Due to crisis events that have shocked several college and university campuses, many of these institutions have begun to look for ways to respond effectively to those events. However, higher education is generally not equipped or prepared to respond to crisis events. Thus, crisis management research in higher education should be explored. Principles of organizational learning and organizational development from corporate management America were used in this qualitative study to explain how leaders in higher education institutions prepare for crises and learn from their crisis experiences. Chaos theory provided the theoretical lens for the study. Purposeful sampling was utilized to select two institutions and purposely identified administrators at those sites. Interviews gleaned the lived experiences of the participants. Data analysis revealed five themes: conflicting definitions, institutional response to crisis, continuous learning, institutional issues related to a crisis, and leadership roles during a crises. The findings support the importance of developing a crisis management plan, disseminating the plan to all stakeholders, and application of continuous learning principles to evaluate the plan and actual crises responses before, during, and after a crisis event.

Crisis management is a technique that has existed within organizations worldwide and is dictated by the response of leaders’ actions. In a classroom, the teacher can be referred to as an ‘educational leader’. With an emphasized work setting of the classroom, different leadership responses can be examined in a comparative analysis. The focus of this thesis is to explore the effect of intercultural experience when higher education leaders are dealing with crisis management within their classrooms. This exploratory study adopts a qualitative analysis with the help of deductive approach and critical realism philosophy. The primary source of this study is the interviews with professors from a Swedish University, both from local and international programs. By using intercultural crises challenges, crisis scenarios in a higher educational setting were created. These themes are ethnocentrism, scandal/misinterpretation, and culture shock. These scenarios were used in the interview process to understand how different program leaders manage the crises. Additionally, the findings of this study show that intercultural experience of higher educational leaders plays a role in how they are managing a crisis within a classroom setting.