Across public higher education, there are institutions where the machinery of governance still hums but the spirit that once powered it has stalled. Leadership meetings occur on schedule, strategic plans are cited in slide decks, and community updates are filled with the right vocabulary of innovation and inclusion. Yet within the walls of these colleges—and, increasingly, even their flagships—something essential has gone missing. The motions of leadership continue, but the substance has been replaced by performance.
I’ve witnessed this pattern repeating itself across multiple campuses. The details differ, but the structure is eerily consistent: senior leaders who convene regularly but deliberate little; strategic plans that exist primarily as talking points; engagement data that reveal trust so eroded that analysts question its reliability. The effect is not chaos but a kind of disciplined inertia—a system organized to appear active while insulating itself from change.
In these settings, leadership meetings take on the quality of dress rehearsals. The chief executive uses the forum to test language and timing before addressing trustees, legislators, or the press. Feedback is solicited in form but not in fact. Senior administrators, having learned that dissent is unwelcome, offer minor adjustments or none at all. Over time, the meeting ceases to be a space for governance and becomes one for message refinement. What had been the executive brain of the institution devolves into a focus group for optics.
The dynamic is contagious. Committees perform participation; initiatives circulate through polished memos but die in follow-up. Even strong leaders learn the futility of candor. After enough cycles of symbolic consultation, silence becomes not apathy but self-preservation. Governance persists as choreography—precisely timed, flawlessly presented, and devoid of risk.
Externally, the performance is convincing. Annual reports gleam, and speeches blend metrics with moral purpose in tones calibrated for donors and policymakers. The public sees a confident executive fluent in the idiom of transformation. Boards, reassured by coherence of message, often mistake rhetorical mastery for organizational health. Inside, however, the performance lands differently. Faculty and staff recognize that narrative has overtaken reality. Strategy has been subsumed by branding; metrics are curated for their aesthetic rather than diagnostic value. The institution becomes fluent in its own marketing language. It begins to live in the PowerPoint version of itself.
This inversion—from substance to surface—is what defines the modern optics economy. When perception becomes the only safe metric of success, authenticity recedes and administrative energy is consumed by self-presentation. Even the instruments designed to measure culture start to fail. In more than one institution, employee-engagement surveys have produced anomalies so extreme that analysts labeled the results statistically “rare.” Such irregularities do not arise from sampling error; they occur when people no longer believe their responses are private or consequential. The data cease to describe reality and instead record mistrust itself. The institution continues to collect information because the act of measurement looks responsible, but the information no longer informs anything.
Where dialogue has been replaced by rehearsal, resistance becomes the only remaining expression of agency. Unions, senates, and staff councils that once collaborated on implementation now default to obstruction—not because every proposal is flawed, but because participation without voice feels complicit. Even policies that promise genuine improvement meet procedural delay. Outsiders interpret this as stubbornness; insiders recognize it as a survival strategy. When consultation is performative, refusal becomes the last credible act of engagement.
Higher education rewards articulate leadership. Trustees and accreditors gravitate toward presidents who can convert complexity into narrative, aligning aspiration with analytics. But eloquence can become a mask. Institutions rarely fail because their leaders lack polish; they fail when polish replaces presence. A college can withstand fiscal pressure, demographic decline, and political interference. It cannot survive the collapse of trust that follows when people stop believing that leadership intends to act on what it says. The paradox is that the more effective the external performance, the more insulated the executive becomes from internal reality. The organization begins to orbit around presentation. In time, it loses the ability to distinguish between what it shows and what it is.
Reversal requires humility and proof, not another plan. Leaders must re-establish a connection between language and consequence: ending meetings with clear decisions and ownership, reporting publicly on follow-through, and rewarding those who speak honestly even when the message is uncomfortable. The culture of performance can only be displaced by the culture of evidence—one built not on messaging but on measurable trust. Colleges and universities can recover from nearly any material setback. What they cannot recover from is the slow corrosion of authenticity that turns leadership into theater. Once that happens, the mission becomes a script delivered to an audience that no longer believes. Rebuilding faith in the performance begins only when leaders remember that governance is not a stage and that sincerity, not style, is what makes institutions endure.
So What Can We Do?
So what can we do? For a start, we might stop pretending that PowerPoint decks are oxygen. We could attempt small, radical acts like telling the truth in meetings, admitting when the plan isn’t working, and remembering that “strategic alignment” is not a synonym for “please don’t argue with me.” We could insist that leaders spend less time “disrupting” and more time earning the basic human trust of the people they lead. And perhaps we could replace our endless cycles of consultant frameworks with something truly dangerous: listening.
Because the future of higher education won’t be rescued by another branded initiative or an AI-polished mission statement. It will be restored when someone at the leadership table finally raises a hand and says, “This sounds impressive, but what are we actually doing?” That isn’t rebellion; that’s governance. And it’s long past time we gave it a standing ovation.