UNC is in hot water and Vanderbilt is offering some optimism.
In this episode of Trusted Voices, hosts Erin Hennessy and Teresa Valerio Parrot start with news from Chapel Hill, where a lawsuit alleges UNC’s board skirted public records laws by hiding information from stakeholders; the lawsuit also alleges the hiring of Bill Belichick was illegal. For Teresa, who once served as a system board officer, the case is a reminder that transparency isn’t optional — it’s foundational. FOIA requests may be inconvenient, but they’re part of stewarding public trust.
The conversation then pivots to civil rights compliance. A report from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is a stern warning about Title VI’s growing weaponization in Department of Education investigations, while a parallel track emerges at Health and Human Services. Erin notes the concerning trend: multiple federal agencies now scrutinizing campus policies, raising both compliance risks and costs. And with state governments reshaping boards “one appointment at a time,” Erin and Teresa highlight the mounting challenge of protecting institutional autonomy.
From there, the focus turns to athletics. Why are international student-athletes still locked out of NIL deals? As Teresa points out, their visa status makes participation risky, leaving them sidelined from opportunities their American teammates enjoy. Erin underscores the inequity: institutions recruit international athletes heavily, yet fail to fight for their full rights and benefits.
And amid the challenges, a pulse of optimism: recent polling from Vanderbilt shows a modest rebound in public confidence in higher education. For Erin and Teresa, it’s a reminder that higher ed’s value still resonates with most Americans, even if the loudest critics dominate the headlines.
What ties these threads together is clear: higher education leaders must stay vigilant on compliance, courageous in governance, and attentive to student experiences.
Show Notes
- UNC-Chapel Hill Board Hides Information from the Public, Says Former Provost in Lawsuit
- AAUP Report on the Weaponization of Title VI in DOE Investigations
- The Other Office for Civil Rights
- Why International Student Athletes Remain Locked Out of NIL
- 2025 American Marketing Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education
- Anonymous Professor Calls on Students to be “Agents of Change”
- Red States Are Taking Over Higher Education, One Board Member at a Time
- How to Govern for Institutional Autonomy
- Colleges Have Had a Tough Year. Confidence in Them Is Rising.
- Vanderbilt Unity Poll
- Celebrating Leading Women In Higher Education
- Leading with Humanity, Not Just Titles
Read the full transcript here
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Erin Hennessy
Hello and welcome to the Trusted Voices Podcast. I’m Erin Hennessy alongside Teresa Valerio Parrot. And in each episode, we discuss the latest news and biggest issues facing higher education leaders through a communications lens. For these conversations, we’re 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’re seeing, hearing, and thinking. Trusted Voices is produced by Volt, the go-to news source for higher ed leaders and decision makers. Remember to visit Volt at voltedu.com and subscribe to Trusted Voices on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode.
Erin Hennessy
Hi.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Hey Erin, it’s so good to see you.
Erin Hennessy
Like Jimmy Kimmel, I have returned.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
And like you were saying.
Erin Hennessy
Yeah, as I was saying. I want to before we dive into things, thank Michael Harris for stepping in while I dealt with some family stuff for our last episode. And I also want to say what a delight it was to have an episode of Trusted Voices in my podcast feed that I knew nothing about. I mean, I knew it. I knew what it was about, but it’s really nice to listen to our podcast having not been part of recording our podcast. It was a treat for me.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
It was so weird not to have you there, but it was really kind of fun to have you come back and to say, so let me tell you what I thought.
Erin Hennessy
Yeah, no, it was a great conversation. And Michael is a delightful human being to begin with, but he was great in the podcast format. I think we need to loosen him up a little bit. I was disappointed by the lack of profanity. I’d like us to earn our explicit ratings from the podcast platforms. But I thought it was great. And I so appreciate you all giving me the flexibility to go do what I needed to do that day.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Yes, and it is so great to have you back.
Erin Hennessy
Thank you, I cut my hair.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
I saw that. I saw that.
Erin Hennessy
Yeah, yeah.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
You were saying it was that or bangs. So congratulations on the choice.
Erin Hennessy (02:45)
Well, yeah. It was a stress…it was a stress thing. And, I said to the hairdresser, do whatever you want. And she said, anything? And I said, well, like almost anything, like we could do bangs. And she said, no, no, no. And there is more than anyone listening to this ever wanted to know about conversations between me and my hairdresser.
Teresa Valerio Parrot (03:05)
Right, well I want everybody to know I got up this morning at, well very early, and took a 6 a.m. Orange Theory class. My husband and I did, yeah. So you all can’t smell me, but I smell like one of those post-recovery creams because I hurt right now, because you said something that made me think about this. It was your stress relief. So right now there are two things that are my stress relief. One is I’m now running again as much as I possibly can and I started going to Pilates. No bueno. I don’t know that that’s going to last long. I don’t think that’s for me. And the second is meditation. So my husband is laughing because all that I have to do is hit the Daily Calms podcast. And the dogs come running from across the house and they come and sit on my lap. They know Tamara Levitt’s voice. So it starts, “welcome to the daily calm.” And the dogs just run because they know for 10 minutes, I am just going to sit still and they both sit in my lap. And my blood pressure goes down from both of those things.
Erin Hennessy
These all sound like very Teresa Parrot things to do. And I congratulate you on each of them.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Yes. So we’ll see in three weeks if I’m still doing Pilates. My guess is no, but I’m guessing I will still be doing Orange Theory and running because that’s me.
Erin Hennessy
We’ll see in 20 minutes if you’re still awake, but we…
Teresa Valerio Parrot
So make sure, I don’t know what you’re doing for you, but make sure that there’s still you time in the universe.
Erin Hennessy
There’s plenty. I also went to the gym yesterday and I also hurt, but, we’re not going to talk any more about that. And we have a hard stop today. so we’re going to…
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Let’s jump in!
Erin Hennessy
…wrench this conversation back on topic now that we’ve lost at least half of our listener base by talking about hair and exercise routines.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Welcome to my daily calm. Yes.
Erin Hennessy
Yeah, welcome to whatever we’re calling this.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Yes. Should we talk about my way to get everybody a daily calm? Yeah? It’s going to be a good one.
Erin Hennessy
Okay? Alright.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Know your institutions and states, FOIA policies and laws. Are my dogs going to run and sit in my lap?
Erin Hennessy
I don’t think so. I hope not.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
So there have been a couple of different pieces on my first story. And that is on UNC Chapel Hill, but this could be any institution, so I’m not picking on this institution. There have been stories about UNC Chapel Hill’s provost who has been talking about their board hiding information from the public, and he has filed a lawsuit about this. And this is really my tidbit about this. So we’ll have a link in the show notes to the story. And having served as assistant secretary of the University of Colorado system, I cannot stress enough that we’re starting an academic year. Know your state laws, know how those work, and y’all, let’s just be responsible people. I have a couple of resources that I would encourage for people to think about, and that is know also how your reporters are learning about the ways that they should be filing their FOIAs, because they have a right to know what it is that y’all are doing within the law.
So the Poynter Institute has resources. There are a number of different reporters who are excellent and also give some courses on this. Jessica Huseman is fantastic at this. I follow her on the socials and I’m hoping I’m pronouncing that last name correctly. She does her own webinar on this. There are a number of reporters. Paul Fain is great at knowing how to file those FOIAs. I used to try to work as best I could as a FOIA officer to help reporters, although I know some don’t try to help. EWA, I was just there two weeks ago. There are sessions on how to fill out FOIA requests. Please make sure that you’re knowing what the law is. And as best as you can, let’s not be skirt-skirting those, right?
Erin Hennessy
Yeah, it’s never a good look when people think they’re going to be the ones who are clever about making reporters wait weeks and months and sometimes years and charging outrageous amounts of money to comply with these requests. It’s just not the look.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
And I know boards think, again, former board officer, I know boards think and know that they can skirt these, but the reality is people know and word gets out.
Erin Hennessy
Public dollars. It’s public dollars.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
People, well, and but people, so part of the claim by the provost is that the board has been skirting public law and freedom of information, right? And they’ve been using Signal and they have been not on the up and up with how they have been getting together and how they have been convening. And we all know that there are ways to do this, right? You can either get together in small groups. Back in the day in my Blackberry days, you could send through pin. I don’t know if y’all remember this.
Erin Hennessy
Oh man do I remember that.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
I loved, I just found my Blackberry the other day. I still have it, cause I’m waiting for those days to come back. And I used to tell my board, just don’t do it. Let’s just have integrity. This is PRSA ethics month. Let’s just be ethical. Don’t do it. Just don’t hide that information. Let’s just be public stewards because those are our jobs.
Erin Hennessy
Yep, yep, because we’re spending other people’s money.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Welcome to the Daily Calm. That’s my first one.
Erin Hennessy
Okay, I don’t feel calmer. Also, and we have talked about this a million times, free story tip to the two reporters who might listen to this. FOIA the FOIA requests, right? You know, that’s a story waiting to be written. I know EWA, there’s a lot of conversation about good stories and what should we be covering and how can we do this in a thoughtful way. I’m surprised more reporters don’t write stories based on FOIA’d to FOIA requests. Find out what your local institution is sitting on and what their average response time is and all of those things. Find out what is sitting out there and how long it’s been open.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Yeah, we talk about this every so often. Once upon a time when I was at CU and Christopher Simpson was working with us, we decided to have what we called Freedom Day. And we said, this is what we’re going to do. You can ask for anything you want. We’re going to have all the officers of the institution available to you for one day. And here’s the thing. We’re going to make a copy of what you want. And we’re also going to make a copy for every other reporter who was there for Freedom Day. It was the worst day of my life, but also it was the best day of my life and the next day’s stories were amazing and then it was over.
Erin Hennessy
Yep. Yep. Good times. All right, let’s keep trucking.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Yeah. So AAUP had a report on the weaponization of Title VI in DOE investigations. I’m going to…
Erin Hennessy
Ah! Ah! Not DOE my friend.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Well, that’s what they called it. That’s what they called it.
Erin Hennessy
Well, that’s wrong!
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Tell us why, because I know this is one of your pet peeves. This is what they called it on their website. I’m just giving the people what AAUP said. Tell us why it’s wrong.
Erin Hennessy
Because DOE is the Department of Energy and ED is the Department of Education and it makes…
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Maybe this will be correct at some point, Erin, let me tell you why. So that’s what AAUP called their report.
Erin Hennessy
Okay.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
I’m gonna add to that something that was in Inside Higher Ed. Inside Higher Ed talked about The Other Office for Civil Rights. And this is where they started talking about health and human services and how they also are starting to file Title VI reports and claims. So now you have the Department of Education filing Title VI and you have Health and Human Services. So maybe AAUP is really just looking into the future and this is going to be the Department of Energy.
Erin Hennessy
Maybe. But some of our institutions do have nuclear facilities.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
That is true, Erin. That is true. I did a project on this. One of the things that they’re talking about in this Inside Higher Ed piece that it ties to this AAUP report is don’t forget that there is more than just the Department of Education that has civil rights departments. And so you may start hearing from other areas. But that AAUP report is good. It’s really good to talk about how the weaponization of Title VI is a thing. And there are a number of institutions that are starting to literally pay the price of these investigations.
Erin Hennessy
Yeah. Yes. And considering that higher education is currently regulated by every single federal department, cabinet department, I wouldn’t be surprised if other folks got in on that, on that game. See?
Teresa Valerio Parrot
See? So AAUP, you didn’t even know how smart you were.
Erin Hennessy
You didn’t even know. You are so smart. Come on the show. Come talk to us. Okay. Next up. Keep going.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Okay, here’s my next one. So this is a piece that I thought was really, really interesting. This is about why international student athletes are currently locked out of NIL deals. I thought this was really fascinating. This is in the EDU Ledger. And I wanna also give a shout out to the EDU Ledger. This used to be Diverse: Issues in Higher Ed. They have recently rebranded and I wanna give them a shout out. if you are looking for Diverse, I want to have you all now look for the EDU Ledger. There are real reasons why they have rebranded, but also kudos on the rebrand.
Erin Hennessy
And thank you for choosing a name that is shorter than Diverse: Issues in Higher Education.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Um yes, yes. Also, I always liked typing out the whole thing. I always thought that was really fun, but…
Erin Hennessy
Yeah, it always messed up my spreadsheets for my press lists because it would be…
Teresa Valerio Parrot
You had to then wrap the text?
Erin Hennessy
Yeah, I had to wrap the text to get their full name in there, but yes, I’m sorry, I digress.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
And it always bothered me when people just put Diverse: Issues. No, no, no, it’s not issues, no.
Erin Hennessy
My issues are diverse, but…
Teresa Valerio Parrot
No, but they have, this is more complex and nuanced. Anyway, but congratulations to EDU Ledger for their rebrand and also welcome to 2025. But I thought this was a really, really interesting..no, not that, like welcome to the ecosystem, right? Like this is why that’s…
Erin Hennessy
I was like, that’s rough, that’s rough. Sorry, friends.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
no, no, no, no, I adore that outlet. You know that I have penned pieces for that outlet. love, you know this.
Erin Hennessy
I do. I’ve just penned. Penned is…
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Hi Jamal, hi Jamal! Go back to the spring. I am one of the 40 women they highlighted for breaking glass ceilings, Erin Hennessy.
Erin Hennessy
I know you send me a postcard with your picture every month that says, greetings from one of the 40.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Look look I’m gonna move my screen look. Oh there I am, right there. Right there. Yeah, yep there I am. Anyway…
Erin Hennessy
Okay, this is maybe the worst episode ever. We should have Michael back. Gird your loins, Michael, you’re taking over my job.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
You said, where were the girding of the loins on this episode?
Erin Hennessy
I know, I know.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
So they talk about why international student athletes remain locked out of NIL. I hadn’t thought about this and it’s because it could put their visas at risk. I hadn’t stopped and thought about the fact that we weren’t seeing international students in NIL deals. And shame on me because I follow this quite a bit. But there are a high percentage of international students who are intercollegiate athletes and good gravy. Now that I stopped and thought about it, like I went down a rabbit hole about the realities of all of this and who we are leaving out and the money that is being left on the table. And this is actually a really, really sad story.
Erin Hennessy
Yeah. Yeah. It’s also very complex and international students are the focus of so many of our thoughts right now. And I think higher ed, American higher ed can default to just thinking about these folks as, to be gross about it, you know, cash cows, because they often are, they’re paying full freight, they’re not eligible for aid. And so we look at them more as, bolstering our balance sheets than as students who we should be fighting to ensure they have the full range of opportunities and experiences. So yeah, it’s I think just another area of NIL and collegiate athletics that we’re going to be hammering out over the next few years.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
But think about that, we’re using them for tuition dollars. We’re using them to offset our own domestic student tuition. And we’re still using them in ways that the courts have told us isn’t right for our student athletes. So they are still being used in so many different ways. And we’re not advocating for them in ways that we can and should be.
Erin Hennessy
Yeah, and it’ll be interesting to see if the folks who advocated for American students to be eligible to participate in name, image and likeness arrangements advocate for these students. I’m guessing they won’t.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Well, and as always, kudos to the EDU Ledger for advocating for students that others are not raising issues for.
Erin Hennessy
Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep.
Campus Docket Ad Read
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Erin, what’s on your mind?
Erin Hennessy
Um, nothing really. Not a lot. Not a lot.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
There’s nothing going on in this industry.
Erin Hennessy
Just big old static up there. I am thinking about a lot of things as we all are. One of the pieces that I was really taken with this week is, I’m pleased to say, in a student publication, The Battalion, which is the student newspaper for Texas A&M, ran a piece this week titled Anonymous professor calls on students be ‘agents of change.’ And this letter really touches on and sort of similar to your sort of revelation about international students and intercollegiate athletics, we’re talking a lot about overreaching into our campuses, into what our faculty can teach. We’re talking a lot about people being appointed to boards not to protect mission, but to advance a political position. And oftentimes I feel like the students are left out of the conversations about the impact of these kinds of decisions. We talk a lot about research, we talk a lot about faculty, and we sort of forget that the end result of all this is our students and that these choices and decisions will impact them. Not just their ability to access an institution, to complete a degree, to graduate on time with a manageable amount of debt, but really what they’re going to learn in the classroom. So I thought that this letter, which was written anonymously for reasons that I think we all are hip to, was a really important read. And the faculty member makes a really good argument. I’m going to read a chunk of it. It’s a little long, but bear with me because I think it sort of encapsulates so much of what we’ve been talking about around this issue. So…
“The challenge A&M faces is that its mission is complex with many actors and competing demands. As a land-grant institution, we are charged with teaching, research, and public service. As a public university, we are accountable to the state and to the taxpayer. And as your university, the place where you invest your time and money, we have an obligation not only to prepare you for the workforce and advanced study, but also to live meaningful lives of consequence. To this end, many actors must come together working in coordination and good faith. Faculty to teach and advance knowledge in the public interest, administrators to provide resources and uphold institutional standards, and a chancellor and board of regents to represent the people of Texas by safeguarding the university’s public mission and accountability. As should now be clear to us all, this good faith has broken down and you were the ones who have the most to lose as a result.”
I’m not a goosebumps kind of person, but this letter gave me some goosebumps. And I think it’s an important read and I think it’s an important conversation for our institutions to be having around how we engage students. Shared governance is ideally faculty and administration and the board, but also students because they are the ones who are the reason why we’re all here.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Right.
Erin Hennessy
So I thought that was really interesting. I also wanted to highlight as we’re talking about governance and who gets to make decisions for institutions and how boards are comprised to talk about a piece that ran in The Hill. I think it was earlier this week written by David Wippman who is the former president of Hamilton and Glenn Altschuler who is an emeritus professor at Cornell University, that focuses on and really highlights how red states are making changes to higher education one board member at a time. And this is an issue that in our work with AGB, we do a lot of thinking and writing and talking about. And this piece highlights some examples in Florida, in Virginia, in Ohio, in Texas, and really makes clear that the concept of governance is being eroded by political actors outside the institution. And it’s frightening.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
I don’t know that this is, so what I would say about this is I don’t think that this is new. And I would say, I think that this is something that you and I have been talking about for quite a while. Going back to bring up Michael again, this is something that Michael and I have talked about since I met him. I think this is something that we all need to be watching. And if you read the literature on what this looks like and how this has come about, this is, to the victors come the spoils, right? Elections have consequences and this is part of how pendulums swing based on elections. And this very much is tied to, you can trace elections and you can trace governance for higher education tied to the parties that are in office.
Erin Hennessy
Absolutely.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
And history repeats itself in higher education. And you and I talk about this quite a bit that some of the books that I love and I read like they’re a romance novel tied to the history of higher education trace this over the years and over the centuries in higher education in this country.
Erin Hennessy
Of course. And it makes complete sense based on what we do and the amount of money that we as institutions take in and push back out. So of course this is going to be a battleground. And I quote this so often, I’m sure I’ve already quoted it here on the podcast, but I had the opportunity to sit with the chancellor of Vanderbilt and Jon Meacham a number of years ago during the first Trump administration.
There was a lot of conversation about, know, things are bad and things are hard and this is the most divided we’ve ever been and this is the worst ever. And Meacham has a phrase, he talks about the narcissism of the present. And of course it feels the worst and the most and the horrible-est because we’re living in it. And he ties that concept back to think about the civil war when the nation was actually at war with itself. And so the moment we’re in is hard and stressful and very, challenging. And it is not the first time we’ve been here and it surely won’t be the last. But when we’re talking about governance and institutional autonomy, I did want to maybe try and make a somewhat more optimistic point. AGB has a new resource out as part of their govern now work, which is funded by the Mellon Foundation. It is a toolkit called How to Govern for Institutional Autonomy. It is available on their website. We will put a link in the show notes. And it’s a really comprehensive, really practical approach for boards to look at their policies, to have conversations about these issues, to think about how boards are structured and how committees work, and all kinds of questions that are really practical and useful. So recommend for our colleagues who have not received this. I’m sure you’re receiving links to this from AGB, but go and search it out because it’s really helpful as we think about how to navigate the challenges and control what we can control.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Exactly. And I was thinking about this the other day, I was cleaning out my office and you will appreciate this as the former editor of ACE’s presidency magazine.
Erin Hennessy
Aw RIP presidency. Yep.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
I know, right? I have kept copies of all of the magazines that I’ve either contributed an article to or helped shepherd an article through. And so I was looking at the cover headlines and the cover artwork and I would say about three quarters of the covers are about crisis in higher education, where we find ourselves now. They were all very, the moment that we are in and like the…
Erin Hennessy
Yeah, very breathless.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
…right, very breathless over my career, which is, you you know, I’m very young, right? So it’s just a couple of years. And so there is a consistent drum beat that we have never been in a moment like this. Well, if we’ve never been in a moment like this and it’s been a couple of years now, right? We need to remember that we’re going to get through this, that we have had challenges. It’s going to be okay. We’re going to find our way through, whether it’s the DOE or it’s ED or whoever it is that is bringing these different investigations.
Erin Hennessy
Yea, Well I’m going to fulfill the Teresa Valerio Parrot role on this podcast and end us on an optimistic note.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Oh yes! Yes!
Erin Hennessy
A couple episodes ago, we talked about some polling work from Gallup and Lumina showing increased confidence in higher education among the general public. What we said was a poll is a snapshot of how people are feeling at a moment in time and we need to look for more data to know if this is just people were feeling good that particular day or month when they were polled, or if this is indicative of something longer term. And I am pleased to tell you that we have a second data point. See that I am not getting overly excited. I am simply saying we have a second.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
It’s a pulse report. I’m seeing it as a pulse report.
Erin Hennessy
Right, it’s it’s data point number two. And we need more than two data points, but Vanderbilt University, they have now gotten two shout outs on one episode of the podcast. So I at least want to sweatshirt size, extra large. Vanderbilt University has something called the Vanderbilt Unity Poll and they have some data that is…pretty good.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
I think it’s good. I don’t think it’s glowing. I think it’s a point in the right direction. But again, I’m taking all data with a grain of salt, I always do. We just saw some data recently that was like, eh, maybe, maybe not. Here’s what I say. I always say, think about who their audience is. Think about, like, look at all of the parameters of the data. And let’s get what we can from it. Let’s learn from it. And let’s make wise decisions with whatever the data shares and presents.
Erin Hennessy
Yes. And, as has so often been the case recently, this polling information, or this poll, rather the results, when you break them down by political affiliation are still challenging for us with folks who, align themselves with the MAGA movement. But top line, nearly half of US adults said they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education and nearly 80% said that college education is very or somewhat important for a young person to succeed. That’s pretty good.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Correct. And this is also a poll, if I remember correctly, that broke out Republicans versus MAGA. Correct? And that was important.
Erin Hennessy
Yes. So next paragraph.
Yes. That question, like others reflected a split along party lines with 87% of Democrats and 68% of Republicans expressing that college education has some importance for success. The real divide was expressed by the 20% of adults who said they identify with president Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
That’s a key differentiation. That’s where we need the split to be coming because that, and again, that’s where I think the devil is in the details as we keep saying, is that when there, and this is, I’ve been saying this about a number of different things. Any group seen as a monolithic group, that really is a disservice to that group. So once we start to get disaggregation of data, we have a better understanding of what we’re talking about. And that split is so critically important for us to understand who we’re talking about and what we’re talking about so that we can move forward and start to think about communication, audiences, all of the things that we’re responsible for.
Erin Hennessy
Yes. And I have my own sort of in my pocket theory that all of these attacks from the Trump administration, while they are pleasing to that 20% of respondents who align themselves with MAGA. I think it is bolstering, my hypothesis is that those attacks will long-term bolster people’s regard for our industry and what we do.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
I agree. This is what we talked about two episodes ago, is that at some point people are saying enough. This is why I thought we had the Gallup bump, is that people are saying we’re done kicking them while they’re down and there is a value that they provide. So we need to continue to be talking about what that value is for them, not for us, for them. And we need to take advantage of this moment and allow that 20% to continue to feel how they feel and think what they think. And we need to focus on the other 80% which is what we’ve always said. We’ve always been so smart, Erin.
Erin Hennessy
I know. And good looking.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
And have great hair. So one last note if we end on an absolutely positive note. Everybody come spend time with us. I want to just give a shout out to the AMA Conference. We are both planning on being there and it is going to be in National Harbor. It’s going to be November 9th through 12th and we would love to have you come and see us. The keynote addresses have just been announced. The first speaker is Todd Henry. He is going to talk to us about how you balance brilliance and bravery in this environment. And especially because so many of us are feeling a little bit exhausted right now, how do we maintain our energy and our creativity and our brilliance and our bravery when we might be really feeling stretched? I got to talk to him and I have to tell you, it felt a little bit like an inspirational hour as well as therapy. So that was great. Ray Day, who you all know I adore, is going to do a alongside my colleague Vanessa Otero. And they’re going to talk about some data and also how we can think more smartly about how we’re communicating in this environment. We’re going to have a panel of some higher ed leaders, including Ted Mitchell, who was on the podcast. Kara, who you know, is the president of NACUBO, and she is brilliant. We’re going to have Sue, who’s the president of CASE, and we’re also going to have a representative from NACAC, because Angel is going to be abroad. And we’re going to close with Kevin McClure, who has also been on the podcast. And he is going to help us carry that caring university spirit back to our institutions and to our organizations to close out the conference.
Erin Hennessy
That sounds very exciting, and I am compelled to mention that I had a long dream about Ted Mitchell’s cell phone last night, in which Ted Mitchell did not appear. Just his phone.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Just his cell phone? I hope he didn’t lose it, and if so, I hope you were able to help him reunite with it.
Erin Hennessy
I had it and I couldn’t find him to return it. Do you ever have those dreams where like you have to dial a phone number and you just consistently dial it wrong or…
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Yes, I do that in real life!
Erin Hennessy
…mine are often about elevators and I can’t find the right elevator or the button doesn’t work or I keep missing the floor? Anyway, Ted Mitchell, if you’re listening with your cell phone.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Erin will be at AMA and I know you will be at AMA. So on the 10th, Ted Mitchell will be speaking. Erin can give you your phone then.
Erin Hennessy
That’s right. Also, I discovered the last time that I was at National Harbor that the sports bar on the bottom floor has duck pin bowling and I’m spectacularly bad at it. So if anybody wants to come have a beverage or a snack and do some duck pin bowling, let us know. Cause it was, it was super fun.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Yeah, I think that sounds fantastic. And by then I will be able to just be so zen and…pilated.
Erin Hennessy
And flexible. This is getting weird again, so…
Teresa Valerio Parrot
So on that note, us at National Harbor. We would love to see you in real life.
Erin Hennessy
Yes, yes, we should, I don’t know. feel like we should hide.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
We should do podcast meetup or something.
Erin Hennessy
Yeah. Or like, hide Trusted Voices swag around National Harbor. And I don’t know.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Maybe Volt will pay for a meetup even better.
Erin Hennessy
Hey, Kevin Renton.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
On that note, thank you everybody.
Erin Hennessy
Thanks for having me back.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Yes, thanks for being back. We missed you and we love you. Have a great day everybody.
Erin Hennessy
Of course. Ah, thank you. Bye, everybody.
Teresa Valerio Parrot
Thank you for joining us for this episode. You can find links in the show notes to the topics and articles referenced, as well as a copy of the show’s transcript on the Volt website, voltedu.com. Remember that you can always contact us with feedback, questions, or guest suggestions at trustedvoices@tvpcommunications.com. Follow Trusted Voices wherever you get your podcasts, and be sure to check out Higher Voltage and Campus Docket, the other podcasts on the Volt network. Until next time, thanks to Erin Hennessy, DJ Hauschild, and the Volt team, including Aaron and Maryna, for a great episode. And thank you for listening.
