The television trucks and newspaper reporters, like locusts, swarmed last week into Blacksburg, Virginia, where Virginia Tech is located. The university's administrators and especially its public-relations staff members are steeling themselves for what will be a long and intense feeding frenzy. For the men and women who speak for colleges, being thrust into a national spotlight can be a trying time. In recent years, Duke and many other prominent universities--among them Ohio University, Tulane University, and the University of Colorado at Boulder--have been involved in scandals or disasters, and have become fodder for the 24-hour news cycle, the infotainment circuit, and the blogosphere. The problem, experts say, is that institutions are often ill prepared for crises. In this article, the author discusses the importance of having a solid crisis-communications plan to protect colleges during crisis.