END INSTITUTIONAL STATEMENTS

Kudos to my alma mater, Mount Holyoke, and our new President, Danielle Holley, for explaining the rationale for limiting institutional statements.

Many of us, remember when world events happened and our institutions remained silent. As students, we expected to engage with each other. Nobody looked to the institution to weigh in. Our conversations were rich and robust and the institution qua institution had no role.

In the last two decades, institutional commentary on events has become its own cottage industry. Institutional statements, regardless of how well intentioned, can often amplify pain, stoke anger and exacerbate divisions. To make things worse, while many statements are well intentioned, others are motivated by a desire to curry favor with a particular constituency. In some cases, ambitious campus leaders look for opportunities to virtue signal in order to enhance their public profile and career prospects.

Every statement invites controversy for every decision to send a statement begs questions about which events don’t merit statements.  In a university with students from around the world, it seems insensitive to write about a disaster in one region while ignoring a disaster in another.  How do you decide which shootings merit an institutional response? Which political uprisings? Often the lack of messaging for certain events becomes as controversial as messages themselves.

You see the fundamental flaws with institutional statements given this month’s communication debacle. While the events of this past month were so horrific and on such a scale as to make a statement seem warranted, we watched delays caused by institutional hand wringing as many leaders were immobilized by public relations ramifications. In the end, many generated statements with both-side-isms and false equivalencies which amplified grief and division at an already gut-wrenching time.

I don’t think most people appreciate how much time is spent crafting, negotiating, and wordsmithing these statements among communications offices, presidents, deans, lawyers, and other institutional leaders. In the end, statements crafted by committee leave readers feeling dissatisfied. I know this first-hand having sent such statements myself.

I firmly believe the educational mission of institutions is better served with direct communication in the classrooms, in the hallways, and in the dining halls. Of course, institutional statements remain absolutely appropriate for matters directly involved in the university including the death of a student, a swastiska on campus, or a racist incident involving campus police, but when it comes to national and world events, which undoubtedly affect students, institutional leaders should work with student communities directly to offer support and step away from institutional statements as a matter of practice. ##mhc, ##aamhc

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/news/news-stories/institutional-statements-president

UPDATED NOVEMBER 10

As a follow-up to my previous post on university statements,I applaud the Washington Post’s editorial. I’m thrilled that they cited Chicago’s free-speech policy as a model and that Mount Holyoke ‘s policy pre-dated this. I would only modify this to say that all statements are controversial. Objective statements about natural disasters created controversy about which ones were covered and which ones were not.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/10/campus-israel-gaza-free-speech