Jeremy Young: That’s not the way this is gonna work. The reality is, most of the advertising dollars in higher education go to individual campus recruitment pitches, and those pitches need to include this, this kind of general language about the value of higher education as a whole, not just an individual institution, and that language needs to be, uh, taught and, and deployed by armies of trusted messengers, your alumni, your trustees, your community partners, your students, your faculty. Those people need to know how to talk about higher education in ways that matter, in ways that work, and carry that message with them. And then the final recommendation, is, a, a recommendation for defense. Um, you know, we argue that higher education, like any sector, nobody’s gonna trust it unless they can trust it to defend itself against bad faith scurrilous attacks.

Keith Edwards: Hello, and welcome to Student Affairs NOW. I’m your host, Keith Edwards. Today, we’re digging into the trust agenda, AAC&U’s new framework for advancing public trust in higher education. I’m joined by two of the report’s authors and a vice president for student affairs who’s thinking about this framework and what it means on the ground.

The report doesn’t shy away from the moment we’re in. Declining public confidence, a coordinated political campaign against institutional autonomy, and a sector at risk of having its future dictated by outside actors unless it gets serious about earning trust every day, not just defending itself.

Importantly, the report rejects the idea of rebuilding trust as if returning to some prior status quo would fix things. Instead, it argues for five practical shifts colleges and universities can make now. Let’s get into it. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and online learning community for thousands of us who work in, alongside, or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs.

We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. You can find details about this episode or browse our archives at studentaffairsnow.com. This episode is sponsored by Evolve. Evolve offers four leadership coaching journeys designed to expand capacity and build capabilities, empowering courageous leadership to transform institutions and reimagine the future of higher education.

As I mentioned, I’m your host, Keith Edwards. My pronouns are he, him, his. I’m a speaker, author, and coach empowering higher education leadership with and through the storm toward better tomorrows for us all. You can find out more about me at keithedwards.com. And I’m recording this from my home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is at the intersections of the current and ances- ancestral homelands of both the Dakota and the Ojibwe peoples.

Let’s get to our conversation today and introduce have our panelists and guests introduce themselves. Jeremy let’s begin with you

Jeremy Young: Well, thanks for having us on, Keith. It’s great to be here. I’m Jeremy Young. I’m the senior advisor for strategic initiatives at the American Association of Colleges and Universities.

I’ve been here for about a year and a half. And this time seven years ago, I was a history professor in southwestern Utah at Utah Tech University. Made the move into higher ed nonprofits largely so we could be closer to family on on the East Coast. I’ve worked at the American Historical Association, and most recently, my background was in advocacy at Penn America on behalf of higher education.

I did that for three years. And since I’ve joined AAC&U, I’ve been the co-director of our Advancing Public Trust in Higher Education initiative which put out the report we’re gonna discuss today.

Keith Edwards: Awesome. And you helped write this report with Scout. Scout, tell us about you.

Scout Meredith Best: Hi Keith. Really glad to be here today.

My name is Scout Meredith-Fest, and I’m a political scientist and higher education advocate also based at AAC&U working on the Advancing Public Trust in Higher Education initiative. I am also a report co-author of the report that we released in June. So my connection to this work and background is via student-facing work at a range of global institutions.

So- Yale University and NYU Shanghai. And then also made the hop over to education focused nonprofits like the college board. As I said, my academic background is in political science, and one of the things we think quite a bit about in political science recently is the decline in trust of institutions of all types.

And so it’s been really nice to see that work being transferred over to the education s- focus space.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Thank you both for contributing and writing this report and being here to talk about it. And we’ve got Danita here, who is a vice president for student affairs at multiple institutions, talking about how you’re putting this and how it’s framing your leadership on campus.

Tell us a little bit more about you, Danita.

Danita Brown: Hello. Thank you, Keith, for having me. I am absolutely honored to serve along side my colleagues Jeremy and Scout. Currently, I’m the vice chancellor for student affairs at the University of Illinois, and I’ve been here since 2017. I’ve been in the field of higher education for nearly 30 years.

Time has gone by very quickly, but sometimes it’s very slowly. And even though I started my career at a private Jesuit institution, I have spent most of my career at public institutions. In fact, this is my third Big Ten land-grant institution that I have worked at. I’ve also had the opportunity to serve in many professional organizations and had the privilege and honor to serve as the NASPA board chair from 2022 to 2023.

And so when we’re talking about, the, the trust of the public in higher education and all the complexities- … that come with it, I’ve definitely seen it all.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Wonderful. I’m excited to get this framing and application and talk with all of you. Let’s talk about h- how this report came to be.

I’m interested in learning about the genesis story of this. And Jeremy, let’s have you take the lead on this.

Jeremy Young: Yeah. So we AAC&U back in April of 2025, which was right after I started working there put out a statement called The Call For Constructive Engagement which was coordinated with a group of t- about 200 presidents who met under our leadership and with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to try to come up with some way to respond to the challenges that were coming out of the federal administration in early 2025.

And so they, put out this statement. It got 650 college, university, and scholarly society presidents’ signatures. So over 10% of all college presidents in the country signed this statement. Got a lot of press, a lot of attention. And in the aftermath of that we were trying to decide, how are we gonna make this more than just a statement, more than just a one-month story?

How are we gonna build this into a durable initiative? And so we decided to… that our lane, because, we are not an advocacy organization, we’re not gonna go out and lobby Congress on behalf of higher ed, we had… there are other or- organizations that do that. We decided that our lane was to change the, try to change the terrain on which these battles were being fought.

That is to say, to work on the problem of public trust in higher education. Public trust, as has been on a steady decline over the last 20 years. The numbers are quite bleak when you look at the Pew and Gallup surveys and other surveys of how people view higher education. And we wanted to try to understand the causes and solutions for dealing with that public trust problem, for getting the public on the side of higher education when higher education is threatened.

And so we spent about nine months researching and writing what became The Trust Agenda: A Framework for Advancing Public Trust in Higher Education. We consulted with experts. We talked with practitioners. We took a set of ideas and workshopped them with campus leaders and campus par- actually people doing the work on campuses across the country.

We read a bunch of literature on the history of higher education, and we came up with a set of five recommendations that we thought were plug-and-play for college and university leaders. That is to say, because we’re a membership association of colleges and universities, we’re not focused on things that have to be do-

Give you, an individual leader, that you can work on now, that you can implement on your campus now. It doesn’t have to be easy, but we want to make sure that it is doable and politically and financially feasible, and that it will actually work to advance public trust. So that was the origin of our report.

The report came out in June 2026. We’re speaking now just about six weeks after the report launch. It’s gotten a lot of attention and we’re happy to talk about it in more detail.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Scott, I’d love to hear you add a little bit and I’m curious about your take. As you mentioned, as a political scientist we’re seeing lots of institutions lack public trust.

I was thinking as Jeremy was speaking about Congress. I was thinking about media. I was thinking about lots of these things. So what would you add about public trust? Seems like we’re seeing public trust go down in a lot of areas, and how is- higher education similar in a lot of those, or different than some of those, and how does this connect with the, this report?

Scout Meredith Best: Yeah. As you noted higher education unfortunately is not finding itself in a particularly unique situation. Many institutions across democracies are facing declining public trust. And, if you look at those poll numbers they’re getting more grim every year. Colleges and universities are distinct because they don’t necessarily hold public authority in the same way that governments do, but they are a public good, and as such, the public has expectations for colleges and universities to create economic and social value through the work and outreach and scholarship and teaching and service that they that they do.

Colleges and universities on their own unfortunately can’t necessarily solve or reverse the kinds of declines in trust that we’re seeing across institutions and in many democracies. But there are still things that they can do to position themselves as trusted and trustworthy partners for the communities and the people that they also serve.

As Jeremy said, one of the things that we were really hoping to do with this report is to make our recommendations very actionable, and to also provide support for leaders within the higher ed space as we move forward. In August, we’re launching registrations for a leadership institute that is a team-based institute that will engage leaders and educators at a range of institutions across the country, and active work on these recommendations and help them really develop a strategic plan.

We’re also working on bringing folks together across a range of different sectors in a coalition that will work on projects around restoring public trust in higher education. So again, trying to keep the report and its recommendations really forward-looking, even as this is a problem that is unfortunately not unique to colleges and universities.

Keith Edwards: Yeah, it might, while it might not be unique, we can’t affect what Congress does, but we can focus on our agency and what we can do to shift public trust in institutions of higher education. Let’s get to these re- these recommendations, or these five practical shifts. Scott, do you wanna start us off here?

Scout Meredith Best: All right. Yeah, absolutely. We have these five key pillars that we’re working around. The first is accelerating innovation. Second is prioritizing community engagement. The third is recommitting to inclusive excellence. Four is telling a clearer story, and five is coordinating a mission-centered defense.

So I’ll speak a little bit more about the first two, accelerating innovation and prioritizing community engagement, and then pass it over to Jeremy to discuss the last three in more depth. So thinking first about what innovation looks like, one of the things that we were really thinking about when we were writing the report is what it would mean for colleges and universities to really break down the internal barriers that prevent or inhibit institutional change and improvement.

We think about innovation in the terms of practical implementations of new ideas and processes that create meaningful and tangible value. So colleges and universities really need to be able to demonstrate that they can solve their own problems and embrace changes and improvement, and to, most importantly, do those things in a way that is Quick and proactive and effective.

That includes things like reimagining shared governments governance, so we can help create good changes and forward-looking changes in addition to stopping bad ones. So we’re thinking about something that AAC&U has termed the agility imperative, or this commitment to accelerating innovation and embracing change.

So that’s recommendation number one. The other thing that we saw as a really key part of the story and wanted to put front and center at our recommendations was prioritizing community engagement. Thinking about how colleges and universities interact with the communities that they serve, and this doesn’t necessarily just mean the local community down the street, right?

Although that’s certainly part of it. It also means for institutions that draw from a national and international applicant pool, the communities that their applicants come from, the communities that graduates go to, the communities where there’s research conducted and applied, right? So thinking about this through an anchor institution model or the process of building very durable two-way partnerships with community members and leaders and also investing in terms of time and effort and energy and money to learning about the community’s needs in terms of higher education.

I’ll hand it over to Jeremy for the next three recommendations.

Jeremy Young: Thanks, Scout. That’s great. And, I think that the community engagement recommendation and the next one, inclusive excellence, really underscore something that’s important about this report, that we, higher education has become less popular over time, but that unpopularity is not limited to particular ti- is not uniform across institution types.

There’s a great Data for Progress poll that came out in December t- 2024 that asked Americans how they felt about higher education institutions of different types. And community colleges and technical schools rated very high. Public institutions rated pretty high as well. And then there was a pretty big drop-off to liberal arts colleges, private colleges, and then bringing up the rear you had Ivy League institutions.

So we’re in this odd moment where the colleges and universities that are the most prominent and the most talked about are the least popular and the least trusted. And on the other hand, 43% of all students attend community colleges. Another 39% or so attend regional publics. That’s over 80% of all students in the United States are attending institutions that are actually quite popular on a local level with the public and are not really thought of as representing higher education.

So rather than reinventing the wheel, our goal here was to try to reverse engineer what those schools are doing right and figure out how we can apply those to other institutions. Community engagement is a key part of that. Being able to be nimble and flexible and get things done is another key part.

Another argument that we made is that inclusive excellence and we define this… So inclusive excellence is an old AACU term that has often been identified with DEI work, and that certainly is part of inclusive excellence. But fundamentally, inclusive excellence is about creating more opportunity for more students to access and succeed in higher education.

It’s a student success imperative. The DEI component is about breaking down barriers specifically rated, related to identity for students to succeed. There are other types of barriers that need to be broken down as well things like food insecurity, housing insecurity, lack of preparation, lack of tutoring and advising and career counseling, right?

All of that is inclusive excellence. So we argue that, again, that’s something that community colleges, regional publics for the most part are doing right. Other institutions, some of them are doing it right as well. And that’s a key component to winning that support from the general public.

So those first three recommendations, inclusive excellence community engagement and, And i-innovation. Those are the sort of reform recommendations, and then we made two additional recommendations. The first is about communications, about telling a clearer story, and here we drew on some work that’s been done by The Metropolitan Group and Spitfire Strategies, communications firms.

The Metropolitan Group has done a lot of work in Latin America, in backsliding democracies on pro-democracy narratives. And so they have some really interesting ideas about how institutions should communicate their value to the public. In addition to saying that you want the, the, the, that higher education is a driver of social mobility and an engine of economic innovation and creates life-saving research, all of which is true, they argue that you have to put that language in terms of common values that the public actually cares about, things like freedom and f-fairness and security and strength and opportunity.

So using those sort of rhetoric, that sort of language. And then we extend their analysis by saying this needs to be done at, in the places where people are actually encountering higher education messaging. We o- we dream about there, there be some national campaign that has m- hundreds of millions of dollars to advertise for higher ed.

That’s not the way this is gonna work. The reality is, most of the advertising dollars in higher education go to individual campus recruitment pitches, and those pitches need to include this, this kind of general language about the value of higher education as a whole, not just an individual institution, and that language needs to be taught and deployed by armies of trusted messengers, your alumni, your trustees, your community partners, your students, your faculty.

Those people need to know how to talk about higher education in ways that matter, in ways that work, and carry that message with them. And then the final recommendation is a, a recommendation for defense. We argue that higher education, like any sector nobody’s gonna trust it unless they can trust it to defend itself against bad faith scurrilous attacks.

So there we talk about the importance of autonomy of universities from government control of ideas the need for universities to break down silos and break down fragmentation and work together across boundaries- … to really build bu- build coalitions a- and speak if not with one voice, then at least singing from the same hymnal when it comes to the value of their independence.

And really to take a, a s- a sort of, you know, approach that if one ins- institution is threatened, if one type of institution is threatened, that it is imperative on everyone within the higher education sector and every type of institution to stand with that institution. Just a, a need for solidarity, a need for defense of the mission of the sector.

So those are our five recommendations.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for walking through that. It’s me thinking about- That last one, some of the work of the Alliance for Higher Education, AAUP, other folks that are doing this. And then as you were talking about the clearer story, I think one of the challenging things that, that I see is that we’re…

I see these higher ed organizations often talking about what they need to defend, and they’re talking about terms that I think most people outside of our higher education don’t understand or don’t care about. Like shared governance, right? Of course, we know what that is and how important it is, but my dad doesn’t.

It’s like, why is that important? Yeah. Why is that something you… or academic freedom, right? That just sounds like self-involved. And so I think we’ll have this clearer story to transform that. And then the, the accelerated innovation. I think higher education, one of the juxtapositions I see is that higher education is so invested in innovation of the students, of the research of the sector, and producing innovation, but really terrible at innovating how we operate, how we function, right?

We’re not great at being agile and for good reason. I think these institutions, in many ways, have been designed to be slow to change so that we’re not changing with every fad, with every administration, with everything. These institutions think in terms of centuries rather than months or quarters.

But as, not just a current administration, but court cases, AI, demographics so many things changing rapidly, we have to shift how we’re operating. Which brings us to you, Denis. That you’re not in these public higher ed think tanks. You are there at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, leading a team doing this work day in and day out, navigating the challenges and the realities of AI administration changes, athletic changes-

we can’t keep up with, right? From week to week. Yeah. All of these things. How, as you listen to these five recommendations and read through the report what is really helpful and supportive of the work that you and your team are doing, and what’s challenging?

Danita Brown: After reviewing the report, I really think that it positions student affairs as one of the primary divisions responsible for building trust between higher education, the students, the families that’s already been mentioned, the, the policymakers, our communities.

And we have to be the primary builder of trust. And we talked a little bit about the, the campaigns and marketing. That is true. We need to have better communication. However, trust is not created through a marketing campaign. It’s really created through the lived experiences. And so when, every interaction that a student has with us, whether that’s in housing, orientation student organizations, dean of students That interaction can either strengthen or weaken the confidence in our institution and the confidence with that individual.

And, we in student affairs, we have to make sure that we are delivering our services. They gotta be consistent. They gotta we gotta make sure that we’re responding quickly to the crises that occur. We’ve gotta be transparent. Now, transparent can be a little bit loaded because sometimes transparency is because people wanna know everything just to know, because some of them are very nosy.

But they just want to hold information, but they don’t want to be creative and think about how they could better serve by using some of the information. But we have to demonstrate care. We have a CARES framework here in student affairs that we talk about that kind of frames everything that’s in this report about making sure that we are effective communicators, making sure that we are collaborative, because we cannot do this work in silos.

We cannot be by ourselves. We have to make sure that our programs, our services are accessible they’re affordable. We have to hold each other accountable. We’re building up relationships. Again we have got to do this in unison. We have to utilize the research that’s available to us to help inform some of the decisions that we’re making.

But everybody, re- whether they have a degree or not, whether, whatever their title is, everybody has got to learn how to be an educator who’s focusing on the excellence and eminence. And for us in student affairs, that means we have to be student-centered, we have to care about our staff, and we have to care about the scholarly work and service.

When we are talking about community engagement, that is key. We have to be concerned about the community because we are the community. We cannot put up barriers and separate, our institutions from the community because we are a part of the community. Which brings me to, we have to make sure that we are not just communicating, but we are demonstrating what that return on investment is.

We get questions all the time about, “Is college worth it?” Why? Why would we pay it this amount of money? What is the impact? And so when we’re talking about communicating, yes, we have to better demonstrate, communicate the impact that we’re having on our students, whether that is the, the retention, the sense of belonging.

What does the employment look like? What does the academic success look like? We can’t just rely on our data just to count people and how many people have attended our programs. We have to start demonstrating what is that measurable impact on the student and saying, “How are we transforming?

How are we being innovative?” And, when I looked at the innovative portion of it, we talk a lot about innovative Illinois here. And th- for us, it’s three types of innovation, so how we frame the work that we do. Are we looking to be efficient, so efficiency innovation? Are we looking at sustaining the innovation, or are we looking at transforming the innovation?

And I think that, that helps with, inform some of the transparency that we have with our community and our partners because that is absolutely key in how we move forward. We talk about that innovation. Obviously, people are talking a lot about AI, technology, predictive analytics. How can we better be efficient and effective in supporting our students?

How do we help them better connect on campuses and in the community? How are we making sure that they’re th- thriving instead of surviving here on our campus? When we’re talking about innovation again, we can’t do this by ourselves. It has to be collaborative in order to build up that trust.

But the c- the community engagement I cannot underscore that enough in terms of making sure that there’s service learning and volunteerism and making sure that it’s a reciprocal partnership throughout all of our communities to better serve our students and our families.

Keith Edwards: Really taking away from what you’re saying here is that we need to build trust we need to match the words with actions.

Yes. That alignment of what we’re saying, what we’re claiming, what we’re advocating, what we’re proposing, and then we need to match that with actions. And of course, our audience loves hearing the student affairs’ key player- And the investments. And

Danita Brown: the investments. And the investments. Because you know our budgets have shrunk.

Yeah. And so we, a lot of times we receive unfunded mandates to do programs and services here on campus. And it’s like, okay we’ve already reduced our budget. We’re really good stewards of our finances. We’re trying to create really impactful programs and services. We’re prioritizing.

We’re not trying to over program. So we really, sometimes I think the, our legislators and our public, they want us to create miracles. They want us to turn water into wine constantly, and I’m like we can’t do that. That’s not in our wheelhouse.” But we can work together to make sure that we are meeting the needs particularly around career readiness.

W- it’s imperative again that we work collaboratively together to get this done and serve our mission.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Scout and Jeremy, as Danita talks about moving trust by moving into action, what does that evoke for you, Scout?

Scout Meredith Best: Yeah. I’ve am sitting here listening to Danita’s excellent points and thinking about an interview that I did with the president of Campus Compact, Bobby Lowder, for our initiative’s Substack publication.

And happy to share that link. But thinking about it in terms of what meaningful reciprocity looks like-

With our communities. And Danita, you said, “We are the community,” and that really stuck with me. We have the ability to add and bring so much to the community, and thinking about the small, sustained little things that really lead to powerful longterm relationships. I also think recognizing knowledge and who has knowledge, and our communities have knowledge that folks within the universities may not have, and vice versa, and we both have a lot to learn from each other.

And thinking of that as a real opportunity for engagement as well is something that stands out to me.

Jeremy Young: Yeah, I’m, I agree, Scott. And I, I, Danita, I’m grateful for your close read of the report. I think you’re exactly right about what we’re arguing. Th- this is the… If there’s one thing we want people, administrators, university administrators to take away from this report, it is that community engagement and student success work is not optional.

It is not an add-on that you do if you have money or if you have time or if you have staff. It is the solution to the problem that you’re dealing with right now in, in terms of public trust. The complaints that you are getting from the public, the funding cuts that you’re getting from the legislature, the solution to those things is to invest in your communities, invest in your students, and position higher educa- your institution as a community asset, something like the fire department rather than like the ivory tower.

And that’s just, th- that is so crucial for… And I think it’s, I think that’s exactly, what, p- you’re doing and what people in student affairs are doing. I came up with a faculty background. I w- I worked technically I was shared with student affairs my last 18 months as a faculty member because I was leading an institute of politics and public affairs at Utah Tech University that was housed in student affairs, and the s- the student workers were student government members.

So I actually reported to the director of student affairs for a while, and it was an absolutely eye-opening experience. Faculty have this idea that we are the backbone of the university, and what happens in our classrooms, that’s the only thing that matters. And I was seeing that these are the people who call your students when they don’t come to class and take their exams and make sure they’re okay.

These are the people that give them tutoring. These are the people that make sure that they have a successful experience when I’m off grading papers. It was just transformative, and I think that we have to understand higher education as that kind of transformative place where students can succeed, where communities can thrive.

That’s the mission of what we’re doing.

Keith Edwards: Yeah.

Scout Meredith Best: And it’s also… Oh, sorry, Keith, go ahead

Keith Edwards: No, you go ahead. I’ll follow up Yeah,

Scout Meredith Best: no, I was going to say as well also understanding that all of this takes time too. I think that we’re all very keen for a very quick fix on trust, and recognizing that just like the relationships that institutions and folks within student affairs build with their students and with classes and with cohorts, that takes real sustained- work. We can do these projects, but committing to them and really watching the needle move is not going to happen overnight. And in the meantime, we’re still going to need to keep showing up For the daily little things, and I say little things with the caveat that they move into something bigger and- Yeah

and meaningful.

Keith Edwards: Yeah.

Danita Brown: Jer- I’m gonna jump in here. Jeremy, you had mentioned that, you were from the faculty side and you spent some time in student affairs. I conduct what’s called college impact reports, and I sit down with each academic dean and talk about how student affairs inter- intersects with their students.

Giving them some data about, how many students are involved in fraternity, sororities or in organizations or visits to our campus recreation. And just really going through each of our units within Student Affairs. And I remember the fir- one of the first college impact reports I did with one of the deans.

He’s like, “You’re really the mayor.” Like- … I had no idea how complex student affairs was. And so that was eye-opening to him, but it was also eye-opening to me ’cause I’m like, this is why we have to better educate not just individuals within the, the university setting, but outward too, i-i, in the community to help them better understand who we are, what we do.

We know parents, legislators they rarely observe what’s happening in the classroom, but they certainly observe what’s happening when it comes to mental health services or career preparation or, community engagement and leadership. So but, we just have to make sure that we are educating and again, talking about those impactful practices.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. I th- I’m so glad you mentioned that ’cause that, that’s what I was thinking too, is I think there’s so many misunderstandings about higher education. Jeremy pointing out about this one experience and how it really helped him learn more about both sides, the academic and student affairs. But I also think there’s a lot of misunderstandings because I think that most people don’t know about the community service or the leadership, but they do see the football game on TV on Saturday, and they see these institutions who are firing coaches and paying $31 n- million for someone not to coach, and then go why do you need this additional resources for a mental health program?”

You obviously have that, and not understanding- These are completely separate budgets.

Danita Brown: Very separate.

Keith Edwards: Completely separate things with completely different rules and completely different sources and completely different things. So I think there’s, there is some misperception. And then there’s some bad faith actors, right?

And I think this brings us to the next question that there’s been some critiques about this trust framing, not necessarily this report, but this framing of higher ed needing to regain the trust because it placed the burden on higher ed for regaining trust, while there are bad faith actors misrepresenting higher ed to advance their own political, financial, and personal agendas.

Jeremy, I’ve seen you and Scout address this critique openly and would love to give you an opportunity to address it now. Let’s start with you, Jeremy

Jeremy Young: Yeah. It’s interesting The Atlantic covered our report, and they had the opposite critique. They thought we didn’t go hard enough on higher ed, and that we were too critical of the critics, and that and not recognizing how deeply higher ed needed to change.

And I like that that there are critiques on both sides there because I think we really hit the nail on the head in that case. And- It’s really

Keith Edwards: kind of faculty sweet spot. If I’m being

Jeremy Young: criticized-

Keith Edwards: … By everybody, I

Jeremy Young: must be in good

Keith Edwards: shape.

Jeremy Young: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. But, a- and the, the reality is that it

I won’t say the reality, I’ll say our argument in the report is that higher education has a lot of problems, and what the administration is saying about it is not really what the problems are.

That we have created an opportunity because our trust in higher ed is so low, we’ve created an opportunity for people to say all kinds of things about us, and nobody to really push back because they’re, the public isn’t really in our corner.

But that doesn’t mean that the c- the criticisms we’re getting are the real causes. It was very eye-opening when we were researching this report. We spent a lot of time looking at Katherine Cramer’s book, The Politics of Resentment, which is a really fascinating study. She’s a political scientist at University of Wisconsin who interviewed did qualitative interviews with a lot of rural conservative Wisconsinites without college degrees, loggers, and people living in rural towns.

And she did a lot of the interviews in tw- 2007, so before there were any sort of major national political figures or state political figures who were critical of higher education. Even in Wisconsin Scott Walker was still a couple of years away at, when she did these interviews. And what she found was that people were very critical of higher education but not really for the reasons that you hear about in the media today.

There’s a great story in that book where she argues that, which she tells, she interviews a, a guy who says I, “W- why do you hate, why do I hate higher education? Because I went to my local fishing hole where me and my friends have fished all our lives, and I saw a researcher there from the University of Wisconsin.

And he wa- he had all these nets and trawl, things in the lake. And I asked him what he was doing, and he says I’m trying to determine whether bass spawn in the same place every year.'” And the guy just says, “Did you ask anyone? Did did you ask anyone who lives around here who’ve been fishing here our whole lives?

We can tell you bass spawn in the same place every year.” And he just says, “Higher ed doesn’t care about people like me. They don’t want anything to do with us.” And that sense of alienation, I think that, that story really captures what is meant when we talk about elitism in higher education.

It’s not so much that higher education is, sees itself as better than the rest of the public, but that it sees itself as separate from the rest of the public, right? This lack of interest in community ways of knowing, lack of c- connection to local community members, this sort of ex- extractive approach, come to the lake and just do some research and leave, and don’t really talk to anyone.

It, this is the problem. This is the cause, in our view, of the lack of public trust, and we think that higher education can combat that, can do some internal reforms that help to solve that problem while also defending itself, and we make the case that both of those things need to be done.

Scout Meredith Best: Yeah, I’ll add on to Jeremy’s point, and particularly coming back to making the terrific work that is happening in higher education more visible. I think often about a quote from the education scholar Michael Corbett that college is all too often i- invisible training for an invisible jobs in an elsewhere economy.

And, i- the relationship between rural areas and higher education is one that I’m very interested in from a research perspective, but also is something that is personal to me. I grew up in a town of 700 in rural Appalachia. And this holds true when we’re thinking about the, the broader perspective too.

There are things that need to be changed, and it is incumbent upon higher ed to do that, and there’s motivating reasons for higher ed to do that as well. The- if there’s a declining public trust issue, that’s something that’s likely to spiral and impact higher ed whether or not it changes, so it behooves it to change.

But also, in terms of thinking more broadly about the narrative of opportunity and success there’s a lot of overlap there. And the, ultimately the vitality of higher education is inseparable from the health of our democracy and also the strength of civic life. So lots of motivating reasons for both change and defense.

Danita Brown: Earlier I hesitated to say rebuild trust. Because I think when we say rebuilding trust, we unintentionally imply that higher education is solely responsible for the declining confidence within us. And I think in reality, many institutions, the leaders within the institutions are being deliberately misrepresented by people who have their own agendas.

They, we… Those actors, as you’re saying, whose goals are political or financial rather than educational. And I think it’s time for us in student affairs, higher education, to really take that narrative back and control it. Yes, we need to acknowledge where higher education has fallen short, whether that involves the affordability or the bureaucracy, ’cause Lord knows we got lots of orange tape.

We always call it orange tape around here ’cause of orange and blue. We got lots of orange tape. Or communication or responsiveness to a lot of our communities. But without accepting these false narratives about our mission and we would allow others to define who we are. So I think we, we just have to- You stop spending so much time also on those personal attacks.

And constantly, like I said, I’ve been attacked a lot, but, it’s easy to get into the defense mode. But I think if we spend all of our energy on responding to these attacks constantly, then we let our critics define us, and it takes us off of the mission, right? Our goal and the mission.

But I think it’s time for us to really flip that and take the narrative back.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. And constantly responding to these di- to the disingenuous attacks gives them more validity, right?

Danita Brown: Yes.

Keith Edwards: And more time responding to the legitimate critiques of, slow to change, needing to be more responsive, needing to be more clear, as a lot of this report calls for.

We are running out of time, so thanks to all three of you for being here. The podcast is called Student Affairs NOW, and we always like to end with what are you thinking, troubling, or pondering now? This might be what is on your mind related to our conversation or completely separate or related to higher education.

And also, if you want to share where folks might want to connect with you, where they can do that, that would be great. Danita, what are you troubling now?

Danita Brown: All right. First, I want to thank you for allowing me to engage in this wonderful conversation with my colleagues. If you ever need to contact me, you can contact me on LinkedIn.

I don’t do all the social medias, but, LinkedIn is a place where you can find me. I think what I think about the most that kind of keeps me up at night is the overall wellbeing of our students and our staff. And we really try to infuse a holistic picture of wellbeing, so not just mental health, but we’re looking at physical health, financial health the environment, the work environment, all of those issues and really look at the factors that’s contributing to the decline of your wellbeing.

We know that groceries have gone up. Rent, gas, everything has skyrocketed. And so how are we really supporting our students and our staff? Do they have the essential basic needs to not only help them in everyday life, but to help them thrive? I think about our public safety.

I think about our- is our institution affordable and accessible? Budgets constantly. We’re constantly thinking about budgets. So there’s a lot to… that keeps me up and, but I’m grateful that I have a wonderful team that helps me think through the plans that we do to address these issues.

Keith Edwards: Yeah, you must not get much sleep, ’cause that’s a lot of things that can keep you up at night. No. That is a big, long list, and

Danita Brown: being involved in community organizations, yeah.

Keith Edwards: Absolutely. Scott, how about you? What are you pondering now?

Scout Meredith Best: What am I not pondering now might be a better question. Yeah. Yeah. Again, echoing Danita, Keith, thanks for this opportunity. This has been a terrific conversation. And if folks are interested in connecting I… Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn and reach out there. What am I pondering most immediately? I think the pace of change that we’re all experiencing in the world today and what that means for students since there has been rapid innovations external from higher education.

And I really wanna think carefully about what it means to equip students with a durable and transferable skill set that will serve them well even as many of the skills that we know them now will become become obsolete or are likely to become obsolete. We have a interview that I’m doing forthcoming on our Substack with Arthur Levine, who is- the president of Brandeis University. And we go into that in some depth, so that’s been the inspiration behind that. I’m also pondering, as per usual the poem by Lydia Davis called A Position at the University, which really speaks well to the positionality and the background that we all bring into this work and the things that we carry with us and that impact us.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. All right, Jeremy, what do you think about?

Jeremy Young: Oh boy, I get the last word. This is dangerous. Just to quickly you can also find me on LinkedIn. I’m pretty active on there. If you wanna follow our our Substack, which doubles as our team mailing list that’s aptwords, A-P-T words, no hyphens or spaces, @substack.com.

You can f- email the whole team at apt@aacu.org. And what is it that keeps me, that, that keeps me up at night? What is it that’s on my mind? Honestly, I think what is on my mind is that we have to remember h- how important it is for us to remember that higher education is a, is an institution that exists to do good things, that exists to help people.

Help students, help community members help increase knowledge. That’s the purpose of this institution. And it doesn’t always live up to that purpose and we als- a- and it needs to get better at doing that, and also we need to remember when we’re talking about it that is what it exists to do. I think that we get so pulled into here, higher education is broken, and here are the things that it’s doing wrong,” and we forget sometimes to talk about how much it matters how transformative it is, how life-changing it is for so many people.

So I think that’s what keeps me up at night at the moment, that we need to get back to first principles and remember what our mission really is, and help other people remember what that mission is as well.

Keith Edwards: Awesome. Thank you all so much for joining us today, for the great report. Danita, for your contributions as the vice chancellor there at the University of Illinois.

It’s great being in conversation with all of you, and thank you for your leadership on behalf of all of higher education. Thanks also to our sponsor of today’s episode, Evolve. Given the current context of higher education, as we just spoke about, we need to invest in leaders with the capacity and capabilities to transform their institutions and the future of higher ed.

The Evolve Institute for Higher Education Leadership offers four leadership coaching journeys tailored to four different leadership levels. Each is a three-month journey that includes individual and group coaching, plus a curated curriculum of short asynchronous video modules. We also offer Evolve for leadership teams.

If you’re ready to evolve your leadership voice, visit evolve-institute.com to learn more. As always, a huge shout-out to our producer, Nat Ambrosey, who does the, all of the behind the scenes work to make all of us look and sound good. And we love your support of these conversations. Your listening, sharing, and recommending makes all of this possible.

You can help us reach even more folks by subscribing to the podcast on YouTube and to our weekly newsletter, where we announce each new episode each Wednesday morning. If you’re so inclined, you can leave us a five-star review. It helps great conversations like this reach e- even more folks. I’m Keith Edwards.

Thanks to our fabulous guests today, and to everyone who is watching and listening, make it a great week. Thank you, all.

https://www.aacu.org/initiatives/advancing-public-trust-in-higher-education/the-trust-agenda

https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2026/05/11/trust-isnt-issue-opinion

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2026/06/17/colleges-are-breaking-their-silence-admitting-mistakes-regain-trust

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/higher-education-universities-public-trust/687714

https://aptwords.substack.com

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52125/a-position-at-the-university