One of the most pressing challenges facing senior administrators in higher education is how to lead through crisis — or, these days, crises. Yet when institutions recruit deans, provosts, and presidents, competency in crisis management is often undervalued in favor of academic vision and fund-raising potential.
The recent low public confidence in higher education demands a heightened focus on crisis leadership as a core competency of senior administrators. Few newly hired deans have training or experience in crisis management, and even provosts and presidents could use a reminder of key principles. Whether a crisis is large or small, political or financial, public or internal, handle it well and your efforts may garner praise or go entirely unnoticed. But a poorly managed crisis is seldom overlooked and can undermine confidence in the institution for years.
I have been honing my own crisis-leadership skills lately. In August 2021, I arrived in Singapore to join Yale-Nus College as dean of the faculty — just weeks before news that the college would close in 2025. I have spent the past few years guiding the campus community through this unexpected closure. Based on my experiences managing crises both overseas and at my home institution of Yale University, here are some lessons learned.
Lesson 1: There will always be another crisis. Accept a senior-leadership post and you can expect crises to occur every academic year, every term — and even more frequently for presidents and provosts. Many crises will overlap, and you will inherit some ongoing or slow-simmering ones from your predecessor.
There isn’t much of a grace period anymore for academic leaders to learn on the job, a reality that search committees and trustees should keep in mind. Many potential appointees are exceptional academic leaders but woefully inexperienced at crisis leadership. Some personal traits may predict success in a crisis (more on this below) but there is no substitute for experience. And even experienced leaders can be poorly prepared for the type, magnitude, and complexity of crises they may face in a new position.
Too many academic leaders end up scrambling to pull people onto their team to manage a crisis that is already out of control. Which is why you need a core crisis team in place from Day 1. You also need points of contacts from across the institution who can join your crisis team, as needed and as quickly as possible. Its membership should include:
- Core members. You will lead the group but someone in your office (e.g., your chief of staff) should serve as the point person. The core team must have members of the public-affairs and general-counsel offices.
- Specialists. Once the nature of the crisis becomes clear, you will want to bring in topical experts. Have a list of names you can call on from athletics, mental health, human resources, the faculty, student life, and other offices. External experts from law and consulting firms might also be appropriate and helpful (but only if they have a good understanding of campus culture).
- Relevant stakeholders. Again, depending on the situation, you might want to bring in representatives of students, parents, alumni, professors, staff, and other constituent groups. Having such people ready and willing to be called upon, as needed, will save a lot of time.
The upshot: Deans, provosts, and presidents (and increasingly trustees) have to be ready to handle crises before they happen. Because they will happen.
Lesson 2: Not all emergencies are crises, and vice versa. Every institution will face emergencies, disasters, and crises, and your ability to differentiate the three situations is critical to an appropriate response. First some definitions:
- Emergency: a serious, unexpected, and often dangerous situation requiring immediate action. Examples include a death on the campus, a natural disaster, or an active shooter. Some academic scandals (things like financial improprieties, sexual harassment, research misconduct) might not seem to fit the classic definition of an emergency but because they are typically unexpected and occasionally dangerous, they may fall under the emergency rubric and require quick, if not immediate, action.
- Disaster: a sudden accident or natural catastrophe that causes loss of life or property damage. A disaster is an emergency and might initiate a crisis.
- Crisis: a period of instability or uncertainty — often sparked by an unexpected or unusual event — that carries the potential for a range of undesirable outcomes, including threats to campus safety and institutional reputation or lack of confidence in leadership. Some examples: Covid, academic- and sexual-misconduct cases, or major campus protests. Crises can be generated by internal causes, external ones, or some combination of the two.
Emergency management is typically operational and follows an existing plan of action. The vast majority of emergencies will not initiate a crisis — but some will, and understanding which ones may become crises depends heavily on the local and global context. For instance, many misconduct cases go unnoticed, but if the case includes a high-profile academic, it can easily initiate a crisis. Events that touch on academic freedom — e.g., inviting or canceling a controversial speaker — may also create a crisis, particularly if the topic has received public attention from protesters, politicians, and groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Crises are fundamentally different from emergencies in nature and scope. A crisis tends to require a quick public response — a “holding statement” that will calm and reassure people — but not quick answers. If you take too long to respond, others, especially on social media, will shape the narrative for you in ways that can exacerbate the crisis or generate a new one. At the same time, an initial statement that is poorly framed can also worsen a crisis.
Most crises, by definition, do not have an easy or immediate answer. Offering a quick answer might lock you into an untenable position or poor decision.
Effective leadership in a crisis is about problem-solving, which allows the evolution of answers and solutions. Many crises would benefit from an adaptive-management framework, in which new information feeds into the process to create new approaches or solutions. Taking your time to find a solution is not, however, a substitute for having a strong moral compass that provides the basis for your institutional response (especially the initial one). Crisis response is about leadership.
Lesson 3: You can seldom predict the nature of a crisis. You may see it coming and try to get ahead of it, but other events — internal or external — may supersede the crisis you anticipated. More than once in my own career, I have prepared for, and started to lead through one crisis, only to see people’s attention diverted by another one. All you can do is remain vigilant in looking out for new crises and flexible in your responses.
The narrative arc of certain internal emergencies — such as the death of a student — are well understood, with plans in place for how to handle them. But even in such cases, an emergency can morph into a full-blown crisis if, say, senior leaders mismanage the tragedy. Likewise, leadership resignations are routine, until they’re not. Last year’s resignation of Marc Tessier-Lavigne as president of Stanford University, after intense scrutiny over research integrity, is an example of an internal crisis that was mishandled.
As plenty of institutions can attest lately, external events can spark internal crises, which leaders may or may not be able to anticipate. Two cases in point: Covid and the October Hamas attack on Israel. The nature and duration of the pandemic was hard to predict and required most institutions to feel their way through the crisis. The Israel-Hamas conflict is a continuation of decades of strife and human suffering in the region, yet many academic leaders seemed caught off guard by criticism related to antisemitism and Islamophobia on their campus. Too many institutions were poorly prepared to respond to student protests and demands related to these broad national events.
Academic leaders need to have a strong and consistent stance on how and when to respond to external events. Recent crises have many institutions considering whether to adopt a policy of institutional restraint that, as Robert Post, a law professor at Yale, wrote in a 2023 article, “reminds us that universities ought to be quite cautious when pursuing goals extraneous to their core mission, for the pursuit of such goals can pose serious systemic risks.”
Lesson 4: Aim to minimize self-inflicted wounds. Leading an institution, or part of one, is hard enough without creating your own crisis or making an existing one worse. That is easier said than done but here are some dos and don’ts:
Don’t overreact. Take a deep breath, consult with your team, and start to formulate your strategy. As mentioned above, not all emergencies will initiate a crisis. But you risk creating one if you overreact by making hasty decisions, creating legal risks (by not following campus policy and procedures), drawing attention to something that might otherwise have passed unnoticed, or taking actions that inflame the campus. This is where an experienced team, with a strong understanding of campus culture and good contacts, is invaluable.
Don’t wait too long to speak about an emerging crisis. If you do, it will look like you are out of touch or don’t care. Even in the absence of full information, a good crisis leader calms and reassures people. You want to be as honest as possible about what you do and don’t know, assure the public that you are working toward a solution, and provide open lines of communication. Many leaders waited too long or provided messages with little moral clarity in response to the Hamas attacks in October and the Gaza crisis, creating political problems for their institutions.
Know your audience. You must understand the primary stakeholders affected by a particular crisis, or the source of criticisms that are driving it. A budget crisis will affect the entire institution but will require different approaches when communicating the fallout to students versus faculty members. External criticisms from politicians, alumni, parents, and donors create their own challenges. How you react and respond to such outside critiques can inflame people on the campus (and vice versa). For example, the desire of some major donors to influence academic programs and policies can provoke strong reactions from professors and students. Dealing with divergent audiences can be among the most difficult of challenges for leaders.
Do find a way to lead without being overly controlling. You can control your message and the institutional response, but trying to control the arc is impractical, especially when it comes to externally imposed crises. Some crises just need to run their course. The risk there is overreacting and making things worse, or spending so much time trying to prevent and respond to minor issues that you lose focus on the big picture.
How to Prepare to Lead in a Crisis
Here are a few steps you can take to ready yourself for the inevitable crisis. None will solve the problem but, as a portfolio of preparation, they can help generate better outcomes, speed institutional responses, and minimize damage.
- Don’t just create a crisis-management team. Conduct regular reviews of the core team and its supporting members. It is a good idea to make time for regular practice exercises for your core team.
- Make sure the members of your senior leadership team are aligned on institutional goals, policies, procedures, communication strategies, and philosophy on crisis management. Everyone on your team needs to know how coordination works during an emergency, disaster, or crisis. Likewise, make sure you are aligned on this front with whomever you report to, be it the provost, the president, or the trustees.
- Build relationships and trust in times of (relative) calm. You will need allies on the staff and the faculty, people you can consult with and depend on in a crisis. This is especially critical if you are joining the campus from a different institution (and even more so if you are not an academic). It takes time to build relationships, and you should commit to this effort early and renew these connections periodically.
- Create and maintain open and active lines of communication. They should emerge out of your effort to build trust but that might not be sufficient. You can institutionalize your approach to communication through cabinet meetings and other routine events, but there is no substitute for regularly making time to informally interact with people on the campus. These connections can help you and your leadership team identify nascent crises or issues of potential concern, and provide effective channels for communication during a crisis.
What to Look For in an Effective Crisis Leader
Trustees, presidents, and provosts should pay close attention to the potential and capacity for crisis leadership when making appointments. Different crises require different strategies and, therefore, different leadership skills, but there are some general characteristics of good crisis leaders, including the ability to:
- Be unflappable. A good crisis leader is the calm in the storm. In a recent interview on leadership, Joe Tsai, a co-founder of the Chinese tech company, Alibaba Group, said that a crisis leader is the “lowest maintenance person in the room.” Those around you and the institution as a whole will reflect your emotions in a crisis. Remaining calm will help everyone to focus on solutions.
- Be as candid as you can. Only honesty about the current situation will allow you to understand and communicate the magnitude and characteristics of the crisis. You should be honest with yourself, with your staff, and with your stakeholders.
- Remain positive (but not naïvely optimistic). You must believe that the institution will weather the crisis and come out stronger, and be willing to communicate that belief. Being honest and positive are at the core of the Stockdale paradox: “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
- Be adaptable. Crisis management is often about problem-solving. A crisis leader needs to adjust plans and responses as new information is gathered or situations change (strategic adaptability). This means listening to your advisers and stakeholders and changing direction when it becomes clear that previous approaches are less than optimal or just will not work. Leaders who have to be correct all the time or cannot adjust their plans are generally poor leaders in a crisis. Adaptability should not, however, be confused with a lack of a strong moral compass.
- Communicate effectively. Arguably, this is the most important role of a crisis leader. You will need to be effective in communicating through all forms of media, in person, and through proxies. The open lines of communication you create will both inform your constituents and feed information into your decision-making process.
Higher education has faced multiple crises in recent years, and more, such as the “enrollment cliff,” are on the horizon. Trustees, presidents, and provosts should consider carefully the characteristics of a good crisis leader and look for candidates with experience and success in that area. Search committees must make it a priority to ask finalists about their experience with crises, their lessons learned, and their crisis-leadership style. And trustees, presidents, and provosts should work closely with new appointees to build competency in crisis leadership.
