Show note · Jul 2026
Going quiet is also a message
Carol Keese on why institutional silence in a hard moment says the one thing you cannot afford to say.
There is a reflex in institutions under pressure: say less. Wait it out. Let the news cycle move on. Carol Keese, who runs communications and marketing at the University of Oregon, made the case on episode 32 that this instinct is worse than useless.
Our silence is also communicating that we ourselves are unsure of the value proposition. And that is a dangerous place to be when your price tag is where it is, and when it is a four-year commitment.
That is the trap. Saying nothing feels neutral from the inside. From the outside it reads as an answer, and the answer it gives is that you are not confident enough in what you offer to defend it out loud.
A thousand-year-old thing meeting an unstoppable one
Carol’s framing of why this moment is different has stuck with me. Higher education is roughly a thousand years old and was designed for permanence, to study the world rather than be part of it, and for a very small and elite group. It was never designed for scale.
That immovable object is now meeting an unstoppable force: a public renegotiation of what the whole thing is worth, arriving at the same time as declining confidence in institutions generally. Meeting that with silence is not a strategy. It is a stall.
Stop chasing the ranking
The other thing Carol is blunt about is where institutions spend their attention. Rankings feel like the scoreboard, but as she points out, the list is essentially the same ten names every year. That is not a story anybody outside the industry is waiting to read.
The more useful goal is relevance: being present in the places where people are actually living their lives and making decisions, rather than optimizing for a position on a list that describes the past.
What this means practically
- When something hard happens, say something true quickly. Silence is read as doubt, and doubt about your own value is the costliest signal you can send.
- Argue for the value directly. If you cannot say plainly why the thing is worth its price, that is a substance problem, not a messaging problem.
- Spend less energy on the scoreboard and more on being findable, useful, and specific where the decision actually gets made.
The whole conversation is worth an hour of your time, especially if you work anywhere that has recently decided the safest move is to say nothing at all.
