Leadership Communication These Days: Utterly Essential, and Hard as Hell

So many times were Chatham House Rules re-invoked at last week’s Annual Gathering of the Higher Education Leadership Communication Council at Wesleyan University. This is such a creepy time to be employed to help higher-ed leaders communicate.

Even Wesleyan President Michael Roth, one of the very most outspoken people in higher ed leadership, acknowledged being disoriented by this moment. Roth, who took over as Wesleyan president in 2007, said, “I had no idea it would be important, 18 years ago, for the president of a university to be willing to defend democracy.” But willing higher-ed leaders must be, Roth said. “It’s wrong to be silent in hopes that it won’t get worse,” he told these folks, reminding them, “It’s only been six months.”

He further urged schools to stick together in their defense, because “when the government sees [it] can separate schools and make deals with them one by one, the deals will get worse and worse.” (Deals, or as the government might call them, “reforms.” MIT presidential comms chief Martha Eddison reports her team refers to them another way: “What the government is doing is like pruning an orchard with dynamite: Don’t expect more apples.”)

And what can communicators do to defend higher ed? “Help your leader find their voice,” Roth said.

Toward that end, these communicators rassled with the tension between the current ethic of “institutional restraint,” and the need to defend higher education against existential threats: “What to say, when to say it, how to say it and why.” How to do internal communication on eggshells, making required legally programming changes while assuring faculty and staff they’re not abandoning the essential mission. And how to use their particular kind of influence as communicators inside and outside the institution to maximum effect.

Most of what was said at Wesleyan must remain quiet, although some of it was amusingly-enough put that I give in to the temptation to share it anonymously.

Like the pithy recollection of the daily life of a university communicator before institutional restraint. In reaction to every untoward event on campus and off, “Everybody wanted you to say something but everything you said sucked.”

“I love our legal counsel,” said one communicator. “I love him like a brother who I hate.”

Colleges and universities have many constituencies, often opposed to one another—especially in turbulent times. “The only two people in the [university] cabinet who think about all the audiences,” said one participant here, “are the president, and the VP of comms.”

Which is why comms is essential. And also, so goddamn hard.

I admire these people very much.