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oai:null:10339/374292026-09-02T11:37:34Zcom_10339_14934col_10339_38132

Smith, Mariana 2012-09-05T08:35:16Z 2012-09-05T08:35:16Z 2012 https://wakespace.lib.wfu.edu/handle/10339/37429 In May 2010, one of the most memorable higher education crises of the decade erupted, six blocks from the campus of the University of Virginia (UVa), when fourth-year student and women's lacrosse player Yeardley Love was found dead in her off-campus apartment. Hours later, her ex-boyfriend and fellow UVa lacrosse player George Huguely V was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. This incident—the high-profile murder of one student by another—and the immense media attention and public scrutiny that it garnered, required the University of Virginia to engage in crisis communication, to respond to a chaotic situation in the hopes of restoring order and regaining legitimacy through the use of appropriate discourse. Although a university is required to craft and deliver a public response to crisis situations, its spectrum of rhetorical strategies is often much narrower than that of a corporation experiencing a comparable crisis. Therefore, the project theorizes that during a student-driven crisis, effective crisis discourse focuses on addressing the values with which the public is most concerned and speaking in a direct and meaningful way about the issues that contributed to the crisis. This shift away from image repair and toward values–affirmation is expressed in the rhetorical tradition as a change in genre, a move away from <italic>apologia</italic> toward <italic>epideixis</italic>. en Wake Forest University crisis genre theory higher education image repair organizational communication Yeardley Love A Values-Affirmation Model for Higher Education Crisis Communication Thesis Llewellyn, John T Beasley Von Burg, Alessandra Roehm, Michelle Communication open.access