Battling Crises on Campus

Classes are back in session on most college campuses, and many administrators are steeling themselves for what could be another tumultuous term. With the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel fast approaching, the war in Gaza rages on, prompting new protests amid a slate of code-of-conduct changes. Meanwhile, Americans are preparing to head to the polls for November’s hotly contested presidential election, ramping up tensions across the country—and all at a time when the value of a college degree is increasingly being called into question. What’s a college administrator to do?

Group Gordon

As a crisis communications and reputation management expert with more than 11 years of experience working with clients in the higher education sector, Andrew Jarrell, chief strategy officer at Group Gordon, sat down with Inside Higher Ed to discuss the state of higher ed, how administrators can prepare for the uncertainties to come and what lessons they should keep in mind from the “high-profile communications stumbles” that impacted many campuses last spring.

Excerpts of the conversation, which continued in follow-up emails, follow. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: From your observations, what are the biggest headwinds facing college and university administrators from a public relations perspective?

A: I don’t know if I would characterize them as headwinds, but there are a few things that universities need to be more cognizant and proactive about in terms of having a communication strategy.

One, there’s increased scrutiny and conversation about the value of higher education for folks. Certainly there are demographic factors involved in that, in terms of declining birth rates and declining enrollment. And a lot of those challenges, of course, are operational in business, but communication plays a role in that, too.

There’s also been a lot of conversation that we see about the increased cost of higher education, where that value proposition is for people and students needing to feel that this massive investment is really worth it for them and their future.

And, lastly, I would just say in society the cultural conversation has changed in recent years around a variety of political, social justice–related issues. And university leaders, like many other companies, have been expected to have a point of view and a perspective on that. Or certainly their audiences have asked them where they stand on those issues.

Q: A lot of colleges seemed caught off guard by the protests and encampments that erupted on campuses last spring. What do you think administrators should have done differently?

A: Doing crisis and planning work is key, thinking about what are the potential scenarios that could arise or have arisen? And in those types of scenarios, who would we want to be involved internally in the decision-making process? Who would we potentially want to be our spokesperson communicating our message? Who are our key audiences that we think are going to be impacted and want to hear from us on this issue, and then what are our kind of key messages that we want to get out to our community?

We find that this kind of planning work is really important to being as prepared as possible when these scenarios and these challenges do arise. Of course, by the nature of a crisis, it is unique and evolving, and so you’re going to have to respond. But having something in place as a jumping-off point is really, really critical.

Q: What institutions do you think did a particularly good job managing protests from a reputational perspective?

A: No university will get it 100 percent right, because they can’t please everyone. But some took more effective steps than others. Northwestern University, for instance, was relatively successful in opening a dialogue with the protesters that seemed to help avoid prolonged protests and violence. [Note: Jarrell is a Northwestern alum.] President Schill released an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune defending his decision and explaining the key principles that drove his decision-making.

Brown University also made the decision to strike a deal with the protesters that supported them in making their case to the board in exchange for ending the encampment. While there are differing opinions on the decision, the communication from Brown’s president was highly transparent about the process moving forward and, critically, emphasized that the decision was based on existing policies that govern the way the university considers divestment requests. That solid messaging foundation helped Brown defend itself recently against negative attention when one of its trustees resigned in protest over the divestment vote.

Q: And what were some of the greatest flaws of administrative responses to the campus protests?

A: What did not always occur is it’s really important to be quickly responsive to all of your audiences in a crisis situation. You don’t necessarily need to agree with them fully. You don’t need to give them a message that is going to appease all of their concerns. But it’s important that you’re effective in acknowledging all the feedback that’s taking place and being clear that that’s at least being heard and being considered on a regular basis.

The second thing, which I think is important for universities to think about particularly as they go into the school year now with a little bit more preparation, is, how can you create constructive vehicles for people to discuss and share their points of view on these issues? Whether that is communitywide town halls that are moderated, whether that’s gathering alumni for discussions, potentially surveys—these types of things are constructive vehicles for people to be heard. Hopefully it helps avoid leaving people feeling like if there are no constructive outlets, then I’m going to turn to more harmful, destructive ways of voicing my opinion.

I [also] think it is important that [university administrators] are willing to be very clear about their core values, what they stand for and what is acceptable and not acceptable in their community, and be direct about that. In some circumstances, leaders were so scared to say something that would offend somebody that they ended up not saying anything at all. That came across to a lot of folks as, “Where’s that humanity, if we’re not able to say some clear things about our values and what we stand for?”

Universities need to be direct about their support of freedom of expression and civic discourse and the exchange of ideas. And they also need to be clear when they feel like that conversation or that discourse becomes hateful, harmful or violent towards people in their community. I totally understand that that is a subjective line, and that is a difficult line, but that is the role of university leadership.

Q: What has business looked like for Group Gordon in this time of increasing campus tension? Has there been an increase in new clients coming to you for consultation?

A: We helped virtually all our [existing] higher education clients in one form or another through this crisis. Some colleges and universities are solely interested in crisis support right now to ensure they’re prepared for the year ahead. Aside from this specific crisis, we also saw a dramatic increase in reputation management interest after the murder of George Floyd, [when] universities increasingly found themselves navigating social issues on their campuses.

We’ve found that many schools don’t consider reputation management sufficiently, and based on conversations with higher education institutions, we decided to create a free crisis tool kit for university communicators. We’re calling it “Reputation 101,” and it offers straightforward worksheets teams can use to build issues-management plans. Doing this type of work in advance saves time in a crisis and helps ensure the team can focus on creating a thoughtful, nuanced response in tough situations.

Q: In another specific case, Johns Hopkins University announced the decision to adopt a “posture of restraint” when it comes to making any future institutional statements. Do you have any thoughts on their response?

A: The devil is in the details, in terms of, how do you apply this policy? When does it exist? When does it not exist? There’s still a ton of ambiguity, even for the folks that have tried to outline specific examples of when would be an appropriate time and when wouldn’t be an appropriate time. I have no doubt that these policies are going to get challenged by a variety of scenarios that come up, because that line of when does it tie to the core function of the universities—it’s always going to be subjective. So just from sort of a feasibility, logistics standpoint, I just think it’s going to be a real challenge to try to enforce that or follow that in a consistent and coherent way.

Q: Are you anticipating the election will add to the fire that administrators and their communications teams must respond to?

A: That’s where the scenario planning that we talked about can come into play. In an election cycle, and right now, just where we are politically in this country, there’s just a lot of heat around a lot of these issues. So that’s impacting everybody, and that will impact universities as well, and they’ll have to navigate challenges around that. But I don’t think the election itself is a new or unique challenge that universities need to be worried about to a significant degree.

I think it’ll have less overall impact on them than when COVID happened, and then [the impact] George Floyd had, or the war in Gaza had.

Q: How would you advise campuses this semester?

A: Unrest on campuses this year is inevitable. Everyone in the community should understand, as specifically as possible, what the university considers to be a violation of university policies. The more universities can clearly define those parameters before they take any action, the more effective they will be, despite the fact that they cannot please everyone.

In August, Michael Drake, president of the University of California, sent a letter to the UC community vigorously upholding the right of freedom of expression. He noted that “freedom to express diverse viewpoints is fundamental to the mission of the university” and “lawful protests play a pivotal role in that process.” At the same time, he outlined specific policies in place this year to ensure the safety and well-being of the community.

Another pitfall universities need to be careful about is too much bureaucracy. Universities should empower a small group of key decision-makers to drive the strategy for responding to these issues and communicating with the broader community. Ideally, that crisis response team should include the president’s office, marketing/communications, the office of student life and others relevant to the given situation, without making it too large to be effective. A smaller group allows the response to be more nimble and clear.

It’s also important to balance the views of decision-makers. We saw last year in the disastrous congressional testimony from the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT what happens when responses are overly lawyered. The failure of their response, at least in PR terms, was likely the result of legal teams trying to create a technically perfect response that overlooked the PR consequences of coming across as inhuman and alarming to many reasonable onlookers.