Hi there,
I spend a lot of time thinking about trust. It’s not a new thing. In 2017, I wrote Campus Sonar’s vision: for higher education to rebuild the public’s trust and build authentic relationships. Six years later, everyone is screaming about trust. Not a week goes by without reporting on the growing higher education trust divide. All that talk about declining trust can make you feel hopeless. But I hope you don’t feel that way.
I feel hopeful. Although hope isn’t a strategy, it’s defined as “a feeling of expectations and desire for things to happen.” Knowing the feeling isn’t always there, my ears perked up when I heard Clint Smith, poet and staff writer at The Atlantic, declare “hope is something you work for.”
Sonarians and our partners work to fulfill our vision every day and that makes me hopeful. Doing the work means I need to understand the concept of trust. No matter which definition of trust you read, it includes people. Without people, there is no trust.
So how does an institution, college, or university build trust? In The Speed of Trust, Steven M.R. Covey defines 13 trust-building behaviors for organizations. One is listening. He writes:
“Listen before you speak. Understand. Diagnose. Listen with your ears—and your eyes and heart. Find out what the most important behaviors are to the people you’re working with. Don’t assume you know what matters most to others. Don’t presume you have all the answers—or all the questions.”
In this age of social media, there have never been more opportunities to listen.
Listening has historically been a challenge for higher ed. We’re more likely to look for students who are college-ready than become a college that is student-ready. We’re quick to assume we know what matters most to others; that we have all the answers. As an industry, we’re not listening.
Campus Sonar is part of the evolution of higher ed to become more audience-centric. We work to rebuild trust in higher ed one person, leader, campus, and association at a time—through listening. We do this through our partnerships with clients, and our public social listening scholarship.
I hope you’ll join me later this month as I enter into dialogue with higher ed leaders to discuss how our industry should evolve culture, organizational structure, academic programming, and/or recruitment/retention strategies in light of the growing population of non-white and/or queer students and adult learners in need of postsecondary education. A growing population we haven’t been listening to nearly enough.
All the work we do is grounded in trust and hope.
Neither comes easy.
Higher education needs a huge dose of both.
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