Higher Ed's Trust Problem Isn't a PR Problem: AAC&U's Trust Agenda

Speaker A: Welcome to Changing Higher Ed, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions with your host, Dr. Drum McNaughton, CEO of the Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more@uh changinghired.com and now here's your host, Drum McNaughton.

Speaker B: Thank you, David. My guest today is Dr. Jeremy Young, Senior Advisor for Strategic Initiatives at the American association of Colleges and Universities. Jeremy Co directs AACU's Advanced Public Trust in Higher Education initiative and is the lead Author of the 2026 report, the trust A Framework for Advancing Public Trust in Higher Education. Jeremy's had a very inclusive career, having previously served as Director of State and Higher Education Policy at PEN America, and he's also worked at the American Historical Association. Jeremy joins me today to talk about AAC news, new report and the general conversation around public trust that higher education is having right now. Jeremy, welcome back to the show.

Speaker C: Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker B: It's my pleasure. It's been a while. You've moved camps from PEN America over to AAC and U. How's it going over there for you?

Speaker C: It's going very well. I've been at AAC&U for a little over a year doing a lot of different things, particularly work on our new Advancing Public Trust in Higher Education initiative, which I co direct. We kicked this off in September, so it's about nine months old. It's just a blast. It's a great place to work, really smart coworkers, and just a good community feeling.

Speaker B: Well, you're the third person from AAC and U I've had on the program. I've had your executive director, Lynn Ashley, who's been on a number of times talking about your reports, and now you. So it kind of feels like old Home Week to me.

Speaker C: It feels right at home to me as well. Very good.

Speaker B: Well, we are going to talk about your report, the Trust Agenda Framework for Advancing Public Trust in Higher Education. It's a mouthful for title, but it's even more of a mouthful for the report itself. You guys did some great on this. Before we get into it, give our listeners a little bit of your background, if you wouldn't mind. Sure.

Speaker C: Uh, six years ago I was a history professor at, uh, Utah Tech University in Southwestern Utah. I was leading an institute of politics and Public affairs, decided really for personal reasons that we wanted to move back to the D.C. area where my in laws live and made a switch to working at the American Historical association doing membership marketing and communications. And I was there in 2020 when the critical race theory bans began to come out. And of course the American Historical association was very concerned about this, so they got a little project together to work on it. And that ended up being part of my portfolio. We were partnering with PEN America, which had a little more, a little larger of a project and was able to bring me on full time to work just on that issue. And that became a major advocacy program at PEN America, the Freedom to Learn program that has a full staff and writes a report every year and does legislative analysis and advocacy against censorship legislation at the state level in higher education. So I did that for three years, made the jump over to AC&U a little over a year ago, and now working on this public trust project.

Speaker B: Well, uh, good for you. It's a great background, especially for this, because you've been knee deep in a lot of these issues for a long period of time. I know having conversations with you when you were at PEN America really touched on a lot of the trust issues. So by way of background, what's going on in higher eds? Anything? I'm just kidding.

Speaker C: Yeah, we have, a few things are happening in higher education. Um, you know, there, there, there's a, there's a lot of challenges that the sector is facing. I've started saying that higher education is facing the greatest threat in living memory because there are certainly things involved in the Jim Crow system and how it affected higher education that we don't want to compare apples and oranges. But certainly the Ellen Schrecker, the histor of McCarthyism, says that this is far more intrusive to what universities are dealing with than happened in the McCarthy era. And we're facing a, uh, kind of a perfect storm of threats. We are facing an epidemic of government overreach through lawsuits and restrictions on research funding and executive orders, all aimed at colleges, UH and universities in general, and also at specific colleges and universities, including some of the nation's most prominent. We are also continuing to face the state level threats that we face since 2021. And there are other challenges for higher education. The economic model is fraying. The sector is contracting. There are all these reports saying that a college closes every week and likely a quarter of all colleges will be closed in the next 10 years. And.

Speaker B: Yeah, thank you, Dr. Christensen.

Speaker C: Right, right. And there's some truth to that because there is an enrollment cliff. Student, uh, enrollments have been going down sector wide for over the last couple of years and that' projected to continue. You know, the funding situation. There's less and Less funding available from public sources. So tuition goes up and debt goes up and accessibility for students comes down. And then, of course, higher ed has become embroiled in this culture war. We saw that starting in Covid. We saw it in response to the Black Lives Matter and social justice movements in the early 2000s. Higher education has become everyone's punching bag, and it's not a good situation to be in, especially when the economics are so precarious.

Speaker B: Yeah, I hope there aren't any aspiring professors listening to this at this point, because if they are, in hearing all these headwinds that higher ed is facing, they're going to go, why am I going to do this?

Speaker C: And that's a lot.

Speaker B: That's a reasonable question.

Speaker C: It is a reasonable question. And as someone who left academia, I'm not really in the best position to tell them that they shouldn't do the same. But I will say that I have continued to work on behalf of higher education because I think that what happens is at the individual classroom level, at the student and faculty and staff interaction level, is one of the most transformative forces in American life. Higher education is about creating opportunity, opening minds, broadening visions for people who might not have an opportunity to do those things otherwise. And it is the best system that we've ever designed to do that. But of course, it's got flaws, it's got challenges. One thing I'd say I've learned from my experience is that there is value in adaptability. The idea that you're going to get a job as a teacher and you're going to do that for 40 years, the exact same thing you were doing at the beginning, that puts you in a more difficult position. I think if you are willing to imagine your involvement in higher education in a variety of ways, as a teacher, as an administrator, as a student success professional, even someone working in a national higher ed association or a local higher ed association, you can be part of that important work in a variety of contexts, even if you end up in a challenging situation.

Speaker B: But if we stop and think about it, in any profession, there needs to be growth over that period of time. If you take a look at someone starting out in manufacturing or the trades, technology changes, processes change everything, and we need to learn in the job. Faculty, ah, are the same way. Education is the same way. We need to learn. Distance education is a great example of that. When it first came out, the majority of professors would put up the cross. It's like, get away, Give me the cross and some garlic so I can get Rid of this Dracula. But Covid came along. Everybody had to do. Now it's accepted far more. Is it applicable for all groups? No, not necessarily. But for, uh, a good majority of groups, it is. To me, the big issue that higher ed is facing is, is cost and trust. And now trust, that's kind of a multifaceted thing. In your opinion, what are folks talking about when they say higher ed has trust issues?

Speaker C: So it's a good question. We have seen some pretty clear polling from some of the best pollsters in the country, Gallup, Pew, norc, that have done longitudinal research that shows that public trust in confidence in support for higher education has declined pretty steadily over the last 10 to 20 years, but especially starting around the middle of the last decade. So we've seen things like drop offs of 20% in public support, 55 to 36, that sort of thing. And it depends on what people are thinking when they talk about trust. There was a piece in Inside Higher Ed not too long ago saying that if trust is about trusting the experts to do whatever, to sort of blind faith in them, that's not an academic value. That's not something that higher ed wants. We should encourage distrust. And I agree with that as far as it goes. But the kind of trust that higher education needs is the kind of trust that, uh, all civic institutions need. We need relationships. We need connections with people who are not inside the system. We need people to recognize, to view us as a sector that brings some civic value that is a civic asset to a community, to a society more generally, but especially on the local level. It's not just on the end of the public. We, as a sector need to make sure that we are worthy of that trust. We talk a lot about trustworthiness in our work, that we are actually, uh, serving the public, that we are serving the communities that we are in.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, there's that piece of it. But it's also higher ed seems to be the boogeyman right now. It is the cause, the root cause of all problems in society in America. You take a look at dei, Black Lives Matter. Multiple initiatives which were done to right wrongs in the past, and these are now being used as hammers to create dissension, create distrust. That seems to be the cache right now, is create more distrust. And frankly, I don't understand it. I've never operated that way before. But I guess the question is, is there truth in what's being said?

Speaker C: So it's interesting, when we were putting together this report, we leaned very heavily on a book by Kathy, uh, Kramer, the political scient scientist in Wisconsin called the Politics of Resentment. And Kathy Kramer did a series of interviews with rural starting in 2007. And in fact most of them were conducted in 2007. And as part of her sabbatical year from the University of Wisconsin, she was required to ask these people, what do you think of the University of Wisconsin? That's a really useful data Source. Because in 2007 no national or state politicians were openly critical of higher education in any significant way. Scott Walker was still a couple of years off in Wisconsin and nationally there was nothing. And what she found is that there were a lot of criticisms of higher education, and some of them overlapped with what you might consider the criticisms of DEI or things like that. But some of them were more about distance and remoteness and isolation from the general public. There's a great story in this book about a guy who tells her, I went up to the fishing hole where me and my friends have fished for our whole lives. And I found this university researcher up there studying something. And I asked him what he was studying. He says, I'm studying whether bass spawn in the same place every year. And the guy says, uh, did you ask anyone who lives here where their bass spawned in the same place every year? He says, I know that they do. All my friends know that they do. They didn't ask us. They don't care about us. And that basic sense of distance, of remoteness, that a, uh, university is just there to sort of take what it needs and not connect with people, that is a very real and deeply held belief by a lot of people. And it, uh, predates the current political moment. So there is a sense in which some of these political figures have sort of exploited this crisis in public trust more recently. But the origins of it are further back than that. And there is a lot of truth to the fact that campuses need to be more connected to, uh, their communities.

Speaker B: I would agree with that. I mean, when I went back to graduate school, more years than I would like to remember at this point, I always wondered, why do I need a PhD, a, ah, research degree? Most of the stuff that I know is it's pretty much clear I don't need to go in and research to do it. I learned new things going through the program. It was very beneficial for me. But that same thing which you're talking about is, the saying goes, it's intuitively obvious to the most casual observer, why do you need to research something that is like that? So that certainly is the origin of One of the origins of the trust issue, for me, another one comes down to value and cost. Higher Ed's making the argument now that, oh, if you go back and you get a college degree, you're going to earn three to four times the amount of money that you would otherwise over the course of your career. That's great. But for someone who has no money, for someone who's going into college and having to incur debt to get there, that's still very daunting.

Speaker C: It is. And I think we have a particular problem around day one outcomes where students are graduating and finding, uh, that it's very hard to break in and to get a job quickly, which they need to do because they're now in debt. And that is very much on higher education. To work more closely with employers to embed career readiness in all of our curricula. And not just at the community colleges and the regional publics that already do a lot of this, but also at Harvard and Yale and elite places that often think that's not necessary, it's necessary for everyone. We have to recognize that as much as we want this to be about the life of the mind, and it is, it is also about real life and students need to be equipped with the tools to succeed in real life.

Speaker B: Yeah. When I talk about higher education, I know you've heard me say this. There's really three purposes for higher education. It is preparing someone for a career, whether it be a particular job. And in common vernacular now it's workforce readiness. I think that takes it a little bit too far, but it is that piece of it. So there's the work life, there's a civic life preparing you to become a good citizen. But I think more importantly than both of those is the transformational aspect that undergraduates, 18 to 22, 24 year olds go through as part of being out on their own, learning about life, et cetera. Those three things are critical. What we're starting to do is focus more on that workforce readiness instead of the career piece of it. And that brings us to your report, because people are equating that workforce readiness or not being workforce ready with a lack of trust. Higher Ed promised us that we would get XYZ job or whatever, and we're not. So it's higher ed's fault.

Speaker C: Right. And I think that the argument we make in the report, in the trust agenda, is that, yes, workforce readiness is something that higher education needs to do a better job with and is starting to do a better job with, but when done well, is synonymous with the opening of students minds. Because in some ways that is the readiness that students need. They need to be able to understand people different from themselves, to understand unfamiliar situations and know how to act as in those situations. Student success is a key component of what we argue for in the report. And it's not just success in the classroom or getting a degree. It's also success in their lives, in their futures. People talk about human flourishing a lot around this. We support that as well. That higher education is supposed to prepare you for a life of meaning and a life of purpose. And that includes the workforce. But it's not limited to the workforce

Speaker B: and it shouldn't be. Most folks now I wouldn't say most folks, a lot of folks nowadays, especially younger generations, are talking about work, life, balance. It's not all about baby boomers. We will work till we drop, we will get three hours sleep and then we'll go back and work again. And it's all about the money. That's not the way it is for younger generations.

Speaker C: I think that's right. I think especially after some of the economic challenges we've seen in the last couple of decades, younger generations recognize that all that work may not be in enough, you know, so you need to have a life that has meaning beyond work. And I do think that higher education can help with that, although it is also, uh, should be a, ah, strong pathway to a good employment situation.

Speaker B: So getting to your report, which is what we were going to talk about all along, but we, as you and I generally do, we love to explore other topics. Your report details five primary recommendations about how to overcome this trust issue. And I guess before we get into it, the trust issue, Is it an individual college, university, is it a sector, is it an association who's responsible for addressing these things? Or should we get into that after we go through your report? You tell me no, uh, we can

Speaker C: talk about that now. The trust issue is systemic. It applies to the whole sector, but it also applies to individual campuses. And we argue that it needs to be addressed at every level. At the sector level, national associations like ours and others, at the individual campus level, and even at the classroom level and individual interactions with the community. So the individual level as well. And our uh, report. Because AAC and U is a national membership association of college and university leaders, our report is aimed primarily at the specific leaders of individual colleges. Presidents, provosts, deans, department chairs, vice presidents, with practical recommendations for things they can actually do to improve trust that are feasible and politically viable and will actually work. There are Other recommendations that need to be done at the system level, at the sector level that we don't spend as much time on. And there are other things that individuals can do that I think can be drawn out of this report. I want to make one other point here, which is that the polls show that trust has been falling, but they do not show that it has fallen consistently and across institution type. So there was a great Data for Progress poll that came out a couple of years ago that asked people about their support for higher education institutions by subsector. And what it found was the most support for community and technical colleges, which were very popular, a fairly strong support base for public universities, and, uh, much lower support for private liberal arts colleges. And then bringing up the rear is Ivy League universities. So we're in an odd moment here. Yeah, it's interesting. We're in an odd moment here where the institutions that are the most prestigious and the most talked about are the least popular, whereas the institutions that actually serve the large majority of students, you know, over 80% of students attend either a community college or regional public university. They are actually quite popular. And so our strategy in this report, rather than starting with a Harvard or a Yale, is to start with community colleges, start with regional public universities where this is already working, where trust is already, uh, in place and being built, and then try to reverse engineer that for campuses of all types.

Speaker B: That makes a lot of sense. And I understand your report better now when you put it in that context. Thank you. So your report, as I said, really hits on five main areas. Accelerate innovation, prioritize community engagement, recommit to inclusive excellence, tell a clearer story, and coordinate a mission centered defense. Let's go through each of those and talk a little bit about them. Um, starting with accelerate intervention.

Speaker C: Sure. So our recommendation around innovation is really about internal innovation. We're not focusing as much in this section on creating the next Google or Apple in your incubator system for your business school, which is valuable. But the real focus is on innovating higher education processes, being more adaptable, being more open to change. We all know that higher education is one of the least adaptable sectors of any sector in the country. Really?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: I'm not telling your listeners anything they don't already know. Right. And our argument, which we give at a pretty bird's eye level because different campuses face different challenges on this, is that higher education just has to be able to show that it can solve its own problems, that it can adapt to the changing needs of students and communities, that it can fix its own mistakes without having to be forced to do so by outsiders. You have a situation right now where anyone who wants to change something on a campus is attracted to leaders who just want to break it because at the very least you're changing something. And we have to show that that change can happen effectively from the inside. That includes a discussion, for instance, of how do we revitalize shared governance so that it's not just about throwing up roadblocks for bad things, although that's part of it, but also about building pathways, good things, creating successful new programs and investing in them and taking out the ideas of individual campus members and making them real. That's our approach to innovation.

Speaker B: Yeah, and it makes perfect sense. You bring up a good example with shared governance. You know, it's the governance of no in many respects and it shouldn't be that way. I go back to uh, Covid and swapping to online education. There was something that had to be done immediately and colleges were converting a majority, if not their full course load into online in two weeks. It was that fast. So things can change. But I think a lot of that has to do with showing the need and two, believing there is a need. The further we get down the path with higher education and the more it becomes corporate like, the less transparency there is. And in higher education there's always been that transparency and that shared commitment to change. We need to make sure that we do that and continue to do that.

Speaker C: I completely agree.

Speaker B: So the other piece with that is AI is coming in and it's basically saying if you don't change, we're going to put you out of business. I mean that's pretty extreme view, but that's what's happening. AI can be very helpful, but people need to one, trust it and second, use it judiciously. I mean I remember doing a project with a fairly large university in the Midwest and we were doing strategic planning and we had come up with a bunch of tactics and we couldn't figure out how to group them. So I just went into chat, GP typed them up and it gave me five, six different strategies. And the academic leadership there, you can't use that. That's plagiarism. It's like seriously, you really think that everything you do is, nevermind, we don't need to get into it, but it's overcoming those prejudices to be able to innovate and uh, make changes.

Speaker C: That's exactly right. Resistance to change is natural for everyone and it serves good purposes. In some cases it makes sure that we don't just throw out things that are working on a whimsical. But I think you're right about AI. It is creating a situation. It is challenging us on academic integrity. It's the number one thing employers say that they want more of in higher education curricula is AI literacy. We have an AI literacy pedagogy program at AAC&U, and it is by far our most popular initiative. Colleges and campus teams are just desperate for this information because this thing really does feel like it's emerged overnight. And colleges, as you said, are not good at change. So we have to get better at changing these things. I think there's a lot of desire to do that, but we just have to create pathways to make it happen.

Speaker B: Yeah. Next one. Prioritizing community engagement. Trusted mutual beneficial relationships with community partners.

Speaker C: Community engagement is not a new idea. The campus Compact was signed 41 years ago. The concept of anchor institutions was created 19 years ago. I was a little worried when we put this report out that we would be accused of just rehashing old ideas. I think what is fresh about this is community engagement. The idea that a campus is responsible to the community that it serves, which is usually its local community, although for nationally selective associations can also be the communities its students call home. The idea that that's how you build community support. I think connecting that with public trust is maybe the most important intervention that the report makes.

Speaker B: I agree.

Speaker C: There is a sense that on these campuses that have adopted community engagement work, in some cases that this is siloed off in an office. This is something that you do and you point to it in the annual report. And it doesn't really affect lives of faculty and students. And when that happens, you are not maximizing the relationship with the community. You are actually having most of the campus constituents, not interacting directly with the community. One way that I like to look at this is think about an institution, a democratic institution, that is still extremely popular across parties when most others are not. The local fire department. Why do people love the local fire department? And why do they see it as a pillar of the community? Because they know exactly what it does. And every time they see someone associated with the local fire department, they are doing something that benefits the community and they're doing something that clearly serves that mission. So this has to be not just a coalition of the willing. It has to be campuses of all types. One of the things we've seen is that it's very easy for one college to do something wrong and then a video goes viral on TikTok and suddenly people in Idaho are mad about something that's happening at Harvard and blaming their local universities for it. So we need a kind of uniformity here of commitment that we haven't seen before. And the commitment needs to be be shot through the entire campus. It needs to be a part of the mission that everyone understands and that everyone is participating in from faculty, staff, students and administrators.

Speaker B: Well, it's interesting you bring that up because in the back of my mind we all have that formula for tenure. 40, research, 40 teaching 20 service. Why couldn't that be 30, 30, 40? And the service not only be to the university, but also be as part of the community.

Speaker C: I agree with that. But I would go further. I think that when community engagement is being done well, it is woven through all three of those categories. It's not just service in the service category, but you are doing community engaged teaching. You are working with the students to meet community needs. You are doing community engaged research. I still remember talking to a former president of the University of North Dakota system who's been retired for many years and asking him how he was able to convince a very conservative legislature that higher education was worth investing in. And he said, uh, I just told them about how the University of Illinois solved the corn blight of 1970 and 71. I read up on this and it's true. There was a team of scientists, they were going out and examining corn stalks in central Illinois and they found this blight. And within a single growing season they had synthesized a solution to it and they saved the corn. The blight was killing 60% of the corn everywhere it went. And of course in the Midwest, corn crops were the number one driver of the economy. These were researchers who dropped everything they were doing and focused their research on the community needs. And that's so powerful that decades later he was telling this story and people got it it and they understood why it mattered. So it really has to be part of all three of those areas.

Speaker B: Yeah. And that comes to. I'm going to skip something. It comes to telling a clear story that goes right in line with that is using a story to show the value and the trust of higher education. How many of us would be sitting here and doing what we're doing today were it not for higher education? That transformative aspect.

Speaker C: That's right. And I want to be careful about this because inside, uh, Higher Ed did a poll of presidents a few months ago that suggested that half of all presidents who are concerned about public trust see it as primarily a PR issue and are Launching a PR campaign to turn it around, public trust in higher education. You're not going to fix it with pr. PR is not sufficient, but it is necessary. It is a part of the story solution. And so here we draw on some really excellent work done by the Metropolitan Group and Spitfire Strategies. These are communications firms. Spitfire has a lot of experience in higher ed. Metropolitan Group is interesting because they have been doing work on pro democracy narratives in countries in Latin America that have had democratic backsliding earlier than the United States. So they've kind of gotten a jump on everyone else on this. And adapting this work to higher ed has been very generative. So, uh, the basic story is the story we've been telling for 20, 30 years, that higher education is an engine of social mobility, it's a driver of economic opportunity, it's a creator of life saving research. That is the right story to tell. But what they found is you also have to tie that story in with commonly held values that people care about. Freedom, fairness, strength, opportunity. Uh, you have to use that language and then people will appreciate that. And we have a couple of other points about this having to do with how you deliver it. The reality is, you asked the question about can this be done at the sector level. We're never going to have a situation where higher ed associations have $100 million to run an ad campaign on behalf of higher ed. So this has to be integrated into where our advertising is actually happening, which is individual campus recruitment efforts, public validators in the community, alumni, business leaders, trustees, students themselves. That's where we have to spread this message and use this language, because that's what we've got.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I would go back to one of my favorite television shows, the West Wing, and the statement from Leo to Josh, all politics, especially in New Hampshire, are, uh, retail. You've got to reach the individual with stories they understand or groups of people with stories they understand and can relate to to change the way they think.

Speaker C: That's exactly right. And not only is all politics retail, it's also local. And I think that's key to this argument as well.

Speaker B: That's it. So we skipped over to telling a clear story. And that's number four. Number three, recommit to inclusive excellence. This one in today's political world is a little bit fraught with danger, but it's still important.

Speaker C: Yeah. So inclusive excellence is a term that AAC&U actually coined 21 years ago, which is hard for me to believe, given that it's not these days. It's not even only Used in higher ed. It's a term that has really come to be used across sectors. And it's a term that is often associated, uh, closely with diversity, equity, and inclusion work. And we are advocating for a broader understanding of it. The diversity, equity, and inclusion work, when done well, is really a student success initiative. It is really about trying to break down barriers that are based on identity, race, gender, or other types of identity that are keeping students from accessing higher education and from succeeding in higher education and after they graduate. That is one kind of barrier that we need to break down. Whatever we call it, it's okay to change names and turn terms and comply with laws, but we have to break down all barriers to student success. And that includes things like food insecurity, like, uh, college readiness, lack of tutoring. These are all interventions that we need to embrace. And one of the things we see is that the institutions that are trusted, the colleges that are trusted, offer these kinds of wraparound supports. And the ones that don't, often, because they consider themselves to be more prestigious and their students to need less of this support, they are less trusted. And so providing this kind of support is essential to building public trust. It doesn't have to be politically controversial. And we shouldn't shy away from supporting our students because some portions of this work have become politically fraught.

Speaker B: That's a really good way to put it. When I think about these type of things, I think back to when I was the head of our professional association for management consultants, and we were thinking about doing a advertising campaign. And this was back in the early to mid aughts. So your SEO was kind of just a idea that really hadn't been formulated. So what we were going to do was put up a wall of pictures. And what we came to understand was people click on a photograph of someone they relate to. I might do a white male or something like that. You, uh, might do someone with curly hair. I don't think I would go with somebody who has a bald head because that's too much like. But no, anyway. But we relate to certain types of people. So if we're not being inclusive, if we're not helping, all folks go. It's like that old saying, you know, a rising tide floats all boats. It's important for everyone to be successful, not just white males or whatever the demographic is.

Speaker C: That's exactly right. Now, one of the things that we say in this report that may be somewhat controversial to our listeners and to our readers, your listeners and our readers, uh, is that there is actually a problem in terms of inclusiveness with conservative students as well. This problem is narrower and it's a little different from how it's often presented, but it is very real. There are some great studies that came out of the UNC system and the University of Wisconsin system over the last five years that show that conservative students do face a lot of pressure on campus not to express themselves, not to share their, not just their beliefs, but their ideas. But what's interesting is that they don't face that pressure almost at all in the classroom. In fact, the classroom is the place where they feel the most supported it to participate because despite it all, most faculty, even if they're very liberal, are very good teachers and they are able to create structured environments that work for students. The problem is social. The problem is with talking, uh, to their peers in the dining hall. The problem is social media. And so this is a teaching opportunity rather than, uh, got to change laws. This is a teaching opportunity that really involves investment in civil dialogue work. Students come to college not knowing how to talk to people who they disagree with, partly because in high school the communication regime is if somebody says something offensive, you go to an administrator. That's, that's what you're supposed to do. That's not how it works in college or helps students or the world. Right. We need to help students learn how to have these conversations and learn how to build authentic relationships across these divides. It is a real problem and it's an inclusive excellence problem.

Speaker B: Yes, I fully agree. That's a great way to describe it. The last one, in which what may be to me the most important of all of these is coordinate a mission centered defense. Higher ed in some ways has strayed away from its mission. Colleges have strayed away from their mission. We need to get back in that role. And what is higher ed supposed to do?

Speaker C: We have to understand that there are, are lots of areas where higher ed institutions need to collaborate with the public. That's the whole point of the community engagement work. It's the whole point of student success. The public has a lot of stake in what happens, uh, at higher education institutions, especially public ones, but also private ones. What we need to protect from that kind of involvement, particularly from government overreach, is the freedom of ideas on campus. There's a discussion, particularly in Europe, haven't had it as much in the United States on uh, the importance of university autonomy economy. So rather than academic freedom, that's about faculty being able to speak their minds and do their work without involvement. They talk about the whole university as needing to be protected in that way from government intervention. And the reason for that is that ideas are the widgets of higher education. They are what we make. And you can't have the government sitting there in the widget factory saying that these widgets can be made and these which it can't. If you want higher education to function, it has to function as a university. It has to be able to follow ideas wherever they lead. And so with that narrower conception of university autonomy, we need higher education to be able to pull together and actually advocate for this. Higher education as a sector is very good at advocating for its financial priorities and the appropriation system. It is not as good at this new need of advocating for its mission and purpose against government overreach. This is a very fragmented sector. It's actually one of the things that distinguishes American higher education from higher ed in other countries is how fragmented it is, how little federal oversight there is, how campuses are governed by states, and a lot of them are private and aren't really governed by anyone, but sort of private accreditors. And it's created a situation where there's a lot of competition between higher education institutions and not a lot of collaboration. So we're not saying that every campus needs to do the same thing, but they need to be talking to each other. They need to be building solidarity with one another on this issue. They need to recognize that an attack on Harvard today is an attack on your local community college tomorrow, and vice versa. And they have to put their heads together and figure out a way to really defend the mission and purpose of higher education.

Speaker B: When I think back to some of the great things, the collaborations that have happened, my mind doesn't need to go any further than Research Triangle park, where you had had UNC, uh, Chapel Hill, NC State, and Duke come together to put together this consortium, which is, frankly, it's the gold standard for collaboration among institutions. We need more of that. We need people to be able to see the benefits of higher education. And higher ed in America is very fragmented. You're absolutely right. There are a few systems there becoming more systems. But I think it's not so much fragmented as it is independent. And we have made this the greatest education system in the world by the innovation that has come forward through these institutions. Is it time to sit on the laurels? Absolutely not. We need to continue to move forward, but. But we need to also, without trying to take a victory lap, which happens too often, say we've done great for the first 500 years. It's time to reinvent ourselves for the next 500 or in AI terms, maybe the next 25. I don't know.

Speaker C: That's exactly right. We have to be a forward looking sector and we have to be better at everything we do. And that includes defending ourselves. Right. We have to be better, be better at innovating, better at adapting, better at engaging with our communities, better at connecting with people, better with students, better at talking about our work and also better at defending our mission. And all of that is it requires a higher ed that is awake, that is active. I said these are recommendations that are practical and feasible, but they are not easy. This is going to take an all hands on deck approach. It's going to be a lot of work and it's going to require a lot of, of investment by institutions and by everyone at those institutions.

Speaker B: Who needs to lead this?

Speaker C: I think it can be led at any level. But we are particularly interested in the work that individual campuses can do on this. I had a great conversation with a, uh, longtime expert on higher education finance early on in the process of writing this report. I asked her, do you think that we should just pull all the leaders of higher education together and come up with a solution on fixing finance? And she said absolutely not. She said they wouldn't come up with the right idea. They would just get bogged down in their differences. She said the solution has to bubble up from the ground. It has to come from individual campuses innovating and then other campuses adopting what those initial campuses have done. And I think that's our strategy for all of this. This has to be done at the campus level and we have to create change from below.

Speaker B: Mhm. Which is very much in line with the founding of America. So.

Speaker C: That's right.

Speaker B: Given that we're recording this very shortly before July 4th, I think that's a great note to end on.

Speaker C: Fantastic. Well, it's been great to talk to you about this and I hope that listeners are interested in the report and love to talk to them about it as well.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Three takeaways for presidents and boards. What do they need to be thinking about?

Speaker C: The first takeaway is connection. Every one of these recommendations points to the need for more connection. Connection within campus, connection across campuses, connection with the community, connection with society, with students. That's the missing piece. Everyone's going it alone. They've got to work together with everyone. We have to be uh, a sort of welcoming group. I'd say that's the first takeaway. The second takeaway is that we can do reform and defense and communication all at once. This is not an either or proposition. These are all things that we have to do and in fact we must do them all at once if we want higher education to succeed in terms of public trust. And the final takeaway really is just that higher education is a, uh, community asset and we will not be successful at building public trust in higher education unless we are successful at positioning ourselves as a community asset and really do doing the work, being trusted and trustworthy. Not just going out hat in hand and asking for trust, but actually proving that we deserve it.

Speaker B: That community engagement so critical. Great takeaways. Thank you my friend. What's next for you?

Speaker C: Well, we are hard at work trying to implement this report. We are building a series of leadership institutes where campus teams can work with us over a six month period starting in January to implement the report on their campuses and to adapt it to their particular campus needs. We are building a, uh, coalition across sectors to try to advance the recommendations in this report. We are working with some researchers to try to build some self assessment metrics around trust that campuses can use to determine the level of trust on their campuses and to improve that over time. And we're trying to have a public conversation about public trust in higher education and to position these ideas at the center of it. Ultimately, this report is a starting point, it's not an ending point. Too many times you'll see a report come out and that's the end of it. This is just the beginning of a multi year initiative and I want to stress that building public trust in higher education is not something we're going to do in the next month or the next three months or six months. We have to measure this in years and we're prepared to do that work and to do it alongside campuses.

Speaker B: Very good. Well, if there's anything I could do to help you, please do not hesitate to reach out. Thank you, Jeremy, always a pleasure. Thank you sir.

Speaker C: Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker B: Thanks for listening today. And a special thank you to my guest, Jeremy Young. Jeremy, always a pleasure having you on the show. I look forward to the next time we get a chance to talk about important issues like this to my listeners. Thanks again for tuning in. See you next week.

Speaker A: Changing Higher Ed is a production of the Change Leader, a consultancy committed to transforming higher ed institutions. Find more information about this topic along with show notes on this episode@ah changinghired.com if you've enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe to the show and we would also value your honest rating and review. Email any questions, comments or recommendations for topics or guests to podcast at ah changinghired. Com. Changing Higher Ed is produced and hosted by Dr. Drum McNaughton, post production by David L. White.