Half of college presidents worried about public trust are answering with a public relations campaign. According to the AAC&U report at the center of this episode, that is a reasonable instinct but the wrong one. Public confidence in colleges and universities has slid for more than a decade, and messaging alone will not turn it around.

In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Dr. Jeremy Young, lead author of The Trust Agenda: A Framework for Advancing Public Trust in Higher Education and he co-directs AAC&U's Advancing Public Trust in Higher Education initiative, about why trust has eroded and what campus leaders can actually do about it.

Their conversation moves past naming the crisis, which presidents and boards already feel, into the specifics: why the most prestigious institutions are the least trusted while community colleges and regional publics are the most, why distrust took root long before today's politics, and how the report's five recommendations translate into work a campus can start now.

This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, provosts, board members, and cabinet leaders weighing how to respond to declining confidence without defaulting to a PR campaign.

Topics Covered

• Why public trust has fallen unevenly, and what the institution-type gap means for strategy
• The deeper roots of distrust, including the sense of distance between campuses and their communities
• Community engagement as the core of trust, and why it cannot live in a single office
• Inclusive excellence as a student success strategy, including the position of conservative students
• Defending academic freedom and university autonomy against government overreach
• Telling a clearer story that connects to shared values, and why PR alone falls short
• Accelerating internal innovation, from shared governance to AI literacy

Three Key Takeaways for Leadership

1. Connection is the thread through every recommendation: within a campus, across campuses, and with the community, society, and students.
2. Reform, defense, and communication are not an either/or; institutions have to pursue all three at once.
3. Higher education is a community asset, and it earns trust by being trustworthy and doing the work, not by asking for trust.

The most durable change, Young argues, will not come from convening the sector's leaders to design a single fix. It will bubble up from individual campuses that innovate, with others adopting what works.

Read the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/the-trust-agenda-advancing-public-trust-in-higher-education/

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