy that these were professionals trained for mental health crises. Intake required someone with that expertise to recognize severe trauma, identify potential medical concerns, and assist thousands of homeless people as they adjusted to their temporary living arrangements and re-established contact with family and friends. In the case of the San Antonio response, local colleges and universities supported the endeavor by assuring flexibility in teaching (personal communication). In most cases, that flexibility meant students received course credit for participation in the emergency response; for faculty members the “flexibility” was less clear.

Local university faculty and students as well as other individual citizens were in place at Camp Kelly when the first wave of evacuees arrived by bus. These first responders noted no organized support when they arrived; but they acknowledged that individual citizens with various professional experiences identified specific areas for intake, triage, counseling, dining, and even a room for donated clothing. In terms of higher education personnel, administrators, staff and faculty members, and students worked side-by-side in response to the crisis.

Initial responders began expressing dissonance between being an academic and being a professional (Reybold, 2008). For example, some faculty members expressed concern about the implications of choosing to serve (or not) and the impact that might have on promotion and tenure. While at Camp Kelly, these academics were counselors, but they also were faculty members—assistant, associate, and full professors. Members of the team also expressed concern that they were abandoning their students and wondered how to balance their ongoing academic roles with the immediate role of counselor.

This study, approved by the local institution’s Human Subjects Review Board (HSRB), examined how counselor education faculty members negotiated their professional roles as first responders to the Hurricane Katrina evacuation. Research questions included the following. a) How do counselor education faculty members react to immediate and local disaster? b) How do these faculty members make sense of different role expectations as academics and counselors? c) How do these faculty members interpret the social and political aspects of these role expectations? d) What are the perceived implications for tenure and promotion, faculty well being, and future academic responsibilities?

In this article, we first review the literature related to identity dialectics, especially in terms of conflicting professional domains and ethos of practice. Second, we discuss the design and methods of the study, with particular attention to our own identities as faculty members and participants in the events of Hurricane Katrina, as well as how we intersected, that is, brought together, two analysis techniques (Ellingson, 2011)—constant comparative method and discourse analysis. Third, we describe the resulting themes as an identity dialectic between the professional self in dialogue/action and the structure of language in crisis. Fourth and finally, we discuss the findings in relation to faculty as first responders, dissonance between professional identities as counselors and academics, and the perceived impact on responsibilities and potential for tenure, promotion, and general evaluation.

Relevant Literature

We now examine scholarship in terms of the dialectic between professional and personal identity and compassion fatigue and self-care for mental health providers.

Identity Dialectic: Professional vs. Personal

Faculty members are socialized into their professional identities as they move through local institutions and cultures (Reybold & Alamia, 2008; Reybold & Corda, 2011). Through these experiences, they construct expectations about the “holy trinity” of faculty life: research, teaching, and service (Schuster & Finkelstein, 2006, p. 78). At many institutions, faculty members experience research as the primary indicator of accomplishment (Tierney & Bensimon, 1996). Service to the community, like the work first responders did at the Camp Kelly, "is... often seen as somehow outside the ‘real’ work of scholars” (Ward, 2003, p. 3).

The demands of faculty life can reinforce competitive tendencies, making it difficult to develop a sense of community, including community service like that at Camp Kelly (Astin, 1999). In his 20 years of faculty research, for instance, Boice (2000) did not find a single case in which service mattered for promotion and tenure. Moreover, service plays a minor role in institutional ranking criteria. While service usually is not associated with professional rewards, it is still expected of all faculty members, giving it a rather ambiguous status, particularly for early career faculty. In fact, faculty members describe the depleted feeling of living in a “service fog” early in their careers as they struggle to figure out when they can and should say “no” to service requests (Reybold & Corda, 2011, p. 140).

Finding a balance between the “could” and should” of faculty service can be particularly difficult in times of crisis or conflict (Reybold & Alamia, 2008), but even more so in a disaster when those in the helping professions can experience depletion and secondary trauma (Bartley, 2007; Boscarino, Figley, & Adams, 2004; Culver, McKinney, & Paradise, 2011). How should faculty members negotiate the tension between service to general faculty responsibilities and disciplinary responsibilities to their professional fields? In particular, how can counselor education faculty members, many of whom are licensed counselors, balance their faculty service responsibilities with their counselor ethos, and especially during a crisis?

Compassion Fatigue and Self Care

For many first responders to Hurricane Katrina, the struggle to balance personal and professional ethos was even more difficult since they were helping professionals facing their own and their clients’ trauma in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Bartley, 2007; Boyer, 2008; Campbell, 2007; Culver et al., 2011). A significant number of mental health practitioners who work with traumatized populations experience some kind of trauma themselves as a result—at least 15 % (Bride, 2007). This phenomenon—parts of which are operationalized as compassion fatigue, secondary trauma, or vicarious trauma (Boscarino, Figley, & Adams, 2004)—can be more prevalent in cases of repeated exposure to trauma victims, as was the case for many mental health professionals working with Katrina victims. Repeated exposure to trauma can lead to countertransference: “the process of seeing oneself in the client, of over-identifying with the client, or of meeting needs through the client” (Figley, 1995, p. 9). This identification with traumatized clients can co-exist with an opposing desire to draw back from clients and a feeling of being “numb” or “worn out” (Culver et al., p. 33).

Alongside work on compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma, a parallel body of work posits the development of compassion satisfaction and vicarious growth as responses to work with trauma survivors (Arnold, Calhoun, Tedeschi, & Cann, 2005; Stamm, 2002). While many caregivers report symptoms of compassion fatigue, some may experience compassion satisfaction because “they believe that what they are doing is helping a group of people and, in some ways that it is even redemptive” (Stamm, p. 113). After conducting interviews with 21 psychotherapists involved in trauma work, Arnold et al. found that most (over 75 %) clinicians believed that, despite compassion fatigue or vicarious trauma symptoms, their work with trauma survivors had created positive changes in their own lives, including increased compassion for and insight into others and a deeper spiritual perspective.

Method of the Study

Through interviews, participants told the story of their experiences as faculty responders to crisis, thus actively enacting their faculty identity. Stories provide researchers with direct access to the individual-in-culture, allowing us to understand not only the narrator but also the world in which they live and how they choose to portray interactions with that world (Murray, 2008). Crafting a personal narrative calls on several different cognitive processes including “remembering, situating, anticipating, representing, evaluating, and otherwise interrelating life events” (Ochs, 2004, p. 269). Given this level of cognitive engagement, it is not surprising that narrative can be a tool for interpreting the events of our lives, for attempting to integrate disparate experiences into a single, coherent story (Polkinghorne, 1988). This integration can be conceptualized as dialectics that individuals negotiate as they balance their various professional and personal identities (Reybold, 2008).

Prelude to Inquiry

The first few days of emergency response to Hurricane Katrina were driven by urgent need: the imminent need for basic shelter and food; attendance to personal hygiene; health care; mental health care; child care; clothing for the evacuees; and, just as important, the need for organization and structure, particularly in identifying who was coming through the doors and how these evacuees could be reconnected with family and other support systems. University personnel helped to meet these needs with full-day, every-day volunteer sessions at the Kelly intake center. When the formal and official emergency responders took control of the Kelly intake of evacuees, some faculty members and students continued daily vigils of support; others returned to a “more normal” semester routine of teaching and learning; still others negotiated their personal and professional time commitments between the chaos of Kelly and the routine of academia.

As life became more “normal” for the faculty and students, university discourse about emergency response, especially the role of academics in that response, changed tenor. Private discussions refocused on faculty evaluations and student grades. Some questioned the lack of preparation for emergency response: Should untrained civilians be responsible for this type of response? Others questioned the impact on their career: Will faculty evaluations reflect the general spirit of civic duty? Not everyone participated in the emergency response: How can we reconcile faculty and student productivity in light of a disaster of this magnitude?

One response to this question lies in language use. After Hurricane Katrina, mass media used various terms to refer to those who had experienced the traumatic conditions of this horrific event: environmental refugee, neighbor, victim, evacuee, citizen, and even looter (Edgerly, 2011; Masquelier, 2006). Journalists, political leaders, citizens who had endured the storm, and others engaged in a debate about the “right” term for those residing at Camp Kelly. Refugee was the most common term in early reports, according to Edgerly.

Moreover, in journalistic contexts, refugee was used more often in a passive voice as the recipient of some action while citizen (referring to the same group of people) was used in the active voice as someone claiming agency (Edgerly, 2011). Masquelier (2006) argued that this debate arose in large part because of a conceptual void: the U.S. did not have a term for its own citizens in a vulnerable position. Thus the term refugee brought to light the gross inequalities of poverty that public discourse generally manages to keep quiet.

Throughout this study, we have chosen to use the term evacuee for several reasons. First, while it also misrepresents the situation in that it implies a group of people who were evacuated before a tragedy, it does not have the disempowering connotation of refugee. Second, Masquelier (2006) cites the definition of refugee given by the United Nations Office of High Commissioner of Human Rights as someone “outside the country of his nationality… [who is] unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country” (p. 738). Given the human rights violations associated with Hurricane Katrina, we chose to use international language related to human rights. Finally, the majority of our interviewees referred to their clients at Camp Kelly as evacuees, so we are staying true to their perspective in order to shed light on the ways the academy as an institution participated in what the U.S. Congress (2006) later called “an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare” (p. x).

Case Study: Figuring Out the Research Question

Case study often describes how a study is planned, but it also invokes the telling of a story (Stake, 1995). Telling the story was personal for each of us as each of us had been involved in the Hurricane Katrina event. Three of the authors (Reybold, Trepal, and Haberstroh) were “first responders” as university personnel; their university had requested faculty and student assistance to help “process” the first wave of evacuees from New Orleans through Camp Kelly. Konopasky lived in New Orleans, working as an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans, until she and her family had to evacuate just before the storm made landfall; she was subsequently displaced professionally due to the economic and structural devastation of the storm.

The study began as an intellectual outlet for trauma experienced by one faculty member, Reybold, who was not trained as a counselor and was unable to separate personal and professional dimensions of the volunteer work at Camp Kelly. Unable to contribute to the most obvious medical and psychological needs, she considered alternative ways to participate in relief efforts. After several discussions with two colleagues in counseling education (Trepal and Haberstroh), the three of them set out to study faculty response to natural disasters. Because of their affiliation with counselor education and intimate knowledge of the response, they chose to focus specifically on counselor education faculty. Konopasky joined the analysis after a chance meeting with one of the faculty responders.Footnote 2

The original three researchers chose to focus on faculty responses because of their personal and professional experiences as first responders and faculty members. After receiving HSRB approval for the study, we identified a group of counselor educators from south Texas; and we invited them to participate in post-response interviews: all agreed and were interviewed the following semester. Given that there were only a few counseling programs in the immediate south Texas area, we did not include demographic information to protect confidentiality.

The initial interview guide was developed from Reybold’s longitudinal study of faculty identity. We modified the guide to account for counselor socialization and ethics. The two counselor education faculty members conducted all of the interviews—mainly for the sake of disciplinary understanding related to counseling, but also to allow the other faculty member to focus her attention on early coding and literature review. The semi-structured interviews were conducted in person and included topics such as participants’ volunteer roles, personal and professional (clinical and academic) impact of the Camp Kelly experience, self-care practices, and changed beliefs about multiculturalism and diversity.

Analytic Techniques

Initially, all interviews were coded using constant comparative techniques of open and axial coding (Corbin & Strauss, 1990). Subsequently, we chose to review our analysis through a more constructivist framework of constant comparative analysis (Charmaz, 2011); and we decided to re-analyze all data through the lens of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003), focusing in particular on the tools of systemic functional linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). Linguistic methodologies were drawn into the final stages of research for several reasons. First, the integration of multiple methods of analysis can bring complexity to the final claims (Kidder & Fine, 1987; Morse, 2010). The analyst, in this case, is a bricoleur, using multiple ways of thinking to encourage reflexivity and systematic analysis (Kincheloe, McLaren, & Steinberg, 2011). Second, because of the intimate relationship between design and experience, the initial researchers wanted to check their interpretation through peer review. Having another analyst, particularly one who experienced the storm directly and who had access to a different set of analytic tools, allowed us to develop the findings more fully. Third, because language plays such a central role in constant comparative analysis (Charmaz, 2006), particularly in a context where faculty members were perhaps hesitant to express themselves fully, we wanted to involve another analyst who could help us discern meaningful patterns in participants’ contributions.

The original three researchers met bi-weekly to discuss individual analyses until they reached consensus on these themes. Their constant comparative analysis focused immediately on how participants explained their experience of disaster response in dialectical terms (discussed below in the section on findings). Every narrative revealed tensions between each aspect of the unfolding story. For example, participants talked about creating order out of chaos, but then followed up by talking about the chaotic aspects of the order they had created.

We then decided to layer our understanding of these dialectics with functional linguistic analysis at the word and phrase level within each construct. After a debriefing by Reybold about the design of the study, but before looking at the results of the constant comparative analysis, Konopasky coded the transcripts linguistically, looking for patterns that might be relevant to the research questions. She began with an analysis at the level of the clause, investigating the representational choices participants made (Fairclough, 2003). This analysis revealed that certain kinds of verb tense and aspect, negation, word choice, subject and object choice, and metaphor were potentially important textual markers for participants. For example, interviewees used the simple past tense (e.g., went) in different circumstances than they used the past progressive tense (e.g., was going); markers of negation (not) emerged at interesting points in their narrative; and they often chose to make themselves the subject of passive verbs (e.g., I was told) rather than talk about the people and things acting upon them. Then, Konopasky made a second pass through the transcripts, coding all instances of these markers. Finally, Reybold and Konopasky worked in tandem as bricoleurs (Kincheloe, McLaren, & Steinberg, 2011), attempting to “straddle” the spaces between their findings as we moved towards consensus (citing Miller, 2000, p. 48). Finally, the four of us continued this process until we agreed on the final representation of themes.

Findings

Participants’ stories revealed the personal and professional struggle across their roles as counselors, faculty members, and even private citizens. The language of chaos came through clearly in the narratives of the events, particularly in the descriptions of initial experiences working at the evacuee site. Within the first minute of the interviews, all participants used descriptors such as chaotic, overwhelming, war zone, not organized, difficult, in flux, and on my toes. This kind of language set the stage for the rest of the interviews in providing a fluid, often confusing and overwhelming backdrop. The dialectic of chaos/order was the most obvious tension, and thus the primary theme of the study. We discuss the other dialectical elements or themes—trying/doing, outsider/insider, visibility/invisibility, and leaving/staying—as aspects of the overwhelming tension between chaos and order.

Chaos/Order

The original response team remembers the experience as chaos, but with the ever-present goal of achieving order. There was no plan, no central supervision, and consequently planning was the first goal. There were no nametags, no computers, and no assigned roles. The facility layout was merely a diagram, and the bathrooms were “somewhere down that hall.” Someone thought to bring markers and stick-on badges; we do not know why or how that detail was handled. There was a folding table set up in somewhere in the center of the building where we reconvened occasionally. We had no schedule at first; our primary duty was to walk up and down the hallways to try to establish order. And then the evacuees arrived. Finally, a university staff member brought in her own laptops to assist in patient intake.

In terms of a professional/academic dialectic, one participant said, “Like other faculty, I wanted to get involved.” Being available as a faculty member—trained in counseling—met with opposition on the ground in first few hours as another faculty member “collided head-on with one of the residents who was real angry.” The counselor/academic remembers vividly the “row after row of cots, that kind of scene. I can’t really remember ever seeing anything like that, and I came away from it feeling like I wanted to run for the hills.” After reflecting on his experience and reaction, the participant focused on how he could be of assistance. “Sorting shoes? Carrying boxes of water? This is not the plan for me; on the other hand, I am a licensed psychologist, so I could volunteer as a therapist.” His continued reflection on this issue led to what he describes as being “humbled” by the decision and realizing his contribution was more academic than professional:

If you get involved with people in counseling, then there is some commitment for a relationship. I really didn’t want to give that much time to it…. However, I was supervising a practicum, and here were a bunch of counseling students desperate to get hours [and] having a heck of a time getting 200 hours on top of their teaching responsibility; and so I decided that I would get the help to where it was needed.

Analysis of the linguistic construction of this chaotic backdrop suggests three patterns: (a) relations of excess as context for actions, (b) expressions denoting negation or absence, and (c) use of the adverb just.

Relations of excess

The first linguistic question was what kind of attributes these participants used to describe the setting. One of the primary ways speakers accomplish attribution is through relational clauses—verbs of being or having—and existential clauses—use of there is/are. For participants in this study, these clauses pointed to a feeling of excess, of just too much. For example, Rhett used the relational to be to describe his initial impressions of the evacuee situation in his city: “And I think given how quickly people came in—and it’s a flood of people—that it’s overwhelming.” Likewise, Pamela used the existential there was/were to describe the personal impact of Katrina: “On the one hand I felt, personally, a bit powerless because there was so much devastation and everything, and there were so many faces everywhere of people I knew who… would not ever get to go home.”

Rhett described the people as a flood and Pamela used the intensifiers so much and so many. About a quarter of all the relational and existential clauses used by participants referred to some notion of excess, intensity, or chaos like utter suffering and loss, a glut of need, a feeling of immediate crisis, too much confusion, sheer numbers of people, and of course chaos. While the use of these terms on their own is notable, when participants used them in relational and existential constructions, they were saying something explicit about what they perceived the world to be, about what characteristics and attributes existed. The feeling of excess was significant for these faculty members.

Expressions denoting negation or absence.

Participants emphasized a sense of chaos by describing what was not present. For instance, of the initial efforts, Nadine said, “It was just so crazy. Everybody was trying to do everything. There was no coordination.” For her, the absence of certain elements contributed to the chaos. The sense of chaos in this case came from some deficiency in the situation, rendering participants powerless. For instance, Stephen talked about not knowing how to help; Pamela talked about not being in a specific location; Rick talked about none of them having training; and Joseph talked about a lack of resources. While some of these examples referred to what the evacuees did not have, most referred to a sense of the participants themselves being overwhelmed.

Use of the adverb ‘just’

A third linguistic pattern that emerged was participants’ use of the adverb just to denote that they simply did not have further words to describe an overwhelming situation. For example, George said, “It was just ‘holy cow,’ and the city staff [was] just not prepared for this!” Similarly, after a particularly troubling incident with an evacuee, Stephen said, “It was overwhelming. I mean it was just like ‘Oh my God’.” For Nadine, “it was so intense from the faces… to the smell… to just everything.” Rhett also emphasized smell, noting that “having worked in a prison for years and years, it was the same smell: just people crammed together.”

Trying/Doing

Closely connected to the chaos/order dialectic was the binary of trying/doing. Both as professional counselors and as teachers and researchers, these participants were accomplished—they provided therapy, they taught and mentored students, and they wrote and published papers.

In the first days and weeks after Katrina, however, the chaos at Camp Kelly made it difficult to accomplish tasks efficiently or effectively in the linear way to which these faculty members were accustomed. For example, one participant noted that “we all met as a faculty, but I don’t remember what day. It wasn’t quite clear to me who was going where, but most people seemed to find their way down there [Camp Kelly] sometime during the weekend. I think that’s when I went down.” This participant was frustrated particularly by the lack of coordination among counselors rather than academics. The university had arranged for time release from courses, but the counselors were responding mostly as individuals. The Red Cross had not yet arrived, and the counselors/academics found themselves in the first few hours writing nametags and distributing food rather than providing mental health care. “I really tried to get involved in the therapeutic aspect, but initially [it was about] just getting volunteers. Period.”

Another participant expressed the same frustration. To alleviate that, she fell back on her academic identity and connections. “I helped with the effort at the university with getting students and faculty involved.” Extra credit for classes, university T-shirts… she used any university symbol to encourage counseling participation. Reflecting on her actions at the onset of the crisis, the participant is clear: “I was being a conduit to try to get everyone else involved, to be the cheerleader, to try and organize and contribute that for the university, for the college.”

In describing their experiences, then, the tension between trying and doing emerged in their alternation between use of verbs in different aspects. While tense refers to when something happened, aspect is about speaker focus. Verbs in the perfective aspect present the action “as a single unanalysable whole, with beginning, middle, and end rolled into one” (Comrie, 1976, p. 6). For instance, Rick began his narrative of his first night at Camp Kelly using the perfective aspect, emphasizing what he completed. “I moved blankets…. I went ahead and helped break down cubicles.... I alphabetized all the intake forms; that’s basically what I did.” These simple past forms—moved, went, helped, etc.—narrate what Rick was accomplishing, what he was doing. As Rick’s narrative began to touch on some of the chaos, however, he moved into the progressive aspect, which focused attention on the duration and lack of completion of an action (Bardovi-Harlig, 2000), and the conditional voice, which focused on the habituality of the ongoing actions: “We were doing the intakes. We would have people, grandmothers, relatives trying to find kids, and we didn’t have the right last names.”

The progressive were doing and conditional would have place the hearer in the midst of the action, emphasizing the flow of events, participants trying (and often failing: didn’t have). The past progressive tense was a frequent verbal tool these faculty members used to express a sense of being “in the midst” (Bybee, Perkins, & Pagliuca, 1994, p. 136); and they often combined it with expressions of movement without purpose or direction. For example, Stephen said, “I was just sort of roaming around.” Likewise, Rhett shared, “There’s so many people that you get shell-shocked—in their eyes—wandering around lost…. What can I do?” These participants were always on the move, always trying to be of help, but never reaching a destination physically or emotionally.

Other participants realized early on that their efforts—as counselors and expert academics in the field of trauma—were at odds with the structure of crisis response. One participant, who had developed an instrument specific to this type of trauma, was rebuffed when he tried to use it for counseling Katrina evacuees. “I trained 30 of our students on how to use [this instrument], and they were ready to go…. We were directly told that we couldn’t implement that.” He concluded by balancing the professional and academic identities: “I think [this experience] has great lessons for IRB [Institutional Review Board]. I think faculty wanted to do research…. I think it is a combination of just being overwhelmed with responsibility, but also not getting the support they need [as researchers].”

Insider/Outsider

Interviewees referred to their participation as first responders in terms of belonging (or not), usually in relation to their professional identity as either a faculty member or a counselor. George said he “was humbled by the reality that the kind of therapy I did had very little relevance for a traumatized minority population.” Likewise, Rhett focused on the moment he realized the limitations of his training: “Reality hit when we went out there…. It wasn’t organized because there were so many people—trying to process so many people through their basic needs.” The reality of being a first responder, as a faculty member and a counselor, was obvious in Stephen’s response: “Every time I looked over in the mental health area there was nobody there—there were psychologists, and there were counselors, but no real people in line to get help.”

George was witness to the reality of the irrelevance of his techniques for Katrina evacuees; on the other hand, Rhett was hit by the reality of their needs; and Stephen noted reality only in relation to the evacuees. Each participant noted the pain and injustice of this reality, but all positioned themselves outside of that reality during the initial response.

The use of the term “reality” to describe the surreal situation is perhaps a way to normalize the experience. After all, it was reality for everyone involved. Faculty participants, though, further normalized their status outside the realities of loss and grief by modifying them with just. George said his “personal reaction at some level was fear. I think that was one reaction, the other [was] just an awareness of my limitations, some self-imposed, some imposed by culture, age, race, whatever.”

An interesting aspect of the insider/outsider dialectic is a tension around disciplinary aspects of identity. Pamela was “especially proud of [her institution] because we didn’t splinter off into our own little group,” but Rhett counters that “it was very hierarchical there. The psychiatrists on staff saw them first and diagnosed them, and LPCs [licensed professional counselors] did case management, kind of referral stuff.” While Pamela maintained that there was unity among the different professionals at the site, Rhett was angry about the ways certain specialists were shut out of their counseling role and divided according to professional hierarchy.

Other participants moved between unifying and dichotomizing their professional experiences in these same ways. Catherine, for instance, remembered that “there was just this call, and we were all helpers, people not really worrying if they were social workers or counselors… or whatever.” Several moments later, however, Catherine said that “over time, it seemed to be only this group of people from this agency can do this.” Others expressed similar thoughts. For example, Nadine talked about turf in terms of response and professional identity; Stephen described the experience as battles for territory; and Rhett called the response initiative a communal foxhole. Rick mirrored the war metaphor, describing it as a call-to-arms. Note that even when this military language of territory is evoked, participants do not use it consistently to set up a battle with “the other.” Instead, for some the chaos evoked the image of camaraderie. For instance, Rhett’s thoughts on the initial response were, “We have… hundreds of students that we can marshal together.”

Visibility/Invisibility

In describing events at Camp Kelly, participants represented themselves and their actions as passive. For example, when asked how she decided to contribute, Catherine mentioned that she “was directed elsewhere…. So that’s how I ended up where I was.” George said “there was a meeting arranged” to organize a relief effort. Stephen “was given a clipboard and told to gather this information, but wasn’t trained very well.”

Behind the scenes, faculty members discussed relationships with other faculty members on site, and they worried if they were “being seen” providing academic service. On record, however, they focused more on the lack of recognition given to counseling students involved as first responders. “As a clinical supervisor… I think our students deserve recognition for what they did. They went over and above the call of duty, the things they did for my class.” Because the faculty had been asked to suspend typical course content and evaluation, counseling education faculty members found themselves re-viewing their students—for the purpose of class evaluation. “It was not in the syllabus…. They went above and beyond. And yet the only person I know who praised them was me.”

After the initial crisis, this same professor said he “even questioned whether or not that would help them for promotion and tenure.” He concluded, “I think it overwhelmed faculty and made fall semester a very hellish time, and people had to do a lot of catch up things.”

References to organizers were often non-specific. Pamela was blunt: “Apparently they were organizing a city-wide effort, and they were going to convene here, and I got the email, and I was at home, and I just came on over, and that was the beginning of my involvement.” Catherine felt the same, referring to the evacuee check-in process as “what they were calling ‘intake,’ for lack of a better word at the time.” When a group of social workers offered to assist with intake, Rhett was puzzled; “[Local organizers] said ‘sorry—you can go sort underwear.’”

These interviewees not only noted the distancing between themselves and colleagues, but the nominalization of evacuees. “The way they were talked to, the lack of services that were provided—[it was like] misdirection, miscommunication, the disciplining of the kids.” These examples show that part of the experience of feeling invisible was a perception of the response effort as only an en masse, organizational response. Meetings were arranged, participants were directed, intake was organized, and evacuees were directed… and even disciplined. Throughout these narratives, faculty members talk about others at the site in this anonymous way, thus emphasizing their own feelings of anonymity or distance.

Perhaps the most convincing evidence for the sense of being invisible is found in interviewees’ responses to the question about the professional impact of Hurricane Katrina. Despite all participants at some point in the interview discussing feelings of chaos, of impotence (trying without accomplishing), and of an outsider status (whether it be in reference to Katrina evacuees or other professionals), none of them answer this question by talking about these feelings. Instead, participant narratives stayed on the relatively safe topic of their teaching and how their perspective on multiculturalism or advocacy has broadened. In talking about their professional lives, participants’ negative experiences at the Camp Kelly become relatively invisible across all narratives.

Leaving/Staying

Part of the tension around leaving or staying is about the power of presence, resulting in the professional/personal dialectic: Even if I am overwhelmed and feeling like an invisible outsider, is my actual presence worthwhile? For example, Stephen contrasts his sense of a lack of completion in the progressive aspect with an almost surreal exhibition of completion:

There were students from [another local university] coming through in groups to observe what was going on. There was nothing going on, and there was this crew of people. I remember thinking it was the weirdest thing. All that was going on, and here is a faculty member showing that they have a response set up for the mental health needs.

Like others in the study, Stephen also was frustrated by an inability to complete much beyond walking up and down the halls of Camp Kelly: “For a couple of days I just walked around from bed to bed asking people if they need anything.” Likewise, another participant said he “walked around and did a lot that initial [intake] work.” George was quick to point out his temporal status: “I could volunteer and just show up. That meant I could be sorting shoes, carrying boxes of water [instead of counseling].” Similarly, Catherine said that intake “involved just being there to let people know what services were available to them.”

Stephen critiqued the feeling of being in the moment. He narrated the absurdity of faculty members being present to demonstrate mental health care readiness in the midst of more immediate issues. Meanwhile, when asked to describe what they did at Camp Kelly, Stephen and Pamela focused on the roaming, on walking around. Part of their role as they saw it was simply moving through the space, being present there. Finally, George and Catherine talked about the power in the simple act of showing up or being there; just being present was a powerful action.

Discussion

In terms of economic damage, Hurricane Katrina was the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, with total property damage estimated at $81 billion (2005 USD) (Knabb et al., 2005). Few people, though, realize that faculty members across the region were asked to be first responders to this national tragedy, many of whom had little or no training in trauma response. Our initial goal was to understand how faculty members responded to trauma in the community. In addition, we wanted to understand how they balanced the expectations of their professional identities as both counselors and academics. Finally, we wanted to know how they made sense of the implications of being a first responder to a natural disaster as counselor and faculty.

The Spectacle of Chaos/Order

Hurricane Katrina, as a media event, was in general a spectacle, a social performance meant to encourage empathy among the audience members (Gurr & Ichikawa, 2000). At the local level, the Camp Kelly intake spectacle became “the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue” (Debord, 1967, Chpt. 1, Sect. 24), both advertising the production and controlling the story line:

It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption. The spectacle’s form and content are identically the total justification of the existing system’s conditions and goals. The spectacle is also the permanent presence of this justification, since it occupies the main part of the time lived outside of modern production. (Chpt. 1, Sect. 6).

The spectacle of emergency response reported here was played out on multiple stages: national and local media, university dialogue, peer debriefing, participant interviews, writing this article… to name a few. One of the ways spectacle emerged for our participants was in their use of battle metaphors, conceptualizing Camp Kelly experiences as battles for turf where students were marshaled together after a call-to-arms. At the national level, critics of the federal and state response to the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina pointed out the lack of emergency planning and preparedness (U.S. Congress, 2006). They noted the slow response time to evacuation of residents following the failure of the New Orleans levee system, a seeming callous disregard for keeping families intact during the evacuation, and quite a few other “absurdities” (p. x).

Dialectic Expressions of Chaos/Order

During the interviews, participants in this study were trying to make sense of the tragedy and their role as responders. Each one noted the Angst of balancing chaos and order, but not always successfully. For counseling education faculty members already stressed by the social and political aspects of their academic roles, that conflict is also a potential trigger for career disillusionment (Reybold, 2005). We discuss the continuum of growth/disillusionment in relation to the most prominent dialectics: trying/doing, outsider/insider, visibility/invisibility, and leaving/staying.

In between moments of trying and doing, it was interesting that participants in this study first fell back on their training as counselor educators, then juxtaposed that “primary” role with their academic roles as teachers, researchers, and service providers in higher education. This, in itself, is a dialectic of professional identity, especially in relation to decision making and faculty rewards (Reybold, 2008). It is most prominent in service activities which usually are less rewarded when it comes to promotion and tenure, especially for women and minority faculty members (Reybold & Corda, 2011). Participants in this study were not sure what was needed as first responders. As they responded, they could not always do the work they were trained to do; and that was frustrating for faculty members socialized to help others in crisis.

Hurricane Katrina held a mirror to each of the participants and asked: “Counselor or faculty member? Choose.” Were they counselors? Or were they educators willing to forgo their faculty duties and join their colleagues in service? One of the underlying tensions for participants was the idea of being evaluated “as a faculty member” when responding “as a counselor.” As counselors, they wanted to care for immediate needs; as faculty members—especially for those who were tenure-track—they were playing out the spectacle of caregiving on a very public and fragile stage.

The participants in this study did not have the option of time, the luxury of choosing one identity over another, neither in the moment of offering assistance nor in the moment of reflection upon their participation as an emergency responder. To be an outsider meant being able to render aid; to be an insider meant to identify with participants according to class, race, disability, or experience. To be either an insider or outsider, and sometimes in between the two, required participants to constantly juggle how they were presenting their “selves” to evacuees, other first responders, and even their own self as evaluator (Goffman, 1959).

Each participant chose to respond immediately, without hesitation. As they reflected, however, on the effects of their work as emergency responders, they outlined the dual experience of visibility and invisibility. Some expressed vulnerability as “junior faculty” members and wondered how this experience, this activity would impact their promotion and tenure chances. While visibly caring for thousands of Katrina victims and “being seen” by academic others, participants were also dealing with their own needs. They wanted to go home and take care of their families, to hug their children, to return to some sense of normalcy. They also needed to take care of themselves, but found it difficult to focus on that in such a state of chaos. Just staying on site was difficult and a cause of deep reflection, especially as the care extended for long days in a row. These feelings of powerlessness and frustration are also common symptoms of secondary traumatic stress disorder (Figley, 1995). It seems that some participants, then, were faced with untangling their traumatic responses to their Camp Kelly experiences from their ongoing stressful work with faculty issues.

Conclusion

The dialectic of chaos/order was associated with struggle and conflict for all participants. Yet for participants it was also associated with feelings of growth in their understanding of their limitations and boundaries as professionals; the sense of satisfaction in helping others; a sense of intimacy and connection with certain colleagues; and an appreciation for their own families, lives, and possessions. Our analysis indicates the importance of attending to the chaos and the order, to the vicarious trauma and the vicarious growth that can emerge from working with trauma survivors (Arnold et al., 2005; Stamm, 2002).

Typically, faculty identity is divided into academic roles known as “the holy Trinity” of research, teaching, and service—and takes into account only the professional aspects of those roles (Schuster & Finkelstein, 2006, p. 78). Scholars agree that “academic service is the least understood of faculty roles” (Reybold & Corda, 2011, p. 121). The problem only begins there; the more immediate issue is how service is defined. Most agree on basic parameters--advising, mentoring, committee work, other non-research activities; but not all service is equally recognized or rewarded (Astin, 1999) though its place in the reward system is subject to institutional mission. This is a particularly difficult path for early career faculty who “soon recognize that service is a lesser faculty role, subordinate to research and teaching when it comes to evaluation” (Reybold & Corda, p. 125).

By combining constant comparative and discourse analysis techniques we came to a multi-faceted understanding of a specific group of faculty members who had responded to a national disaster. These distinct perspectives helped us to make sense of the research allowing our “conclusions [to] become more complex as they incorporate more methods and more points of view” (Kidder & Fine, 1987, p. 66).

Analytically, the separate but parallel application of constant comparative analysis and discourse analysis offered views of our participants’ stories that intersected in interesting ways. For instance, the theoretical construct of chaos/order emerged through grounded analysis and comparison of participants’ own theories about their experiences; but discourse analysis offered a way to understand how participants were constructing these theories, narrating their sense of time with present progressive verbs like wandering and expressing their confusion and exhaustion with the adverb just. Discourse analysis added another level of comparison to the original analysis, another way to “initiate discussion between [ideas]” (Charmaz, 2006, p. 75). Meanwhile, constant comparative analysis can reveal new discourses, new ways of representing the world, which the discourse analyst can then begin to examine (Fairclough, 2003).

We focused this study on counseling education faculty members who responded to Katrina evacuees, but the findings point to a number of issues across disciplines. The nature of service remains ambiguous in terms of definition, scope, and evaluation. Following the actual crisis of intake and sheltering homeless evacuees, faculty members across programs such as business, social work, adult and higher education volunteered. How was their service “counted” or not? Further, who decides what service is worthy enough to reallocate teaching and research time, especially for early career faculty facing imminent evaluation of their work? Also, faculty members responded with little or no structured organization or support from their institutions and communities. This resulted in a “relief” effort that brought the opposite of relief to evacuees and left some faculty members reticent about future service. From the perspective of one faculty responder: “I saw faculty who were exhausted, and I believe that was because they were doing double duty. Not only were they teaching classes and doing everything that they needed to do for promotion and tenure, they were out at this center. I didn’t see a lot of ‘thank you’ messages.”