Institutions of higher education are not just changing what they say.
They are actively scrambling to decide what they can afford to stand behind.
This isn’t because they lack language. It’s because they lack alignment.
Over the past several months, colleges and universities nationwide have begun rapidly reevaluating how they talk about their work. Some have focused on rebranding or restructuring diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, removing language from websites, and revising public commitments in response to growing political pressure and explicit threats tied to federal funding.
Ashley Northington is the vice chair of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission’s HBCU Success Advisory Board and a former divisional executive at the American Mathematical Society.
These decisions carry real consequences for students, faculty, and staff, and are not simply matters of language or positioning.
Recent coverage across higher education has warned of the risks of these rapid shifts, noting that institutions may be moving faster to change language than to clarify direction.
At the same time, reporting from Inside Higher Ed on funding pressures and program cuts points to a broader pattern: leaders are being forced to make high-stakes decisions under pressure, often without the internal alignment required to sustain them.
The pace of these changes has been striking.
In some cases, institutions have moved quickly to rename or restructure programs, removing language perceived as politically sensitive while leaving the underlying work largely unchanged—a pattern reflected in reporting across the sector. In others, leaders have paused or scaled back initiatives altogether, often without clearly articulating what will replace them, or how those decisions connect to broader institutional priorities.
From the outside, this can look like a messaging shift.
But it raises a more fundamental question: Are institutions changing how they communicate or revealing that they never made clear decisions about what they stand for in the first place?
In this environment, it is easy to interpret what we are seeing as a communications challenge. Institutions appear to be struggling with how to articulate their values, priorities, and commitments in a rapidly changing landscape. But in many cases, the issue is not messaging.
It is decision-making.
Across higher education, institutions are investing heavily in branding, marketing, and narrative construction. They are refreshing brand platforms, rewriting mission statements, and launching new campaigns to clarify who they are and what they stand for.
And yet, many are still struggling to build momentum.
Enrollment remains uncertain. Internal alignment is fragile. Strategic plans stall. Leadership teams find themselves revisiting the same questions, often with more urgency but no greater clarity.
At some point, it is worth asking a harder question: What if the issue isn’t how institutions are communicating but what they have actually decided?
In my work with presidents, executive teams, and public leaders, I see a consistent pattern: institutions often diagnose performance challenges as messaging failures when they are, in fact, decision failures.
Focusing on messaging becomes visible work. It is tangible. It feels productive. It creates the appearance of forward motion.
Messaging does not improve experience, increase satisfaction, or execute strategy. It doesn’t create alignment. It reflects it.
When institutions struggle to articulate who they are, it is often because they have not made the underlying choices that would make that clarity possible.
Who do we serve—primarily, not aspirationally?
What outcomes are we willing to prioritize—and what are we willing to stop doing?
Where will we invest, even if it means disappointing stakeholders elsewhere?
These are not communications questions.
They are leadership decisions.
And increasingly, they are the decisions institutions are avoiding.
This avoidance is understandable.
Higher education operates within a complex web of expectations: governing boards, faculty governance structures, donors, accreditors, policymakers, students, and communities—all with legitimate and sometimes competing priorities.
In that environment, clarity can feel risky.
So institutions hedge. They broaden their language. They attempt to be inclusive of every audience, every priority, every possibility.
The result is messaging that sounds comprehensive but lacks direction.
And over time, that lack of direction becomes operational.
Teams interpret strategy differently. Resources are spread thin. Initiatives multiply without clear prioritization. Leaders spend more time managing tension than advancing decisions.
From the outside, this often looks like a branding issue.
From the inside, it feels like something else entirely: a persistent lack of traction.
In response, many leaders are working to re-anchor their institutions in mission and values, efforts reflected in national frameworks like National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education’s Rooted in Mission and Values guide, shaped by practitioners working directly with institutions to align purpose, action, and outcomes.
But frameworks don’t make decisions. Leaders do.
This is where the distinction between messaging and decision-making becomes critical.
Strong messaging is not the starting point of strategy. It is the output of it.
Clear, compelling institutional narratives emerge when leadership has made and aligned around real choices.
Not just what the institution values, but how those values show up in:
- program offerings
- resource allocation
- student support models
- partnerships
- measures of success
When those decisions are clear, messaging becomes easier. And more honest.
The consequences of getting this wrong are not limited to brand perception.
They show up in ways that are far more consequential:
- Students receive inconsistent signals about what an institution offers and prioritizes.
- Faculty and staff operate without a shared understanding of direction, leading to fragmentation and fatigue.
- Leadership credibility erodes as stated priorities fail to translate into action.
- Strategic plans become documents rather than drivers of decision-making.
In a moment when higher education is navigating funding uncertainty, political pressure, and declining public trust, this gap between messaging and execution is becoming harder to ignore.
If institutions want to strengthen their positioning, the work does not begin with better messaging.
It begins with better decisions.
Not faster decisions. Clearer ones.
Decisions that are explicit. Aligned. And operationalized across the institution.
That requires leadership teams to move beyond consensus language and into real commitments.
It requires governance structures that support prioritization, not just representation. And it requires a willingness to accept that clarity will inevitably exclude some possibilities in order to make others real.
In the end, messaging still matters. But it plays a different role than many institutions assign to it.
It doesn’t create alignment. It reflects it.
Until colleges and universities address the decisions underneath their narratives, they will continue to invest in messaging that cannot carry the weight placed upon it.
And the result will be what many are already experiencing:
More communication. More activity. Very little movement.
Ashley Northington is the vice chair of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission’s HBCU Success Advisory Board and a former divisional executive at the American Mathematical Society, where she led strategy, operations, and engagement work across a national scholarly and higher education ecosystem.
