Ten Ways for Higher Education Leaders to Meet and Define This Moment
Over the past year, I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with university leaders across the country – strategic thinkers and doers who are steering their...
Over the past year, I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with university leaders across the country – strategic thinkers and doers who are steering their institutions through today’s blustery headwinds. As these colleagues work to implement bold structural and cultural campus changes, they often ask a similar question:
“What can I, as a higher education leader, do to create meaningful change beyond my campus, especially at a time when the entire sector is at this pivotal crossroads?”
To answer that, I’ve started to assemble high-impact strategies that educational leaders can apply right now—on campus and beyond. Please join me in refining and building upon these and in sharing other actionable ideas.
1. Prioritize Inquiry Over Activism, Innovation Over Resistance
Why It Matters: In an era of polarized and clashing ideologies, universities must recommit to the pursuit of truth. In the academy, this pursuit must be driven by curiosity, intellectual risk-taking, and continuous learning rather than resistance for its own sake.
Actionable Tactics:
- Foster environments that counter cancel culture and echo chambers by encouraging dialogue across differences.
- Support events where students bring in intellectually diverse speakers to address the same topic.
- Offer courses and workshops on media literacy, highlighting how algorithms shape and limit internet searches and thus generate their own version of the truth.
- Launch a “Rapid-Response Fellowship” for scholars studying current political or cultural shifts in real-time.
2. Combat “Truth Decay” with Evidence-Based Discourse
What It Is: Coined by RAND Corporation, “Truth Decay” refers to the present-day proclivities of giving opinions and personal experiences the same intellectual weight as facts. Such proclivities result in the rampant dissemination of misinformation and the public distrust of sources once known to be credible.
Why It Works: Rebuilding intellectual rigor starts with teaching how to differentiate evidence from opinion and combat disinformation.
Actionable Tactics:
- Be a highly discerning consumer of information and encourage others to be the same: investigate the source, identify the intended audience, look for and call out overly simplified conclusions and false dichotomies.
- Model what data-informed inquiry and investigation looks like: seek out reliable information from experts, gather multiple perspectives, differentiate peer-reviewed sources from blogs.
- Familiarize yourself and your students with known disinformation campaigns and look for the characteristics of such campaigns in information dissemination on new or less familiar topics.
3. Seek to Understand Not Persuade
Why It Works: In the highly polarized world in which we now live, people are primed to hold their ground and write off others who think differently. Knowing that inclination, you can disarm those with whom you disagree by showing them you sincerely want to hear about and learn from their perspective in an effort to better understand a divergent point of view.
Actionable Tactics:
- Listen first—do more listening than talking as it keeps the doors to constructive conversation open (see Deep Listening).
- Home in on whatever common ground emerges or can be built. Connecting with rather than correcting our ideological opponents puts us in a better place to see commonalities that are often obscured at first glance.
- Exchange resources across perspectives: ask someone to share a go-to article and reciprocate.
4. Use Experiential Learning to Practice Democracy
Why It Works: Democracy must be practiced, not merely studied. Some of my writings show how service-learning and community-based research foster such practice.
Actionable Tactics:
- Incentivize service-learning projects in academic courses.
- Reward community-based research in tenure or promotion processes.
- Support university–community partnerships solving local challenges.
5. Elevate the Grassroots Efforts of Those Who Do Their Homework
Why It Works: In academe, grassroots organizing is often viewed as empowering, authentic, and impactful. Providing appropriate resources and expertise to students, faculty, and staff who have spent time and energy researching the issues helps to reinforce the values of sharing reliable information and co-creating knowledge. This, in turn, builds internal solidarity.
Actionable Tactics:
- Host research symposia where students and faculty offer poster presentations related to enduring questions or urgent challenges.
- Support student- and faculty-led symposia and teach-ins on timely topics such as immigration, tariffs and free market, and community health.
- Sponsor a research fellowship for a new PhD recipient who is studying the impact of federal policies on American higher education.
6. Streamline Decision-Making for Agility and Adaptability
Why It Works: To remain relevant, universities must act with urgency and flexibility. Neither bureaucracy nor the aim of complete unanimity should block innovation.
Actionable Tactics:
- Update governance documents to allow for expedited responses.
- Establish rapid-response teams to assess policy impacts within days.
- Use Values Impact Assessments (VIAs) to ensure strategic choices align with mission, vision, and values.
7. Diversify and Sustain Funding Sources
Why It Works: Federal support for higher education is increasingly uncertain. Universities must build financial resilience through alternative revenue streams.
Actionable Tactics:
- Cultivate philanthropic support for programs and services related to academic freedom, civic engagement, and the like.
- Grow industry partnerships and contract research for mission‐aligned projects.
- Explore grant opportunities with established vendors in the higher education space (e.g., retirement benefits organizations, dining service partners, maintenance and custodial companies). Many of them have long histories of collaborating with schools and colleges to bolster student support.
8. Build Inter-Institutional Coalitions
Why It Works: There is strength in numbers. By partnering with peer institutions, accreditors, state systems, and national associations (e.g., AAC&U, APLU, ACE, CIC, NAICU), an individual university can amplify its voice, share its resources, and brainstorm with others facing similar challenges.
Actionable Tactics:
- Issue joint statements defending academic freedom, free inquiry, or Title IX protections. Be prepared to actualize the commitments such statements endorse. This could mean giving the stage (literally) to thought leaders who represent opposing sides of complex and nuanced issues.
- Coordinate multi-university letter‐writing campaigns to state and federal representatives.
- Host multi-campus webinars to share best practices and legal guidance.
9. Leverage the Legal System
Why It Works: The courts can support established freedoms and institutional positions. Compared to small private colleges, university systems and academic consortia typically have well-staffed offices of General Counsel as valuable resources.
Actionable Tactics:
- Bring together General Counsel attorneys from multiple institutions to review policy proposals and, if necessary, file amicus briefs or take other proactive steps.
- Assert, when appropriate, state‐level protections for higher education institutions.
10. Don’t Just “Poke the Bear” and Run— Join Forces in Taking Strategic, Sequential, and Ongoing Steps
Why It Works: Thoughtful, sequential, and multifaceted public engagement can shift narratives and inform policymakers.
Actionable Tactics
- Coordinate a series of op‐eds, podcasts, and data‐driven infographics that highlight the challenges and opportunities that American higher education is facing.
- Create testimony toolkits for leaders speaking before legislative bodies.
- Partner with local media to showcase student success and community impact.
Conclusion
The above strategies suggest that there are no silver bullets or easy solutions to meeting the challenges of the moment in higher education. Presidents and top administrators must take a multifaceted approach grounded in evidence and truth, and with proven success over many years.
