The Rise of Narrative-Driven Leadership in Higher Education
Presidents are often trained to believe that sound decisions, grounded in evidence and made in good faith, will ultimately speak for themselves. Unfortunately, that assumption rarely holds today.
In this environment, presidential leanings, hypotheses, and observations are immediately distributed, interpreted, and critiqued. Campus and community perceptions form quickly and give rise to narratives—often before the decision is even finalized and the rationale, constraints, or tradeoffs are formulated or understood. Though frequently partial or misshapen, perceptions create narratives, and narratives harden quickly. In short order, they circulate as fact, regardless of accuracy.
These realities are not communication failures. They are the conditions of higher education today.
The Impact of Perception on University Governance and Risk
Perception is no longer merely adjacent to reality; it is frequently treated as reality itself in the ways university members interact with each other and in the the ways media cover emerging plans and decisions. What stakeholders believe to be true about presidential intent, institutional health, or leadership competence shapes behavior, governance posture, and risk tolerance in ways that produce real outcomes. Local and social media sources put a particular “spin” on leaders and the perceived state of university affairs. Boards tightened control when there is perceived instability. Faculty and staff grow anxious in anticipation of “rightsizing.” Donor contributions slow in response to whatever angst they are seeing and reading about. These reactions occur in real time, based on what appears to be happening. There is no luxury of time; reactions are formed, shared, and reposted on the spot rather than developed after facts are confirmed.
If and when a more accurate and nuanced perspective takes shape, it is often too late. An early narrative has taken hold and prompted consequences that are already in motion.
Truth Decay: Why Narratives Function as Nonfiction in Academia
Narrative today does not function as a story. It functions as nonfiction.
Partial accounts circulate as complete explanations. Inference substitutes for evidence. Repetition confers legitimacy. Over time, these narratives are no longer perceived as interpretations; they are accepted as settled truth. As I explain here (Ten Ways for Higher Education Leaders to Meet and Define This Moment), these dynamics reflect what RAND has termed “truth decay”—the growing tendency to grant opinions and personal experiences the same intellectual weight as verified facts. One of the concrete manifestations of truth decay is not the absence of facts. It’s the erosion of shared agreement about how facts are weighed, contextualized, and communicated.
For presidents, the erosion of shared agreements means that they are exercising leadership as narratives are forming—often without their authorship or even their awareness.
Managing Presidential Vulnerability During Institutional Change
Presidents are hired to absorb institutional pressure. They are expected to make necessary decisions: those intended to protect accreditation, stabilize finances, restructure programs, and address misconduct. Even when these decisions are necessary, ethical, and well reasoned, they likely increase presidential vulnerability.
Why? Because decisions that surface uncomfortable realities, result in loss, or constrain autonomy often generate narratives of non-transparency, authoritarianism, commodification, or mismanagement. This is particularly the case when institutions are already under strain.
The problem is not the decision itself. It is the way university members often respond under stress. Under stress, faculty and staff may rally around perceived underdogs; band together to confront positional authority; conflate shared governance with direct democracy; or challenge decisions that clarify limits, tradeoffs, or reductions.
Strategies for Early Intervention in Campus Narratives
Presidents do not control perception. But they should model how inaccurate perceptions and the narratives they generate should be challenged.
Such modeling requires early intervention. Stepping up as president—and supporting cabinet members to do the same—means naming incomplete narratives, supplying missing context, clarifying decision authority, and explicitly distinguishing between what is known, what is uncertain, and what is being inferred. University leaders cannot expect faculty, staff, and students to counter truth decay if they do not serve as exemplars for the difficult and courageous work that such efforts require.
To be clear: both a university president and the institution they lead are ill-served by waiting for “the truth to come out.” By then, the narrative may already be shaping judgments, constraining options, and narrowing the space for responsible leadership.
In this context, even responsible leadership can be recast as failure.
The Mechanics of Misinformation in College Administration
Misinformed perceptions rarely begin with outright falsehood. Inaccurate narratives seldom recount complete fiction. More often, both originate in partial truths that are amplified, rearranged, or stripped of context.
A single data point is presented in isolation. A decision is shared without clarity about the constraints at hand. A delayed communication is interpreted as managerial avoidance. A candid disclosure is reframed as alarmism. Each fragment, taken alone, may contain a kernel of truth. Taken together, they can produce a narrative that no longer reflects institutional reality. It functions, however, as if it does.
Once misinformed perceptions circulate, the work of correction becomes more difficult. When perceptions go unexamined, or are implicitly reinforced through silence or partial reframing, they begin to shape the narrative-making process itself. In short order, interpretations harden, expectations form, and preferred outcomes are embraced as realistic goals. By the time a board or senior leader attempts to redirect or contextualize the narrative, it may already be governing how decisions are understood and judged.
Strategies for Early Intervention in Campus Narratives
Presidents do not control perception. But they should model how inaccurate perceptions and the narratives they generate should be challenged.
Such modeling requires early intervention. Stepping up as president—and supporting cabinet members to do the same—means naming incomplete narratives, supplying missing context, clarifying decision authority, and explicitly distinguishing between what is known, what is uncertain, and what is being inferred. University leaders cannot expect faculty, staff, and students to counter truth decay if they do not serve as exemplars for the difficult and courageous work that such efforts require.
To be clear: both a university president and the institution they lead are ill-served by waiting for “the truth to come out.” By then, the narrative may already be shaping judgments, constraining options, and narrowing the space for responsible leadership.
The Diagnostic Approach: Moving from Rebuttal to Response
Presidents often ask the most immediate and understandable question first:
How do I correct this inaccurate narrative?
A multifaceted question is more apropos in most cases:
What narrative is forming, what elements of truth or distortion does it contain, which members of the leadership team are best positioned to speak to the emerging inaccuracies, and how are those inaccuracies shaping governance behavior right now?
This level of examination matters. It moves leadership attention from rebuttal to diagnosis and response. It recognizes that narratives left uninterrogated often negatively impact the leader and the institution and exert influence on boards deal with the real and perceived issues at hand.
Narrative Stewardship: A Shared Responsibility for Senior Teams
Preparing a senior leadership team to redirect and reframe partial or misleading narratives is not an exercise in spin. It is a form of institutional stewardship—one that requires shared responsibility, coordination, and accountability across the executive team. In complex institutions, narratives rarely emerge from a single decision or communication. They form through accumulation: incomplete information, delayed context, informal interpretation, and selective amplification.
Narrative stewardship ensures that decisions are understood within appropriate institutional, financial, and governance context; that trustees, faculty leaders, and senior staff are operating from shared factual baselines; and that perception does not quietly substitute for evidence in consequential judgments. The work includes engaging faculty and staff in key meetings, allowing them to ask questions, providing clear responses, and challenging misconceptions without calling out or embarrassing individuals.
Effective narrative stewardship clarifies roles and collaboration. Presidents set direction and model transparency, and senior teams reinforce both through integrated and synchronous leadership. These leaders reinforce context at key junctures, correct drift as soon as the see or sense it and address misinterpretation within their own divisions. In highly functional universities, these responsibilities are distributed rather than centralized. It is the very distribution of authority and accountability that allows healthy institutions to navigate moments of stress before partial narratives get hardened and prompt responses that do not align with the reality.
The Role of Governing Boards in Protecting Leadership Narrative
In an environment where perception often functions as reality and narrative circulates as nonfiction, boards play a decisive role in shaping how a university responds to, tests, and challenges the narratives surrounding its institutional leadership and decision-making.
Board action—or inaction—signals whether interpretations will based and reinforced by evidence or grow out partial or inaccurate information that circulates unchecked.
Boards do not merely receive narratives; they establish which narratives warrant scrutiny, which require additional context, and which demand correction. At critical moments, effective boards deliberately slow interpretation, insist on fuller context, and distinguish evidence from inference. By doing so, they model for the institution that governance judgment is not reactive and that accuracy matters more than immediacy.
Governance in this context requires more than formal oversight. It demands sustained attention to how narratives are forming, whose interpretations are being elevated, and whether board responses are anchored in institutional fact rather than cumulative assumption. When boards engage narratives with discipline and restraint, they create conditions that support sound decision-making and preserve leadership capacity under pressure.
Frequently Asked Questions About Presidential Leadership, Perception, and Narrative
Q. Why does perception matter so much in university presidential leadership today?
A: Perception increasingly functions as reality in higher education. What stakeholders believe about presidential intent, institutional health, or leadership competence shapes governance behavior, risk tolerance, donor confidence, and faculty response in real time. In an environment of accelerated information circulation, those beliefs often produce consequences before facts are fully established or contextualized.
Q. How do narratives form so quickly around presidential decisions in higher education?
A. Narratives form early, often while issues are still unfolding. Partial information, isolated data points, inferred motives, and delayed context combine to produce initial explanations that ground the narrative. Repetition, reposting, and social media circulate the narrative broadly. The widespread distribution and amplification confer perceived legitimacy, allowing early interpretations to harden into “settled truth” even when they remain incomplete or inaccurate.
Q. How and when can a university president tell when perceptions substitute for institutional reality?
A. Too often, this is a tendency that occurs at the outset rather than emerging over time. It is evident when interpretations spread faster than verified information and reactions precede formal discussion. Indicators include questions framed around assumed motives, responses to anticipated outcomes rather than announced decisions, and pressure to respond to narratives rather than to conditions. In such moments, perception is not adjacent to reality—it is already governing behavior.
Q. Why can well-reasoned and ethical decisions still increase presidential risk?
A: Decisions that surface constraints, losses, or tradeoffs often trigger stress responses. Regardless of their quality, such decisions can generate accusations of non-transparency, overreach, or mismanagement that quickly frame the early narrative. The risk lies less in the decision itself than in how it is interpreted, circulated, and reinforced as the prevailing narrative.
Q. What are the early warning signs that narratives are beginning to shape university board behavior?
A. Narratives begin shaping board behavior when oversight shifts from inquiry to reaction. Indicators include reliance on informal information, elevation of anecdote over evidence, shortened decision timelines, or increased focus on how decisions will be perceived rather than what the institution requires. Left unexamined, these assumptions can quietly harden into governance posture.
