10 Resolutions for Higher Ed in 2024

In this episode of the Trusted Voices Podcast, hosts Erin Hennessy and Teresa Valerio Parrot outline their top 10 New Year’s resolutions for the higher education industry. Covering topics such as crisis communication planning, institutional culture and climate and Title VI compliance, they emphasize the importance of being prepared for reputational issues, reviewing and updating communication tools and policies and seeking guidance from relevant organizations.

Show Notes

Resolution 1 – Update/Create Crisis Communication Plans

• UW La Crosse Chancellor Fired After Appearing in Adult Videos
• The Emotional Toll of Presidential Scandals
• Harvard’s President Claudine Gay Resigns

Resolution 2 – Gaza-related Communications and Title VI

• How to Navigate the Impossible

Resolution 3 – Transparent Conversations about Finances

• A Look at Trends in College Consolidation Since 2016

Resolution 4 – NIL 

• NCAA Proposal Would Allow Schools to Pay Their Athletes Directly
• New Lawsuit Could Decide Whether NIL Is Subject to Title IX
• Florida State Sues ACC in Fight to Leave Conference over Revenue Complaints
• Florida State, Left out of the College Football Playoff Despite Undefeated Record, Gets Crushed in Historic Win by Georgia
• Kirby Smart Laments FSU Opt-outs after Georgia’s Orange Bowl Rout
• If FSU and Other College Stars Are Getting Paid, Then They Should Play in Bowl Games

Resolution 5 – Professional Development

• The CUPA-HR 2023 Higher Education Employee Retention Survey

Resolution 6 – FAFSA Delay

• How One College Is Locking in Financial Aid Early to Offset FAFSA Delay
• A New Threat to Diversity at Elite Colleges

Resolution 7 – Artificial Intelligence

• EDUCAUSE: Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• AI Unveiled: Are We at the Peak or the Plateau?
• PRSA Releases Ethical Guidance on AI for Communicators

Resolutions 8-9 – Presidential Campaign and Politics

• Harvard Youth Poll
• How Colleges Can Help Students Vote and What They Can (and Can’t) Do Regarding Campus Political Campaign-related Activities 
• Complaint Says CU Boulder Scholarship Program Is Discriminatory

Resolution 10 – Campus Culture and Climate

• You Can Only Tell a Story That Already Exists
• What’s Your Institution’s McDonald’s Order?

Read the full transcript here

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

Hello, Happy New Year, and welcome to the Trusted Voices Podcast. I’m Teresa Valerio Parrot, alongside Erin Hennessy, and in each episode, we discuss the latest news and biggest issues facing higher ed leaders through a communications lens. For these conversations, we are often joined by a guest who shares their own experiences and perspectives, but we also make time for one-on-one conversations about what we are seeing, hearing, and thinking. 

Today, we’re kicking off 2024 with a list of resolutions for higher education and topics we encourage you to do a little bit of research on because they’re gonna be the focus of our time and energy in the coming year. We anticipate these will have the greatest impact on image and reputation for our institutions. And, at a time when we’re all thinking about the shrinking trust in higher ed and questioning of the value of a degree, perhaps we can all do a bit of work to preempt some of our industry’s critiques. So with that, Erin, I’m gonna kick it over to you for a New Year’s resolution for higher ed.

Resolution 1 – Update/Create Crisis Communication Plans

Erin Hennessy:

Sure, I think, I’m gonna speak for you, one of our favorite things about working in higher education is that that break at the end of the year heading into New Year’s is usually pretty quiet on campuses, but also in our world of consulting and crisis higher education. But there were certainly some stories that inspired me to put this at the top of my New Year’s resolutions for higher ed list. And that is making sure that you on campus, our colleagues on campus, have spent some time thinking about how prepared you are for a significant reputational issue or a campus crisis. We have heard from so many institutions in the last, I’d say, three months, certainly since conversations about Israel and Gaza started, but even predating that from institutions that have said either our crisis communications plan is woefully out of date or, and this is the one that keeps me up nights, we don’t have a crisis communications plan. And that is terrifying to hear. One of the things that we talk with our campus partners about is not trying to make an exhaustive list of all of the terrible things that could happen to your institution and then chart out responses to each of them. And I think one of the stories that we followed over break and one that is breaking just today as we have this conversation, both relate to presidents stepping down as the result of crisis. One is the UW-La Crosse Chancellor, whose extracurricular activities came to light over holiday break. And I’m guessing folks received texted links and comments from colleagues and family during the holiday. And one is President Claudine Gay stepping down today as the president of Harvard.

Neither of those things are in anybody’s crisis communication plan in terms of the specifics, but making sure that leadership transitions, making sure that political protests and events on campus, making sure that policies around moral turpitude and what is an appropriate method of conduct for a leader of an institution, making sure those things are considered in your crisis plan, and that you have a plan that can respond to a very sudden leadership transition. What are the roles that you have your leadership folks in in that plan? And are you ready, should they be the subject of the reputational issue or the crisis, to pivot very quickly and make sure that response is still timely, is still relevant and appropriate, but allows you to move forward even in the absence of the sort of head of the institution.

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

So I know that you are not wanting to call it, but I’m gonna call it because I think it gives context to why we’re raising this topic. And we will have in the show notes a link to an Inside Higher Ed piece about the University of Wisconsin La Crosse Chancellor who was fired, this is the headline, fired after appearing in adult videos. And the only reason I say that is because I want to differentiate the two subjects that you’re talking about. One is: it is the behavior and the firing of the chancellor that is becoming the reputational damage. And the second, if you’re thinking about President Gay, is that there was a situation that also then tied to a leadership questioning, whether it is of response to situations on campus or to allegations of lack of detail in citations for President Gay that has become a different issue.

So I just want to make sure that we’re differentiating the two of those. One is this slower burn at Harvard, and one is this quick turn firing after these videos came to light. And I think that institutions need to be prepared for both of those kind of situations. One that feels like it came out of nowhere, or at least came to the public’s attention out of nowhere. And the other one that has been smoldering and questions have been asked for months about whether or not this was the right leader for an institution.

Erin Hennessy:

Yeah, and I think we’ve had this conversation privately and I think it’s worth having it publicly. It’s worth noting that one is a white man and one is a black woman, the first black woman to lead Harvard. And she became very quickly the focus of a lot of conservative pressure, a conservative activist in particular named Chris Rufo who focused particularly on the plagiarism issue – alleged plagiarism issue. And you’re absolutely right, this event at UW-La Crosse was very quick turn over the span of a couple of days. I think it’s worth noting the difference in terms of the fact that someone may have been targeted not just for her conduct, not just for handling of because of the color of her skin, because of what she represents to a number of constituencies, both of Harvard, but also constituencies that aren’t at all attached to Harvard.

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

And I think that’s a really critical point, especially as we talk about diversity on our campuses, is that how do we support our leaders or in what ways are they more vulnerable based on their identities? I do wanna add one item to the show notes. And when I was on a campus working for my first president, I was a staff member for someone who went through a presidential scandal that at the time was quite entertaining in some ways for the media, but it was our lives. So in the show notes will be a piece I wrote for Inside Higher Ed called The Emotional Toll of Presidential Scandals. And I just want for all of us to think about the fact that these presidents have staffs that still have to come to work and do their jobs and hold their heads high despite the fact that there’s titillation that may be going on around someone’s departure. So, it’s really how I thought about picking up the pieces when my trust in someone was unfortunately not all that it could have been. And I just wanna make sure that we’re also thinking about these staffs and people who have to continue on with their jobs in this new year, regardless of the behavior of their bosses and others at the institution.

Erin Hennessy:

Yeah, and I just want to make a particular note of the communication staff at UW-La Crosse, who I guarantee you did not have a break. I guarantee you they were working straight through both to get the interim president up on the website to address, I can only imagine the number and the variety of incoming media requests that they had. And I just would encourage folks to reach out, send a note, and just remember, if you’re at UW-La Crosse, that not everybody had a great break, not everybody had a break at all. And so you’re absolutely right, Teresa, the impact of these kinds of scandals can be very real and very present, but also very long-term for the folks that have worked for a leader who unfortunately has stepped outside of the bounds of employment. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

Agreed.

Erin Hennessy:

There’s a way to put that.

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

And to that point, one of the things I cover in the piece is that I had never in my career felt as small as I did the day when I realized that I was invisible to senior leaders on announcement day, because they were all in CYA mode for themselves. And as someone who was a direct report and had a communications role, I was definitely left out of communication, was left out of the what happens now sort of next steps. And this is a great time for us to remember to make sure that you have all of your staff with you as you’re communicating these things and that everybody understands what it means for them and what’s expected for them next — expected of them — because we don’t always share that information and we’re talking about people’s livelihoods and it’s an emotional time for those that may be going through this. Even if the person, it was a betrayal perhaps of trust or something that we would question, I would just say the others who are still there deserve respect as they go through it as well.

Erin Hennessy:

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And the personal touch here is so important. This isn’t something that you can just do by email, that this is an opportunity for the senior leaders who remain at the institution to reach out and have conversations with their staff. And not just once, not just to convey the news, but to continue to follow up. A, to make sure that they’re feeling focused enough to get the rest of the work done, but also just to check in and say, like, I know, this is wild. I know this is wild. Tell me what’s on your mind. Tell me what you’re hearing. Tell me what people are asking you at basketball practice or school pickup, all of those things. Just really using that interpersonal relationship that you’ve built with your team to make sure your team’s doing okay. And hopefully, someone’s doing that for the senior leaders as well.

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

And I would also say, we were talking about this morning, the two of us, I can’t think of an exact parallel at another institution, but I do want the UW-La Crosse team to know that there are other situations that have had similarities. So you’re not alone. Those institutions have gotten through them. Some of them have been in the media and you and I both know some of them have not. And so when we say this is a first, it’s very rarely a first, which actually circles us all the way back to what you said. We can’t plan for everything, but we can plan for some generalities, and I can guarantee the generalities associated with this have been experienced by other institutions.

Erin Hennessy: 

Yep, it’s always a slightly different flavor, but there are a lot of parallels. We spent a lot of time on that. And that’s all our time for today. Do you wanna move on to the first resolution on your list, which is a much lighter and easier topic?

Resolution 2 – Gaza-related Communications and Title VI

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

Exactly. So mine is really focused on how we’re thinking about our Gaza-related communications for the new year. I can guarantee you that we’re not done. This is going to continue. Even today I’ve had a number of calls of next steps and what’s happening on some campuses. And I would say I wrote a piece for Volt. Our producer encouraged me to answer some additional questions that we had and also to think about how to navigate the impossible around these communications. So that piece is on the Volt site, and I’ll make sure that it’s in the show notes. And my number one suggestion is to focus on mission. And I think that right now, before everybody is back on campus and we’re really going, this is a time to really review, update, communicate some of the tools and definitions at your disposal. And what I mean by this is look at your policies.

How are you more comprehensively thinking about what you’ve sent to students and how they can access information tied to student code of conduct, what you see is appropriate behavior or not? Look at your employee handbook, your faculty handbook, and start to make sure that you know what the expectations are for campus culture and climate and that those are being communicated. If you need to update anything, because it’s not up to date, for example, what the process is to bring in an off-campus speaker. Make sure that you’re doing that now so that you can roll it out with the start of the semester. Don’t conveniently pull it out or make the adjustment once somebody has already been asked to your campus. And then I would suggest, based on the Department of Education’s list of institutions that are under investigation for Title VI complaints, that brush up on what Title VI covers and what it means for your campus community.

I was recently talking to someone and they said, “oh, but I think we’re okay because our state is restricting DEI.” And I said, that doesn’t matter. This is from the Department of Education. This is federal. This still applies. And make sure that you have a good sense from whoever can make those calls about what that intersection looks like between Title VI, between what your state is doing specific to possibly naming or limiting offices that work on diversity topics, et cetera. But

map this out for yourselves so that you go into this with a clear sense of what you can and can’t do, what you can and can’t write as a communication, and you can and can’t advise leaders. And then the last thing that I would suggest is make sure that if you don’t already have this, this is a metaphor here, buy those noise-canceling headphones that you might need for your job. So make sure that you are able to drown out all of the noise around you so that you can focus on your campus community when they need you the most.

Erin Hennessy: 

I think that’s all super helpful. The one thing that I would add to your conversation about Title VI is remembering that most of our institutions pay very hefty membership fees to national organizations that lobby on behalf of their group of institutions. So whether it’s ACE, which is sort of the umbrella group that covers public-private two-year, four-year, or if it’s NICU or CIC or ASCU or APLU or AACC, it’s all the alphabet soup there. Reach out to those organizations if you have questions about what Title VI is, what it covers, how it’s being implemented, what kind of conversations are happening between the associations and the Department of Education to provide nuance around how institutions live Title VI. You pay membership fees in order to access exactly this kind of council, and those organizations are available to provide that kind of insight and information for you.

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

Agreed. And I would also say, look back on how you implemented, and possibly tweaked and then re-implemented, possibly adjusted or drew from scratch, your Title IX approach as well. Because there are some similarities between how the department is investigating these and how they are announcing those institutions under investigation. So think about how you all worked on that, and make sure that you’re already now starting to make it a conversation point of how will you as an institution communicate should you be named to that list so that you’re not scrambling at the last minute. This is a potential communication point for all campuses this semester. So work in advance. As much as we said you can’t address all situations, this is one that you might wanna have a micro plan for so you’re thinking about how you can and should be addressing this.

Erin Hennessy:

Yep, and as you’re planning for those February or March board meetings, think about what kind of information, at what level of detail and what kind of resources you need to share with your boards of trustees so that you are prepared to prepare them should this become an issue for your institution.

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

Agreed. 

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Resolution 3 – Transparent Conversations about Finances

Erin Hennessy:

Okay. This is a golden oldie for you and me, but I was particularly struck going through all of my email sends from holiday break by the send from Higher Ed Dive that was focused on college closures. And the list of colleges that closed this year, there were so many on there that even I didn’t remember. And you and I track this issue pretty closely. So if we’re adding to that early in the year before everybody’s back and the campus is back in full swing list of things to think about, it is time to have some really hard and transparent conversations with your institutional community about where your institution stands financially. And it could be good news, it could be not good news, and it could be somewhere in the middle.

But all three of those alternatives deserve conversations so that as you make strategic choices for your institution going through spring semester, going through next summer, going through next academic year, your community is being brought along with the most up-to-date and relevant information. And, and this is the part where, you know, a lot of our presidents feel like they need to be cheerleaders for the institution and they do but sometimes they overstep into the land of fantasy a little bit. And so making sure that your leadership is prepared to provide realistic, grounded in data and facts, updates about the financial position and future of your institution is just absolutely vital. We can point to a hundred different examples. We can point to institutions that are going to be closing at the end of this semester. And we can probably, I’m not a betting woman, but I am guessing that before the end of the semester, there will be another institution on the list that will be closing by the end of the semester. Meaning their students, their faculty, their staff will not have sufficient time, sufficient runway to build their plans for their summer, their fall, their degree completion, their continued employment, their kids’ child care, health care, all of those things. So if you are in a position where you know there’s some bad news coming, I encourage you to really push leadership to be upfront about it and to start communicating about it six months ago, a year ago, right now, please. It’s vitally important. We’ll include a link in the show notes to the Higher Ed Dive list of colleges and universities that have closed since 2016, but you can also look on their newsletter this morning at the rundown of institutions that have closed in 2023. It’s not a fun conversation. Spoiler alert: there aren’t any really fun conversations on our list of resolutions today, but they’re all really important points and we’re hopeful that we’re giving folks some food for thought.

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

This is another reason why it’s so important to share that financial information, I also want to dispel a myth. Someone was saying, well, the campus would have to give notice to faculty because, you know, we need, in our faculty handbook, it says that we need six months notice. And then they went on to quote from their faculty handbook. And I said, that is for a program closure that is different than an institutional closure because some of those are very, very quick. So I think for some of those ways in which people are saying, well, we’re not there yet because my institution has an X, Y or Z, I would say, I don’t know if you are or you aren’t, look at the financial information that is available and ask the questions that you have because you won’t be the only one who has that question. 

I’m gonna add something else to the show notes and that is you and I both wrote a piece for Hechinger Report at the very beginning of the pandemic, maybe like in I’m guessing it was like in about April. And that was before the CARES Act money had been approved. We anticipated that a lot more institutions were going to close based on the pandemic. We’re seeing those closures now. So go back and look at that piece because we talk about how you have a choice as leaders of having a gracious closure or a stressful closure and that leaves students without a way to transfer, faculty having missed windows for tenured positions, staff just, you know, out. And there are real ways that as we talk about protecting and valuing our communities, we’re doing exactly that even with tough decisions.

Erin Hennessy:

Yeah, yep. Okay, let’s move on to your next resolution for our beloved industry.

Resolution 4 – NIL

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

Oh, I just took a drink of water. So, and that’s because, whoo boy, this one is near and dear to my heart. And the holiday season was all about intercollegiate athletics, I think. And what that future means. And this really was at the heart of my dissertation. So if anybody wants that in the show notes, let me know. Please read it, just kidding. Because my dissertation focused on the disjuncture between the mission of NCAA, which is focused on amateurism and building leadership and character and opportunity for everybody to get an education, et cetera, et cetera. All of those foundational benefits that higher education also brings to community. And that has to be balanced with what we’re seeing in athletics right now with how that’s being lived with the prioritization of money over that ideal and mission.

And I think that’s a really critical point for us to be talking about right now, because there are significant governance considerations associated with this. And I have to say, it’s important for me to say that, just a reminder, that NCAA leadership is comprised of institutional leaders. So if you want to know who Charlie Baker reports to, that would be presidents of institutions who hold leadership positions within the NCAA. 

So. With that, I think that this year, please keep your eyes and ears open, even if you are D3, D2, D1, Power 5, however you’re defining what athletics looks like, there is this interesting NIL conversation and what pay-for-play could mean. The NCAA had a proposed economic model that they rolled out at the end of this last year that not everybody was a great fan of and I think there’s real reasons for that. There are a whole bunch of questions and holes in how basically a savings account would work to compensate student athletes. And this is supposed to help with some of the pressures that we’re seeing from name image likeness. So that came out in early December with Charlie Baker proposing this new economic model. 

The other item that I would raise for you as well is there was a lawsuit at the University of Oregon where some student-athletes are wondering if Title IX also applies to NIL. We’ll make sure that links for both of those are in the show notes because this is a really interesting conversation for us to be having. And with some student-athletes earning six figures, this really can put some pressure on institutions. So with those six-figure student-athletes, I do want to raise one specific institution because I think it’s an interesting case study for all of us to pay attention to and think about, again, looking at that conflict between the mission of NCAA and how we’re living athletics now. 

Florida State brought some interesting questions to the forefront in December. So the institution is suing the ACC. They want to leave the conference because of revenue complaints. This was after they were not chosen to be one of the institutions that went into the championship contention. And based on the fact that they weren’t chosen to go into the two bowls that led to the championship game, there were over 20 Florida State players that opted out of playing in the bowl that they were chosen for. And this also means they were opting out of a potentially undefeated season too, right? So there were complications on a number of different fronts. And they said they did this because of the fact that they weren’t chosen for this national championship.

Well, the update is Georgia absolutely demolished Florida State 63-3 in part again, because there were 23 players who weren’t there. And the coach for the Georgia Bulldogs was saying this really wasn’t fair to his team because they wanted to have the opportunity to have that game. They wanted the competition. And it’s a great win. It’s a great rout. But it’s not what they wanted to have happen.

Erin Hennessy:

No.

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

There are a number of op-eds and a number of thought pieces and I have my own opinions about if players are making six figures in NIL to be on a team, to be part of a program, what does that mean when they decide, I am more worried about me and I’m thinking about me versus team and I’m thinking about my potentially getting injured, what this could mean if I don’t have a great game, I’m upset that I didn’t make this championship game.

All of these things that are me focused. And where does that leave the concept of team? And where does that leave the concept of intercollegiate athletes? And I’ll be curious to see what you think. I think if you sign up to be on a team, you sign up to be on a team. And not showing up because you’re angry means that there’s the potential for others to get hurt because you want to stay safe. And I just don’t get that.

Erin Hennessy:

Well, and it wasn’t about safety. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

No. No!

Erin Hennessy:

So, uh, you know, I guess I have a couple of thoughts and you know my collegiate athletics frame of references is men’s basketball, is not football, but the way that we have incentivized elite college athletics, I am guessing that the coach at this institution will not impose any consequences on these players because he needs them to come back and to play next season. Because his compensation, his six or seven, or God knows, probably eight figures, depends on having a winning record. And so I will be surprised if there are consequences for these young men for making this choice. I am guessing that a number of them will consider Transfer Portal and moving on to another institution and that’s got to strike fear in the heart of the coaching staff, considering the resources they committed to recruiting these folks to play. And so you’re sort of in this damned if you do damned if you don’t sort of spot. I wouldn’t want those folks on a team I was trying to coach because they’re clearly not committed to the organization. Interestingly enough, over the holiday break, I listened to a podcast conversation with Jay Wright, who is the recently retired, enormously successful former coach of the Villanova men’s basketball team. And he talked about NIL and talked about Transfer Portal and talked about how much those two developments were tied to his decision to step down, which was very, very surprising. He’s a pretty young guy. I think he’s early sixties and talked about, and I should send you the link, that NCAA was absolutely, and this reminded me of our conversation with Amy Perko, absolutely behind the ball on NIL. They’ve been advised to move in this direction for 10 years. They refused to do it until their hand was forced and it’s sloppy and it’s messy and it’s not, I think, long-term going to work well for anybody. But also talked about Transfer Portal and one of the things that people who are fans of Villanova basketball know is that Jay Wright as coach built a remarkable, remarkable culture within that program, had incredibly high graduation rates for his players. And the transfer portal in his opinion, I’m paraphrasing, makes it incredibly hard to continue to build that kind of culture-based program, as opposed to a more transactional-based program. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

Right!

Erin Hennessy:

And I guess, you know, my thought as I was listening to this was it’s got to make recruiting so much harder too, because you really have to find these young men and women who are committed and who are not going to have their heads turned by the potential to go to another program to make more money through NIL at another program than they would at their current institution. I can’t imagine how hard that job is right now. And I just think that this isn’t groundbreaking. The incentive system that we have built around college athletics in Division I is just so perverse. It’s so perverse. And it’s one of those things where you can’t tweak around the edges and fix it. It really has to be a wholesale implosion and nobody’s gonna go for that.

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

Well, and we’ve been waiting for that implosion for years. And I think there’s a real reason why athletics these days is called edu-tainment, right? We’re not focused on either of those well when it comes to intercollegiate athletics, the education or the entertainment component of this. And creating this Frankenstein adds to that disjuncture that I’m talking about. What are we really trying to do with this? Because if it is about amateurism, if it is about providing opportunity, this isn’t that. And how do we start to think about that? And it gets back to, again, what are the governance implications for all of this? Because I think they’re tremendous. To your recruiting point, I think there’s something interesting there. It used to be that you recruited a team and either that person washed out or they finished. And that was kind of how it went. And now with the transfer portal, that recruitment is every student, every day, all of the time.

And in some ways, it’s how institutions need to be thinking about their own current students, not just their student athletes. How are they thinking about retention, period. But it has a different flavor and different nuances, especially as we’re talking about student-athletes.

Erin Hennessy:

And there’s a lot more resources, I would bet you, at a lot of these institutions for retaining your student athlete than there are for retaining your first chair cello, your woman physics major from an underrepresented ethnic background. I mean, just, there’s so many more resources pushed into the athletics endeavor. Granted, many of them are coming from boosters and are raised from outside the primary budget of the institution, but man, just imagine.

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

They’re raised outside of the primary budget, but they’re included in. So those are donations to the institution. I still am just so worried about what the long-term impact will be of these NIL collectives, because that is outside of the institution. So we may be held accountable for what’s going on outside.

Resolution 5 – Professional Development

Erin Hennessy:

Yeah, yep.

Speaking of athletics, thinking strategically about your team, not your student-athletes, not even your coaching staff, although they certainly fall within this, but thinking strategically about bench building. We are, none of us, completely unreplaceable. Even the president of Harvard will be replaced by another president of Harvard.

And thinking about professional development for yourself and your team. When we talk about retention, again, not for students, but for faculty and staff, I know it feels like we have come out of the great resignation. I’m not convinced that we have… 

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

I don’t think we have.

Erin Hennessy:

…any more than we’ve really come out of COVID. And so I think as we, again, take advantage of this quieter period, we’re building quite a to-do list for our colleagues on campus, but thinking about professional development for yourself, building a bench that can support you strategically, but also that can function without you in your slot should you decide to make a move to another institution, to take a sabbatical, whatever the eventuality is, and thinking about how we can encourage people to stay because we are investing in them, and thinking very smartly about how we continue to grow their value both for our institution where they currently work, but also for the next place that they go. And we hate to think about our people leaving us, but I have always felt like if someone’s gonna leave my team, wherever they go, I want someone to look at their skillset and their abilities and their strategic vision and say part of that is a result of the time that this person spent with me, with Erin and her team. And I think taking that more long-term approach and long-term investment is a really important part of what we do as leaders and managers. There’s a ton of great data. There are also a ton of great webinars and resources available from CUPA HR, which is the human resources organization representing higher ed human resources professionals. We’ll link to one of their more recent survey research briefs on employee retention in higher ed. That’s from September 2023. It’s important to look at and think about and include in your planning as you look across your team, think about positions you’re trying to fill and honestly think about your own professional development and your own career trajectory as well.

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

I could not agree with that more. And as you know, this is something that we prioritize with our own team. So this is a standing item on our retreat agenda, what professional development opportunities do people want? What else can we provide, whether that’s resources or specifics? And I really do challenge our colleagues to look into professional development opportunities for the reasons that you said, but if you’re thinking about it from the employee standpoint too, If your employer will pay for you or match what you’re paying towards a credential, a degree, a certification, an accreditation, whatever it might be, take them up on it because that goes with you. That’s something that you can always be thinking about. And think about looking at whether it’s your LinkedIn profile or your resume and say, what have I done in the last year? Updating it every year so that you are capturing those different professional development opportunities, but also the highlights and the successes and the wins of what you’ve had over the previous year. This would be a perfect time for everybody to have that personal review as well.

Erin Hennessy:

Yep, agreed. And to think creatively about what professional development looks like. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a webinar or a conference from your “home association.” You may realize that your strengths don’t lie in budget planning and it might be worth looking at a place like NACUBO or even just sitting with your CFO and saying, hey, I would love for your insight in terms of helping me design something for myself that gives me…can I shadow you during the budget preparation process? Can I sit in the finance committee meeting when the trustees are here, thinking creatively about how you can expose yourself to other areas of the institution, other areas of your own industry, if you’re a communicator, spend some time with your marketers and vice versa. Thinking creatively about that, I think also gives us so many more opportunities and so much more … gives us so many more ways to really engage with professional development that isn’t necessarily a webinar, a conference, or a certification program.

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

I’ll give a shout-out to a class I took in my doctoral program. It was a higher education finance course. And that was really important. And I think that that’s really critical for our colleagues right now to make sure that they understand, what does the delay of FAFSA mean? What does that mean? Or, for example, what does the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act, which is proposed, what does that mean for institutions? That is this proposed legislation that institutions, there are about 50 of them, that have a certain amount of finance and endowment would not be eligible to receive Pell funding. What would that mean for an institution? Would that be a pro or a negative for your institution? But understanding what the FAFSA delay means for your institution, understanding topics like your discount rate and how you’re working through that all of those sorts of topics are really critical and if you don’t have a way to talk about those, this is a great time to use that professional development opportunity to take a course like that so that you’re…you understand it and you can communicate it.

Resolution 6 – FAFSA Delay

Erin Hennessy:

Yep, finance is never gonna be a bad skill set to have in higher ed considering the future that we’re all facing. Since you started talking about FAFSA, why don’t you just keep ripping and rolling on that?

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

Yeah, that was really what I wanted to talk about in part that there’s been a delay this year, if you haven’t heard. Please know there is a delay in the rollout of this year’s FAFSA. It was supposed to make it easier. And it, in theory, could make it easier for students filling out the form. It is going to make it really, really difficult for our colleagues to package financial aid this next year because they aren’t gonna have the same amount of time and resources to do so. So one recommendation I have for you, looking at our New Year’s resolutions is to give a little bit of grace to our colleagues who are in financial aid and those who are responsible for making sure that they are communicating with students what they’re eligible to receive and see if there might be a way that they may need your help in communicating what the institution is doing and what this process looks like. I do want to give one shout-out out and this is to my colleague Kristine, she’s done a great job of sharing some alternatives that institutions have implemented. 

Assumption University has rolled out their own financial stopgap and approach to this. And we have a link in the show notes. There was a fantastic piece from Higher Ed Dive that went into how this institution is doing what it’s doing, because the goal is to make sure that students aren’t confused. They aren’t worried about the finances so they don’t enroll. They aren’t second-guessing their choice to go to college purely because the federal government hasn’t yet rolled out FAFSA for this year.

Erin Hennessy:

Right. And as it rolls out, which I think it opened just a couple days ago? 

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

It was a soft launch, but there’s some tweaking?

Erin Hennessy:

Yeah. So which is exactly the point I was going to make as it rolls out, knowing that it will be bumpy, more than likely when you roll out an application that is intended to serve this many people in this many institutions, there will continue to be challenges there. I would also suggest extending that grace to enrollment management professionals writ large because this is not just a financial aid issue, but as we know, this gets to the heart of “can I or can’t I afford to pursue a degree at this institution?” And so this is also adding a lot of uncertainty and I would dare say angst to the folks who are sitting around a table trying to build a class as we speak at many institutions or year-round at many other institutions. So if you are sending pizza or Starbucks gift cards, make sure that you are including the fine folks in enrollment management, as well as the folks in financial assistance.

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

Or it doesn’t have to cost anything. Send a quick email and say, I’m thinking about you. And I want to know if there’s anything that I can do either to help with communications or to help with responses to something, whatever it might be, because there are a whole bunch of different parts of their website and response that are going to need to be populated. The scripts that you use when a student calls in, your chatbot responses, all of those different things are going to need a communications touch. And they may be willing to take you on some up on some assistance.

Resolution 7 – Artificial Intelligence

Erin Hennessy:

Sure, but also coffee, always coffee. Let’s keep rolling through these. Speaking of chatbots, we have had a lot of conversations about AI and I spent time with a friend this weekend who told me that her 70-something-year-old parents are very into AI and have been using it to design their holiday cards. And it just is further proof that AI is everywhere. We had a great conversation about AI and its potential benefits and challenges for higher ed. I feel like this is going to be a really long set of show notes, but we’re going to link to that conversation on the Volt website, where we talked about AI and its impacts. We encourage you to listen to that. There’s also some great research, but also resources at EDUCAUSE, which is the organization that represents technology and information technology professionals on our campuses that is also linked. But this is really some time to think about how this is going to impact you and your part of the organization, but also how it’s gonna impact your colleagues across the campus, faculty in the classroom, how it’s gonna impact your students. This is coming, it’s moving quickly. And the time that you can spend now thinking about AI and preparing for this is really important. And this is another one where I think it is vital to lean on our professional networks and to engage with folks at other campuses to hear how they’re thinking about AI, how they’re using it, what kind of tools they’re tapping into, what kinds of parts of their operation they find this can be useful in. So this is not a problem any institution or any professional should be trying to tackle on its own. It’s an opportunity, I think, that we should lean on the experiences of our colleagues and friends to find out how it’s going for them and how that might translate to our own institution.

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

And I’m adding to the show notes, I’m on the National Board for PRSA, which is the Public Relations Society of America. And PRSA released ethical guidance on AI for communicators. So we’ll have that resource available to you as well. And I note that specifically because in the Trusted Voices episode where we talked about AI, that was my big concern is the ethical components of this. And I think that these guidelines are really important for us to be thinking about our work and how we talk about ownership of work, what we’ve created, and how we’ve used the resources that others may have developed.

Erin Hennessy:

Absolutely. Okay, we’re coming around the corner. 

Resolutions 8-9 – Presidential Campaign and Politics

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

Okay, I have the last one, and this is going to really be about political environment in the country.

Erin Hennessy:

You’re trying to rush this, you don’t have the last one! You have two left, and I have one. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

Oh, ma’am, I do not. I have one because I’m combining them. It is the political environment in this country. And I’m taking that in two different ways. 

The first is the presidential election in 2024. I want for all of us to be thinking about that election. I don’t know that it’s super easy to turn on the news or to read the news and not see something about the election.

But I want to remind everybody that the campaign topics often bleed over to our campus conversations. So think about the topics being discussed by candidates and how the institution may or may not respond to some of those topics. I have a colleague also on the PRSA national board with me. His name is Ray Day, and he puts together these lists of looking around corners and issues that we should be thinking about.

I highly encourage looking at what he is seeing because he has this fantastic viewpoint across the country and in places that not all of us are able to peek. And he’s giving us some indications of what those major topics by political party and by region of the country might be. And because we know that on campuses, we usually have voter registration events and other kinds of ways in which we encourage students to participate in elections, I want to point out two things. One is a Harvard youth poll that talks about college students being less likely to vote in the next election than they were in the last election, which is an interesting tidbit. And it means that we really need to be thinking about what we can and we can’t do to get out the vote.

ACE has a brief that talks about that. Again, to your point earlier, resources are available by associations to make sure that we stay in a place that is safer for our campuses tied to voter registration and voter polling and encouragement of participation so that we’re not, whether you’re a public or a private institution, putting the institution or yourselves at risk. So that’s one half of my political topic.

Thoughts on that one?

Erin Hennessy:

Your clear smushing of two into one. Yes. The other thing that I will note is that as we have seen this year, last year, prior years, higher education will be a player, a character in the presidential election more than likely and in a number of statewide elections and congressional elections as well.

We will receive, particularly our colleagues in purple states, will receive a lot of requests from campaigns to come and have events on campus. That ACE brief also provides guidance on how you can do that as an institution safely. What you need to do in terms of offering equal time. If you say yes to one candidate but want to say no to another, is that an acceptable approach? What kind of policies do you need to have in place? So that brief is really a super useful download. I have been pushing that on people for years and years and years, long since I had responsibility for helping get that out the door. So that’s a super great resource. I would share that with general counsel. I would share that with government relations staff at your institutions if you’ve got those folks on your team as well.

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

And to extend your point, higher education already is a major punching bag for some candidates and for some campaigns. And so I think we need to continue to think about what does that mean for the industry. And it could be everything from freedom of speech on campus or perceptions of lack of freedom of speech on campus. Instead to thinking about what are some of these whack-a-mole lawsuits and filings that we see related to affirmative action that candidates pick up and then are sharing with their potential voting audience? So this is a great time to think about whether or not your institution is at risk from a number of different topics and how you plan to communicate to your community should you be either the topic de jour for a candidate or, and that could be local, state, national, who’s running for office, or if you’re named in a suit or sued tied to something specific to affirmative action. So be aware of any admissions windows at your institution like legacy programs, but not just legacy programs. Let’s be thinking about faculty and staff relatives being allowed into the institution, perhaps in their own admissions window. Let’s think about student-athletes and whether or not we have a window for them that is different than the general population. Who may benefit in ways that it’s always associated with being underrepresented students, but may not just be students that are underrepresented in the ways that we usually think about that term?

Another one is think about those programs that mandate criteria and expectations for diversity. And if you have these programs, if you might be vulnerable, here’s what I mean by that. There was a lawsuit recently against the McNair program at my alma mater. And the reason for the lawsuit is that it is giving preferential treatment for underrepresented students to conduct research and to get their degree, hopefully to extend the number of diverse doctoral degree recipients. The criteria for McNair programs is actually provided by the federal government through a Title IV program. So the institution being sued for upholding the federal guidelines now is in this weird place because the guidelines associated with some of the programs that have been tried and true to higher education may not be aligned with some of the more recent either Supreme Court decisions or other legislation in a number of states. So institutions may find themselves in the middle of bigger political jockeying than really what is tied to their institution’s own ability to determine criteria.

Erin Hennessy:

It’s hell of a time.

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

It’s a great, great time to be on a campus.

Resolution 10 – Campus Culture and Climate

Erin Hennessy:

Yeah, man. Okay, I’m going to close this out with one of our favorite topics that we engaged with recently, and that is focusing on the culture and climate on your campus, thinking about the resources you can bring to bear on trying to move the needle on culture. And we had a great conversation about this with our good friend and fellow Volt  podcast host Kevin Tyler a couple of weeks ago. He would tell you to read Marcus Collins’ book called For the Culture and Teresa and I would tell you the same thing. I think maybe this is the fuzziest of our resolutions on this list, but I think it’s an important opportunity as we start a new year, as we think about entering classes over the summer and in the fall to really do some work around culture. And what I think I’m gonna recommend will make a lot of folks a little nervous and maybe a little uncomfortable, which I think is a good indicator you need to do it. It is time to really assess the culture on your campus and to do that in a very clear-eyed way that encourages members of your community, not just the folks who always have their hand up or always fill out the survey, but to find the folks across your campus who you have an inkling in the back of your head, might have some concerns or might not feel completely welcomed and embraced and engaged in the culture of your institution. You need to find those folks and you need to hear from them to really get a good idea of where your culture is before you can start moving it forward. It is not easy work. It is not quick work. It is not inexpensive work in a lot of cases, but it is, I think, one of the things that is most vital to the long-term health of the institution and really informs a lot of the other things that we have talked about, a lot of the other resolutions on our list for higher ed and for our campus colleagues.

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

And I would say culture and climate. So not just talking about culture, but also looking at climate because you need the incremental steps from climate to get to the culture that we’re looking for. We’ve worked with a number of institutions on rolling out their climate studies. Those are a little bit easier, I think, or a little bit more normalized for institutions than culture studies. Whether you do a culture and/or a climate study, what I would say is communicate the results broadly, even if you aren’t comfortable with what they say, because that will start to build trust in what it is that you’re doing, so that as you are looking to make changes, as you are looking to increase resources or whatever it is that you know you’re going to need to do next, people understand why, and they also don’t think that you are skirting the issue. So transparency is absolutely critically important if you are going to be working on culture and climate.

Erin Hennessy:

Yeah, this is another spot where senior leaders should be cheerleaders for what is possible, but need to be really frank and really transparent and honest and based in reality about the current state on their campus. That is the only way to make authentic, meaningful, lasting change in either of those areas of either climate or culture.

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

Agreed.

Erin Hennessy:

And so there we are. That’s our list of resolutions for 2024 for higher education. There will be lengthy show notes and a transcript of our conversation today on the Volt website. We hope you all are coming back to 2024 rested and refreshed and excited for what lies ahead for you and your institution in this new year. Teresa, it’s great to see you back.

Teresa Valerio Parrot:

Happy New Year, Erin.

Erin Hennessy:

Happy New Year, Teresa.