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Apr 22, 2021Liked by Joe Fitzgerald

"JMU has, since Carrier retired, gone further in the direction of distributed responsibility. If you asked who at JMU is in charge of re-opening, you might have been referred to one or more large committees. If you checked at the staff level, you’d find that many of us were expected to do certain things, but nobody was checking to see if we were doing them well."

Among my clients last summer was a prominent land grant university; one with a nationally renowned medical school and an executive team weighted heavily toward medical professionals.

Couldn't help but notice that, as the months rolled on, the university in question might as well have been in a different universe than JMU -- my alma mater. It wasn't a matter of resource allocation, state support, or a more legible communications strategy. It was a matter of organization and organizational incentives.

The university had a built-out comms team with both in-house and retained crisis management staff, under normal circumstances subordinated to the President and Trustees. In March they were in their entirety seconded to the university's health leadership, and their media relations strategy was reoriented accordingly.

This is a school deeply scarred by reputational issues, and one possessing a leadership team fully aware of how crisis communications can make or break their institution and careers. Thus they wedded the crisis response professionals -- their medical school leadership and University Physician -- to their PR, with the mission of 1) accomplishing and 2) broadcasting the best damn COVID-19 response a US school could muster.

This is all anecdotal and roundabout to boot, but I mean to say that a consciously mission-driven response to the pandemic is nowhere to be found at JMU. That is unless the mission is to keep spit-polishing JMU's reputation among suburban Philadelphia mothers, in which case 1) they failed and 2) they may want to reorder their strategic priorities.

Alger is a lawyer's lawyer, and our board is little more than a reputational timeshare for Beltway corporate executives. I mean to say that they are managers at heart, and to the degree their resumes demonstrate real mission-oriented leadership, it's outside of higher education and public health. I can't fault them for being unprepared, but I can fault them for failing to recognize the value of seizing the high ground -- transparency and responsibility. We may party hard, but so do college students the country over. Institutions matter, and who leads them matters more.

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