Just a few days ago, I logged onto Zoom to co-facilitate an Evolve Institute coaching circle alongside my colleagues Dr. Keith Edwards and Dr. Dawn Lee. In our virtual circle sat senior higher education leaders from across the United States, representing regional state universities, large research institutions, and small private liberal arts colleges.
It was our first gathering since the November midterm elections.
Over the last week, higher education think pieces and media roundtables have been analyzing what the election returns might mean for the sector. Much of that commentary focuses on potential relief: the likelihood of stronger legislative firewalls against federal overreach, favorable shifts in several state legislatures, and potential avenues of state support. There is valid reason to welcome those developments, especially for those of us who have spent years navigating hostile executive orders and organized attacks against diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) in education.
Yet when we invited the leaders in our circle to name what was truly top of mind in their leadership that day, the overarching theme wasn’t relief, celebration, or triumph.
It was unrest.
Enough with the Finger-Wagging
Real talk: I’m seeing a disconnect between what people who comment on higher education from the outside think campus leaders need, and what leaders on the ground are actually carrying.
In particular, I’ve noticed a troubling amount of finger-wagging in post-election commentary. Pundits and armchair critics are quick to lecture campus administrators about the decisions they made over the past two years: “We told you not to compromise. We told you not to rebrand those cultural centers or pause those hiring initiatives, and you caved.” Then comes the immediate pressure to reverse course overnight; to swing the institutional pendulum back with whiplash speed.
I have no interest in meeting finger-wagging with more finger-wagging.
As an educator whose entire decades-long career in higher education and professional coaching is rooted in racial equity and social justice, I was deeply disappointed by many of the concessions made across the country. I’ve held space for colleagues and coaching clients who suffered personal, professional, and emotional harm when their institutions pulled back support. And if I am being completely candid, as a queer person of color, I’ve felt that hurt personally. The emotional pain is real.
Yet as an executive coach, I also know that relitigating the past or shaming exhausted leaders does not move our institutions forward. Blame is often pain looking for the quickest relief; it rarely yields the kind of transformative strategy needed to prevent the pain from recurring.
Furthermore, the legal narrative that prompted so much administrative panic in the first place continues, with little fanfare, to steadily crumble. In courtroom after courtroom, legal challenges seeking to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in higher education and across other industries have fallen apart. Our partner organization, the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education (NADOHE), is among those securing critical legal victories defending mission-driven inclusion work against overbroad, politically motivated restrictions.
The reality is that seasoned educators who have spent decades doing this work possess a sophisticated understanding of constitutional and civil rights law. Their initiatives were designed from the ground up to be lawful, mission-centered, and defensible.
So rather than indulging in an unhelpful round of “I told you so,” the generative, courageous question we ask at the Evolve Institute is this: What can we learn from what we just lived through, and how do we choose to lead moving forward?
To help higher education leaders ground themselves in this uncertain, transition-filled climate, here are six foundational lessons from our work at Evolve:
1. Exercise the Leadership Superpower of Slowing Down
When the political ground shifts, our first instinct is usually to sprint. In higher education (and most every industry), urgency often masquerades as decisive leadership. Leaders feel immense internal and external pressure to release immediate campus-wide statements, announce sweeping operational changes, or execute sudden course corrections.
Moving too quickly from panic is precisely how many institutions misstepped in the first place.
Reacting with haste now will only create another round of exhausting pendulum swinging, leaving staff, faculty, and students disoriented and demoralized. As Keith wrote in his exploration of The Leadership Superpower of Slowing Down, intentional slowness is not foot-dragging or evasion; it is the discipline of leading with emotional intelligence, verifying data, and resisting knee-jerk panic.
Before you draft the memo, announce the policy, or restructure the division, pause. Take a breath. Slowing down allows your thinking brain to catch up with your nervous system, ensuring your next move is guided by strategy rather than pure adrenaline.
2. Tether to Your Personal Foundations
Leading in higher education right now feels like standing in the middle of a gale-force storm: torrential rain, unpredictable lightning, and crosswinds pulling from every stakeholder group. If you depend on external circumstances to bring you calm and peace, you are in serious trouble.
To survive (and, I hope, even flourish), you must become the calm eye at the center of the storm.
In every Evolve coaching journey, whether with individuals or teams, we begin by turning inward, focusing on a deep dive into you. We help leaders build and strengthen the foundations on which truly powerful and sustainable leadership rests: clarifying core values, articulating a clear life purpose, learning to quiet and bypass the inner critic, and accessing an intuitive "Inner Guide."
When you know who you are, what you stand for, and what your non-negotiables are, external turbulence cannot topple you. You stop being a thermostat that fluctuates with the temperature at every conference table, and start projecting the grounded stability your campus desperately needs.
3. Care for Your Leadership Traumas
Let’s name something that too rarely makes it into the discourse on leadership: leading through sustained institutional conflict leaves real scars.
At Evolve, we originally conceptualized this dynamic around equity leadership traumas: the specific, visceral wounds leaders suffer when their values are targeted, when they are publicly hung out to dry by an administration, or when they face vicious backlash. Over time, we recognized that this phenomenon touches virtually every facet of senior campus administration. Toxic supervision. Organizational betrayal. Sudden budget retrenchments that force leaders to dismantle programs they spent a decade building.
When Keith, Dawn, and I present on healing from leadership trauma at conferences across the U.S., it is consistently standing room only. The rooms are packed because leaders everywhere are carrying unhealed wounds that sit in the passenger seat of their daily leadership, occasionally grabbing the steering wheel, and they are hungry for opportunities to talk about it.
Unhealed trauma keeps leaders in a defensive crouch, hyper-vigilant and fearful of taking necessary risks. In Evolve, we help our participants move beyond this stance with our Three Rs framework: Recognize, Reconcile, and Revisit.
Recognize: Acknowledge the wound and its present-day emotional triggers.
Reconcile: Harvest the hard-won wisdom from the experience while deliberately setting down the fear and shame that no longer serve you.
Revisit: Step back into the memory as a case study, realizing that with your current tools and wisdom, that past harm no longer gets to dictate how you lead today.
4. Learn to Lead Through Influence
Whether you sit in a director’s chair, a dean’s suite, or the president’s office, positional authority only gets you so far. You cannot mandate deep institutional transformation by administrative decree. Sustainable change in higher education is built through coalitions, not commands.
When leaders encounter skepticism or resistance to equity-centered initiatives, our default response is often to grab our "judge’s robes." We mentally cross-examine the other person, labeling them as obstructive, backward, or uncommitted to the mission.
At Evolve, we challenge leaders to take off the judge’s robes and put on the detective’s hat. A detective doesn’t assume their first assessment is correct; a detective gets curious. What are your stakeholders actually afraid of? What pressures are keeping that department chair or board member awake at 2:00 AM? As philanthropy leader Kay Sprinkel Grace wisely put it, “You have to meet, not beat, an objection.”
Influence means seeking to understand the diverse currencies, fears, and motivations across your campus ecosystem. When you build strategies that account for how people actually experience your institution, rather than designing for an imaginary world where everyone thinks just like you, resistance transforms into collaboration.
5. Practice Radical Responsibility
During our post-midterm coaching circle, this was the lesson that sparked the deepest collective exhale among our participants. Senior leaders, particularly those with marginalized identities or those carrying deep commitments to social justice, tend to overfunction. They carry the moral weight of the entire university on their shoulders, absorbing blame for systemic issues centuries in the making.
Radical responsibility means taking 100% responsibility for your actions, your reactions, and your commitments. Nothing more, and nothing less. It is about rigorously tending to your own side of the street. You are responsible for your preparation, your integrity, your communication, and your boundaries. You are not responsible for another person’s defensiveness, the state legislature’s political posturing, or managing everyone else’s anxiety. When you stop carrying weight that does not belong to you, you liberate enormous energy to focus on what you can actually shape.
6. Cultivate Brave Spaces
Finally, you knew I couldn't write about this moment without returning to the concept that sits at the center of my life's work.
Over two decades ago, my dear friend Kristi L. Clemens and I co-created the brave space framework because we observed educators and students hiding behind the illusion of "safety" whenever conversations about power, privilege, and justice became contentious. In diverse groups, promising people that an honest conversation will be completely comfortable or risk-free is a false promise.
Bravery is not the absence of fear; it is recognizing that something is more important than your fear, and taking action anyway.
Transforming our institutions requires us to cultivate brave spaces across campus: spaces where cabinets, faculty senates, and cross-functional teams can lean into discomfort, unpack creative conflict with care for one another, and attack institutional problems rather than attacking each other. Psychological safety is our destination; brave space is the collaborative vehicle that gets us there.
No, You Don’t Have to Do This Alone
In higher education, there is an unspoken expectation that senior leaders must arrive with all the answers neatly tucked into their briefcases. Because campus resources are perpetually constrained, administrators often isolate themselves, convincing themselves that asking for help is a sign of incompetence or vulnerability they simply can't afford.
Going it alone carries a devastating price tag.
A few months ago, I wrote about the hidden ledger where leaders quietly tally the personal costs of staying in the fight: the chronic stress, the emotional numbing, the missed family dinners, and the slow erosion of physical well-being. When we attempt to white-knuckle our way through institutional storms in isolation, that ledger eventually comes due in the form of deep cynicism, estrangement from our core values, and profound burnout.
Frameworks, toolkits, and blog posts like this one can illuminate potential paths forward, but discerning which route actually serves your campus and aligns with your values is complex work. When standing at a crossroads, trusted peers and mentors are invaluable. Yet an experienced coach offers something distinct: a dedicated partner focused not just on where you’re going, but on who you become along the way.
A trained professional coach won’t hand you a prepackaged playbook. Rather, they will partner with you to co-create a dedicated, confidential, brave space where you can set down the exhaustion of executive performance, look honestly at the messy reality of your campus, and collaborate with a skilled and knowledgeable thought partner to turn these frameworks into everyday practice. It gives you the space to ask the questions you can't ask in cabinet meetings, tend to your leadership traumas, and align your strategy with your well-being.
The midterms have delivered a moment of transition and possibility. It is up to us to ensure that transition becomes a movement toward meaningful, lasting institutional renewal, and that we build the communities of support necessary to sustain ourselves along the way.
Questions for Reflection
I invite you to spend a few minutes reflecting on these questions. If you feel moved, share your thoughts in the comments below:
The Pace Check: Where are you currently feeling the pressure to rush or make a reactive decision on your campus? What would happen if you chose instead to slow down?
The "Ghost": What past leadership trauma or institutional setback is influencing how you are responding to the opportunities and challenges of this moment?
Your Side of the Street: What is one piece of emotional or institutional baggage you are currently carrying that does not belong to your side of the street?
Traveling Song: "Defying Gravity" from Wicked
Yes, I know. A proud queer man reaching for a showtune during a high-stakes moment? I realize I am completely playing to type here. Say something to me. 😘
Longtime readers know music is an essential compass for my leadership journey. And lately, as I sit with leaders navigating this tumultuous post-election transition, the iconic Act I finale from Wicked has been echoing persistently in my heart.
The artists who have made this song what it is—from Stephen Schwartz to Idina Menzel to (my current fave) Cythia Erivo—gave us more than just a Broadway blockbuster anthem. They gave us a masterclass in what happens when a leader decides to stop playing along with broken institutional rules that demand their silence.
Something has changed within me
Something is not the same
I'm through with playing by the rules of someone else's game
Too late for second-guessing
Too late to go back to sleep
It's time to trust my instincts, close my eyes
And leap
What moves me so deeply about this song right now isn't naive optimism. Elphaba isn't pretending the Wizard's regime isn't dangerous, or that the skies ahead will be sunny and clear. She knows precisely how hostile the conditions are, and she recognizes the steep personal cost of taking a stand.
And yet, she leaps anyway.
It is an anthem of radical clarity: the realization that the status quo is no longer tolerable, coupled with the profound, grounded confidence that real change is possible when you bet on your own values. As we face this next chapter in higher education, may we find that same fierce determination to rise above the cynicism, trust our instincts, and soar.
