How Presidents Try to Stay Ahead of the Social-Media Outrage Machine

Students parade in blackface one day. A faculty member tweets inflammatory rhetoric the next. An activist group mounts a protest over campus climate, or sexual assault. The incidents come so fast that it’s difficult to keep up.

This new normal has transformed the college presidency, intensifying its demands. Fueled by the breakneck pace of social media and its broad reach, controversies and protests build quickly, and campus leaders are scrambling to adapt their policies, practices, and teams to get ahead of it all.

Presidents like John C. Hitt of the University of Central Florida — who began his career as a faculty member in 1966 — remember the era of phone calls and typewritten memos, when responding to urgent issues within a week was considered quick action. Now students — and, often, the traditional media — demand immediate reaction. Before Twitter and Facebook and Snapchat, the messaging of many a campus protest, with a few students and handmade signs, rarely made it beyond the quad. Now individuals can garner national media attention in an instant.

Leaders are struggling to be more than reactive in an environment that offers little time to mull and no margin for error. They are learning to take more care with more communications, adding extra eyes to their messages and choosing their words more carefully. With those changes, they are shifting the nature of their work and the focus of the top campus job.

For Nicholas B. Dirks, departing chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, the new climate of protest came as a surprise and changed the way he does his job. The name “Berkeley” has been synonymous with campus activism for more than 50 years, and protests are “regular, even routine,” says Mr. Dirks, who took office in 2013. But he adds that he has been struck by the growth in the number of issues he is asked — or forced — to respond to. “There’s almost always something that seems to be either on a boil or soon to get there,” he says.

Mr. Dirks, who announced in August his intention to resign, has faced criticism and controversy on a number of fronts, including questions over how he handled accusations of sexual harassment against faculty members and administrators, criticism of a sweeping cost-cutting plan, and allegations of misuse of public funds.

He singles out one incident that exemplifies how things have changed for presidents.

In the fall of 2014, Mr. Dirks sent an email to the campus marking the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. In the message, he wrote that the meaningful exercise of free speech required treating each other with “civility.” The notion, he notes, came directly from the institution’s Principles of Community, adopted in 2004, which call for “civility and respect in our personal interactions.”

Within hours, Mr. Dirks found his choice of terms being picked apart on Twitter, after some took his call for civility as tacit discouragement against speaking out at all. “Honor the IDEAL of free speech GRACIOUSLY, people. Don’t tell Dad Dirks to shut up, for instance,” @brokenhegenomy tweeted. “Letter from Dirks is chilling,” said @durgaakv Within days, his words were being parsed by university faculty members and by others all over the internet. Traditional media outlets including the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal weighed in. He was compelled to release another statement affirming the university’s support for both academic freedom and civility. The public discussion continued for weeks.

Mr. Dirks says the incident changed the way he and his staff handle communications: “The first thing I learned is that you never sign off on a message when you’re late getting to the airport.” In short, he says, haste in preparing any public statement increases the chances that the statement may be misread.

Getting more eyes, and more perspectives, on a message may help decrease the chances of a misunderstanding or an unconsidered reaction. Mr. Dirks says three people saw his “civility” message before it went out. “When we sent out our follow-up, it probably had been seen by 10 to 15 people,” he says. “Now, for most messages, we usually have anywhere between six and 10 take a look.”

There’s no formal group of reviewers, although staff in the president’s office often share draft messages with people who might be inclined to see another side. For example, Berkeley’s athletics programs polarize its campus between boosters and those who consider sports superfluous to the university’s mission. Dan Mogulof, executive director of communications and public affairs, says any message about athletics is shared with representatives of both camps.

“That doesn’t mean the chancellor’s led around by the nose by any particular group of people, but it does give you an assessment of what may be missing,” Mr. Mogulof says. “Are there are additional things that we take to be self-evident that others don’t?”

Mr. Dirks spends more time scrutinizing his own words, too. During his first year as chancellor, he says, he sweated over a couple of big speeches, spending weekends polishing the texts. Now he spends “an inordinate amount” of weekend time working on ordinary external messages, “bringing the same degree of care, research, and consultation into play to make sure we are being at least as mindful as we can be about how people would read and understand and respond.”

Even with a large and complex university to run, “it’s become the case that a strategic approach of messaging out of my office has become one of our most critical concerns,” Mr. Dirks says.

When a protest begins or a racial incident is reported, a clock starts ticking. A president and his or her team must evaluate how to respond, and quickly. If they delay, the competing voices of social media can quickly take over the narrative, or it can appear that the president is insensitive or oblivious to the situation.

Hate incidents, especially, require alacrity from leadership, says Margaret Dunning, a managing partner at Widmeyer Communications, a public-relations firm that advises colleges. Normally she tells leaders not to make public statements without knowing all the facts, but if a college doesn’t act quickly, “you’ve lost part of the war.” A statement that acknowledges the unknowns and emphasizes that hate is not acceptable can reassure the campus and “set the moral high ground that is needed,” she says.

Texas A&M University got to test its crisis-response capability in February, when a group of students visiting from a Dallas high school, most of them African-American and Latino, informed the coordinators of their visit that they had been met with racial slurs and insults from a handful of Texas A&M students.

The coordinators quickly informed the university’s administration. Christine A. Stanley, vice president and associate provost for diversity, left a meeting, found the high-school students at their last stop on campus, and spoke to them about the incident in person.

Back at the administration building, Michael K. Young, the president, grabbed quick conversations with senior administrators by phone and in the hallway, trying to find out what had actually happened and weighing how to handle the situation.

“Knee-jerk responses have to be avoided at all costs,” he says. “That becomes a challenge, too, because your first instinct is to side with the people who are outraged about this or that.” But a hasty condemnation — especially one based on an incomplete understanding of the incident — could seem to others like a rush to judgment.

Mr. Young says he tried to “go back to first principles a little bit, about what we stand for, about what is acceptable and unacceptable.” If you base your response on the university’s core values, “even if it doesn’t play out the way the Twitter world initially thinks it should, you never have to back away or apologize for that.”

That afternoon and evening, Mr. Young and his staff drafted a statement that was released the next day, as news stories about the incident were starting to circulate. In his initial statement, he condemned the reported incident, promised an investigation, and called for “a deeper discussion about freedom of speech and inclusion” on the campus.

He ignored demands from state legislators and others to summarily expel the students believed to be the culprits. “This wasn’t going to make us lose our minds,” he says. “We had appropriate channels for dealing with things, even things quite inappropriate like this, and we intended to do that.”

Mr. Young traveled to Dallas the next week to meet with the high-school students and apologize in person. The Texas A&M students behind the incident have since left the university. (A spokeswoman says Texas A&M does not publicly discuss the outcome of student-conduct hearings.) Mr. Young says he was able to use the situation to foster a campuswide conversation on issues of race and inclusion that “put them on everyone’s radar screen.”

The university’s response was appropriate for that situation, says Teresa Valerio Parrot, principal of TVP Communications, a company that counsels colleges. She praises Mr. Young for not getting mired in a discussion of free speech and First Amendment rights. Instead, his immediate apology and welcoming reassurance to prospective students and their families “set an expectation for behavior and respect for all Aggies,” she says in an email.

“We didn’t try to minimize it. We didn’t try to say this is an isolated incident,” Mr. Young says. “We said we don’t believe this is what represents us, but this is something we’re going to take really seriously.”

One of the most challenging things about today’s environment is the difficulty of predicting what will blow up into an issue demanding the president’s attention. Some colleges have created structures to try to anticipate as much as they can. At the University of Central Florida, as on other campuses, administrators meet regularly to discuss issues that may arise in the months to come and how to respond. At American University, the communications office compiles a list of issues that may need to be addressed each year and creates a document with talking points and internal resources related to each one. Copies are distributed to senior administrators throughout the university, just in case.

But talking points can help only so much when everyone is talking. The multitude of voices that social media has unleashed in the public sphere has led not to a public conversation as much as a public cacophony. Marvin Krislov, president of Oberlin College, worries about the level of public discourse, he says, “and our ability to say, ‘Actually, this may not be accurate,’ or ‘This also needs to be contextualized.’ Those are the ways that powerful analysis can really take place.”

Oberlin found itself in the cacophony last year as a result of a student’s journalism assignment to write about an issue on the campus that needed fixing. The story, which was published in The Oberlin Review, criticized Bon Appétit, the company that handles the college’s dining services, for serving inauthentic imitations of ethnic dishes such as sushi and banh mi. The article reported that many students considered the dining-hall dishes a form of cultural appropriation.

Mr. Krislov, who is stepping down at the end of this academic year after a decade in office, says the article inspired swift action. The dining-services staff met with the vendor and students to try to respond to concerns and improve the meals. “This is exactly what you want to see in an institution — responsiveness to a concern that’s raised,” he says. “It was dealt with.”

But the story, which was posted on the Review’s website, circulated on social media. More than a month after the initial article was published, the New York Post and other publications seized on the incident as an example of entitled and overly sensitive millennials run amok. Other news outlets picked up the topic to echo the Post’s point, to attack its mockery, or to mention the controversy over a relative noncontroversy. It was soon a national story.

“It was quite a shocker to us,” Mr. Krislov says. “They took this student-news story and just sort of reprinted it, and they didn’t really do the digging to find out the aftermath.” When it broke big, Mr. Krislov was on a family vacation in Peru. He contacted his staff back in Ohio, but there was little he could do. “How do you tell people, ‘This is not a story?’ " he says.

After he returned to campus, Mr. Krislov fielded phone calls from reporters. He discussed the incident in his annual State of the College speech, lamenting that it ultimately provided “fodder for people who want to portray college students in negative ways.” He met with alumni who were upset over the bad press. Eventually the hubbub over Oberlin’s sushi bar died down. But it didn’t go away.

“The negative things do travel,” he says. “They’re not analyzed, and they’re not contextualized, and in fact sometimes they’re pretty inaccurate, but once they’re out there, they’re there.”

During meetings with alumni this past summer, he says, he still heard, “What’s going on with the food thing?”

Colleges that find a way to better distribute the most important responsibilities may better weather the new normal, says Ms. Parrot, the consultant. Presidents often feel trapped between wanting to honor their roles as problem-solvers-in-chief, she adds, and wanting to delegate problems to the administrators with the expertise to solve them. Institutions where the president, and his or her cabinet, have been able to define their individual roles and responsibilities to the campus so that it’s clear who is best suited to address a particular concern, she says, “are the campuses where I don’t see the same kind of turmoil and consternation.”

As the president of a campus with more than 54,000 undergraduates, Mr. Hitt, of Central Florida, must hand off some situations that might gain the president’s attention at a smaller institution. “If you have that really caring person who’s ready to step in, and the message is, ‘The president’s office asked me to call you,’ it seems to work for us pretty well,” he says.

As colleges struggle to adapt to the new normal, activists are adapting as well. The current wave of campus protests began almost a decade ago, according to Angus Johnston, a historian of student activism who teaches at the City University of New York’s Hostos Community College. At the time, there were a number of building occupations for which the occupiers had no specific demands. That has changed.

“Students are turning their attention to the interior workings of the university,” Mr. Johnston says. “They’re becoming much more interested in really holding the university’s feet to the fire, in terms of making actual structural changes.” The recent protests that compelled some colleges to change the names of buildings because of associations with slavery may be only the beginning of a wave of more targeted actions, he says.

Today’s activists also want change now. Many see the committees and deliberate tempo through which higher education tends to transform itself as stalling tactics rather than an effective process. Some colleges are picking up the pace. Demands from students to change the seal of Harvard Law School because of its association with a slaveholding family led to a committee, but it was a committee that delivered recommendations within a year, Mr. Johnston says, rather than “being set up as a place where controversy goes to die.”

Activists have helped prompt important changes on campuses by pressing administrators to do their jobs better. Student protests have compelled institutions to face their lack of action on issues like campus climate, for example. And, ideally, students should be thinking about critical societal issues, says Mr. Young, of Texas A&M: “If that thinking sometimes manifests itself in a particularly vigorous way, that’s not the world’s worst thing.”

One of the paradoxes of the new normal is that face-to-face communication between college leaders and their constituencies has never been more valuable or more difficult. A meeting with the president can humanize both sides and their positions, but the volume of instances in which a sit-down could help is too great to meet at many institutions.

“I haven’t seen anybody at large campuses who’s cracked the code on this,” says Mr. Mogulof, the Berkeley communications director. But it’s clear that “assuming that it’s going to be sufficient to simply kick out an email with expressions of concern and regret, and reiterations of institutional values about a particular area, and that’s going to be good enough — those days are over.”

The president is still the voice of the university, but Mr. Dirks, of Berkeley, says his experiences over the past three years have changed his understanding of how that voice works. Before, the president made a statement to a group and that was that. “We now think more and more about beginning a dialogue,” he says in a telephone interview, “and understanding that dialogue has to take multiple forms and sometimes be expressed across multiple media.”

At one point, Mr. Mogulof interrupts the call. “Can you just hold on a second?” he asks.

After a few seconds he and the chancellor return. Mr. Mogulof apologizes. A new issue had popped up. He couldn’t divulge what it was. But, he adds, “it was something the chancellor may have to comment on.”

Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.