Higher education's embrace of information technology may be rapidly expanding in many areas, but on the hot-button issues of IT security and crisis management, hundreds of campuses are not keeping up, a nationwide survey suggests.

Even in the wake of last spring's horrific shootings at Virginia Tech, and two years removed from Hurricane Katrina, barely three-fifths of about 550 responding institutions in the survey sample have strategic plans in place for IT disaster recovery--a finding that the annual survey's director, Kenneth C. Green, calls "quite striking."

The proportion of institutions that report having such plans is only slightly higher now than was the case in each of the previous two years, Green notes, adding: "Two years after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and six years after the 9-11 attacks, it is still surprising to see that so many colleges and universities have yet to update or complete their IT disaster and crisis-management plans."

The gap persists, moreover, at a time when the need for "network and data security" ranks as the most important IT issue for the fourth consecutive year of the survey, which went to chief information officers and other IT leaders at about 1,200 campuses. About 25 percent of the reporting institutions, only a few percentage points lower than the level recorded last year, identified security as the top issue.

Results of the latest survey, which has been administered during the past two months, are being made public in Seattle today in connection with the annual conference of Educause, a nonprofit organization devoted to IT in higher education.

One reason that many colleges may not be fully up to speed on security is that, technologically speaking, "nothing stands still," says Green, founding director of the 18-year-old Campus Computing Project and a visiting scholar at the Claremont Graduate University. The reality, he observes, is that "IT touches almost everything" in higher education--from instruction and finance to policy and planning--and IT officials must constantly play "catch up."

The conclusion that many educational institutions may be having trouble keeping pace with technology also has been supported in recent days by an informal poll of readers of eSchool News online. More than 80 percent of respondents said schools in their areas were falling behind in the use of new technology.

According to the campus survey, a year ago--before the latest flurry of campus violence--some colleges were already starting to look into using technology for notification purposes in contexts other than campus emergencies, such as for recruitment and retention, Green says. But then came the Virginia Tech shootings and other crises, he says, "and boom, you've got either actual or inferred mandates" for technology-based strategies. Suddenly, the reality has become, "We'd better get these systems up and going," he explains.