by Evelyn Beck

When Burks Oakley logged onto the Web at 4:30 a.m. on Wednesday, August 31st, and learned that two levees had collapsed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, leaving 80 percent of New Orleans underwater, he sprang into action. First he e-mailed his University of Illinois colleague Ray Schroeder, who had been trying to organize a national conference to talk about how college campuses could respond to a major disaster.

“This is exactly what Ray had predicted—that campuses might be shut down by some emergency,” says Oakley, the university’s Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs as well as the director of U of I Online. “But he had thought it might be the flu or SARS or a radioactive spill.” 

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