Officials across the University have been carefully formulating a detailed Crisis Management Plan (CMP) since before Sept. 11 that they say ensures Harvard’s ability to react to any emergency.

But a year and a half later, only a select few are aware of the details of the plan.

And officials say overcoming obstacles created by the University’s compartmentalized administration and concerns over how much of the plan should be publicized has made its creation both a complex and low-profile project.

“Our role is to make sure the University continues to function, to make sure those that live, work and study here are protected,” says Thomas E. Vautin, associate vice president of Facilities and Environmental Services.

Vautin is the leader of the Incident Support Team (IST), a body created by the CMP to handle multi-school emergencies.

Vautin says keeping Harvard on its feet in an emergency “is no different than what we do every day to keep it running.”

Because the University remains free from specific threats, Vautin says, the current role of emergency management is about “being seamless and barely visible.”

“We don’t want to turn Harvard into a locked-down fortress,” he says.

These concerns—publicity versus panic, centralization versus independence and security versus freedom—characterize the balancing act that CMP creators have been performing for the past 18 months.

Show and Tell?

University officials say they have systems in place to communicate important emergency updates to students, faculty and staff—but the question of how much information to publicize, for security and comfort reasons, remains largely unanswered.

Members of the IST say they wonder how much information is beneficial to share.

“It’s very difficult to make a simple, straightforward mechanism for raising awareness without creating...craziness,” Vautin says.

Such a dilemma arose when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security raised the terror alert level from yellow, or “elevated,” to orange, or “high,” last month.

University Spokesperson Joe Wrinn says Harvard did not post an emergency update on the University website the same day because Harvard could not assume that the alert had the same effect on college campuses as on businesses.