In the first quarter of 2011, Carr spoke to the student body saying: "Trust us, we will deliver you a full academic programme this calendar year". He admits that at the time he didn't know exactly how the university was going to do that with closed buildings, students in tents and so on. But he says "we knew that was what we had to do. And we did it."
The university was well-prepared. An emergency operations centre had been established before the earthquakes. Carr says there had been many fail-over exercises for the various computer systems preparing for power cuts and other disruptions.
In July-August 2010, just months before the initial September 2010 earthquake, a training exercise work-shopped strategies for coping with the effects of a major earthquake on the nearby Alpine fault - previously thought to be the biggest risk to the city.
Carr says this meant the university worked through questions like "what do we need to know" and "how do we activate the emergency operations centre".
When the September 2010 earthquake hit it caused relatively little damage to the campus, but it acted as an effective trial run to test the strategies. Carr says the campus closed for two weeks - but that proved to be relatively difficult on an open site. One of the lessons learnt from the trial run, was the need for closed signs and barricades to put across the roadways accessing the campus.
Another lesson was that when power failed, the electronic doors across the campus opened by default. This allows people to get out quickly and safely but leaves a security problem with buildings and equipment unprotected.
"We learnt a whole bunch of things that we were then able to activate in February," says Carr. So though the February 2011 events were traumatic across the city, they were by then "somewhat routine" on campus.
Shortly after the February 2011 earthquake, the University Council delegated authority to Carr as the single decision-maker. They effectively said to Carr, "Stop doing everything else, focus on whatever is needed to protect the university so long as it is within the law."
This shortened the lines of communication and meant decisions could be made quickly leaving debate for later.
The physical damage to the university's Ilam campus was relatively slight. Carr says no buildings fell down; there were no fires on the campus and no injuries. Since the earthquake four buildings that were not worth remediating have been demolished and a total of 50,000 square metres of space have been remediated.
"We've spent about $200 million of insurance money so far", he adds.
By March 2014, there were 11 active construction sites on the 76-hectare campus. Within four months of the February 2011 earthquake the university had built 16,000 square metres of new teaching space on land that was previously athletics and rugby fields. Over the following summer an additional 60 beds of student accommodation was built in just three months.
When the university closed in February 2011, it gave students the option to study elsewhere for a semester. Carr says this was partly in response to an offer from the University of Adelaide which said it would teach up to 500 students free for a semester: "All you have to do is get them here".
He says 172 students went to Adelaide, but they only had five days to prepare. This meant they had to be a New Zealand resident holding a passport and ready to get on a plane. Any courses were recognised and cross-credited. Oxford University saw that and took a further 38 undergraduates and 10 postgraduates. Carr says negotiating these kinds of arrangements during a crisis is hard, but having them in place is sensible. If he could do things again he'd have more of these agreements in place before an emergency.
Things are more nuanced for post-graduate students. Though many of them are independent enough to move around quickly, many lost six months or more of their work because experiments were interrupted. This in turn meant negotiating additional funding for the students.
The university has since attracted considerably more postgraduate students wanting to study the effects of a major earthquake.
Christchurch Mayor Lianne Dalziel singles out the University of Canterbury as an institution that showed resilience in the face of the earthquakes. She says the university stood out for having a pre-existing plan that meant a relatively simple, although not painless, transition through the crisis. Carr says part of this has been learning that "institutions like ours have had to become more flexible and responsive. In our case that has seen us put the student at the centre of our endeavour rather than at the periphery".
Though 2011 was mainly about coming to terms with what happened and thinking about immediate survival in the wake of a disaster, by 2012 it was clear the university needed government support. The quid pro quo for additional resources meant changing the focus of the university.
Carr says the Government initially wanted the university to focus more exclusively on science, maths and engineering. He says there is an acceptance that this is what the University of Canterbury is known for. But what is less well known is that these three disciplines only account for about 40 per cent of students. "For many of the disciplines outside science and engineering, the university is in the top 100 worldwide: education, law, history and geography among others." Many of these drive applications from overseas.
Significantly, that world-class reputation for engineering has been strengthened since February 2011.
In terms of global rankings, the university has dropped from 212 to 238 in the QS World University Rankings, but it is still number three in New Zealand and just outside the top 10 for Australasia.
Carr says 16 University of Canterbury disciplines rate in the top 200 globally and the College of Engineering has gone from somewhere in the 50s, to number 19 in the world today.
Tertiary numbers
10,900 equivalent full-time students have signed up to study in 2014 3 per cent increase on last year 14 per cent rise in engineering enrolments $200m of insurance money spent by the university so far.
