Dive Brief:
- Jim Garland was a physicist before rising to the top job at Miami University of Ohio, where he honed his writing skills as an administrator and developed a number of best practices to share with other higher education leaders.
- In a Q&A for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Garland advises presidents to get away from sugar-coated cliches and write/speak about real issues facing the institution, addressing faculty and other members of the campus community like the intelligent people they are.
- Garland recommends speech teams craft the generic addresses but suggests that administrators who can should write their own speeches for the most important topics (like crises, bad news, hot-button social issues, and institutional policies), and he says to take advantage of opportunities to write essays that show a human side — for the campus newspaper, for example.
Dive Insight:
College and university presidents have a megaphone in an age in which even a whispered comment can turn into a social media firestorm. It is easy to fall back on rigidly prepared speeches that stay away from any controversy, and while this may keep a president out of trouble for awhile, the lack of genuine communication may become its own scandal. Recently resigned University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe was criticized for his silence on diversity issues in the system — a complaint helped along by social media posts that were perhaps too vetted and inauthentic.
Most people in the higher education community understand there are complicated problems facing institutions today. The best presidents have figured out how to discuss them openly. And these are the ones most likely to weather “gotcha” scandals when a president is potentially too honest.