August 18, 2026 · Episode 325
Reputation, Revenue, and the Cost of Silence in Higher Ed Communication
39 Min · By The Change Leader, Inc.
A crisis plan can be 90% ready before trouble hits. Learn how colleges can identify likely threats, choose the right spokesperson, and know when to act.
Most institutions in a crisis don’t believe they’re in one.
The word itself is the problem. Ask a president whether the institution is facing a crisis, and it conjures a scandal with a camera crew outside. Nothing on this week’s agenda looks like that, so the answer is no, and the subject gets put away for another quarter.
The broader test is one sentence: a crisis is any circumstance with the potential to negatively impact reputation and/or revenue.
The potential for harm is what brings a situation within his definition, even before it becomes an obvious emergency. A slow-moving controversy qualifies. So does a donor whose name has surfaced somewhere unwelcome, and a ceremony nobody planned for. None of them will announce themselves.
In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Evan Nierman, founder and CEO of Red Banyan, a strategic communications firm built around high-stakes rapid response.
Quick Overview
- A crisis is any circumstance with the potential to negatively impact reputation and/or revenue. Nothing has to be on fire yet, which is why most institutions in crisis don’t think they are.
- Most colleges can already name where they’re most likely to get hit. Game those scenarios out, and you can have 90% of a playbook written before anything happens.
- Building the plan and training your people costs far less in hard dollars than hiring a firm after reporters, alumni, and faculty are already involved.
- In most situations, the day-to-day spokesperson should be a trained communications professional rather than automatically defaulting to the president or board chair. Nine times out of ten it’s someone who can call a reporter back at the drop of a hat.
- Colleges with no direct tie to Epstein are still taking fire, because donors who gave them money turned up in the files.
- Nierman calls Epstein’s conduct horrific and condemns it in the strongest terms. He also argues, and flags it as controversial, that guilt by association isn’t a courtroom conviction. He cautions institutions against stripping names from buildings solely because a donor was associated with Epstein, without first establishing the facts, and argues that colleges should also explain their own values and standards.
- Treating AI as a cheating problem spends your time on the wrong question. The useful one is how to teach students to use it so they graduate employable.
What Counts as a Crisis for a College or University
Nierman says he gets this all the time. An institution is facing a difficult circumstance, someone suggests they reach out to Red Banyan, and the response is that they’re a crisis communications firm and we’re not in a crisis. He puts it down to an old-school, very narrow definition of the word.
What’s at stake, in his framing, isn’t only institutional reputation. It’s revenue and dollars: students who are paying to attend or choosing not to based on how they feel about the institution, and questions about whether the federal government is going to be an ally to higher education.
Several things have hit higher ed at once, and together they add up to a perfect storm. How people get jobs is changing, and so is the question of what skills make someone worth hiring this century. The value of a traditional higher education degree is being questioned more openly than ever before. Plenty of voices in the startup world say you don’t need to go to school at all, and that they want people who know how to use the tools. AI is a game-changer on top of that. And trust in higher ed sits at a historic low, which the country watched on television when college presidents were dragged before Congress over antisemitism on campus.
So it becomes a question of timing. It’s not if, it’s when. Every institution, every private company, every school and university, and most individuals will face a challenge to reputation or revenue eventually.
Why Reputational Risk Moves Faster: Virality, Echo Chambers, and Partisanship
Nierman’s read is that the country is at an inflection point, and that the situation looks markedly different from twenty or twenty-five years ago. Three changes stand out.
Start with hyper-connectedness. A story that once took days, weeks, or months to germinate now goes viral in a matter of moments.
Then there’s self-selection. People pick where they get their news to a degree that has never existed before. The algorithms feed them more of it. Go down the rabbit hole of one viewpoint and you end up indoctrinated, surrounded by like-minded people, until you can’t hear an opposing side at all. McNaughton’s analogy for it: a vinyl record with a skip, the same phrase repeating until it’s burned into the grooves of your brain and you never get past it.
On top of both sits hyper-partisanship in a form that hasn’t previously existed, which makes audiences less willing to hear the other side even when they still can.
McNaughton put his university hat on here and raised the criticality of a liberal arts education, the kind that trains people to look at all perspectives rather than whatever party is in vogue at the time. Nierman’s response was that as a country we’ve to a large extent lost our way in placing prime value on that kind of education. Liberal here has nothing to do with progressive and nothing to do with politics. It means a country open to a marketplace of ideas, where students are taught to think critically, to formulate arguments, to consider arguments from the opposing side, to weigh the information and decide whether they want to believe it, and to challenge it.
Kids are increasingly growing up without that ability, for the reasons above.
When Should a University Respond Publicly Instead of Staying Silent
Deciding if and when to respond publicly is one of the things institutions genuinely grapple with. In the past, Nierman says, there was maybe a tendency to leave well enough alone, to err on the side of caution, to hope that not commenting avoids giving oxygen to a fire that’s just starting to get kindled.
The equation has changed, and that wisdom now needs turning on its head. People form opinions while you deliberate, and they form them on whatever information they can find. Stay out of the conversation, including the uncomfortable ones, and you cede the battleground to whoever is willing to describe your position for you.
The operating principle is blunt. “If you’re not willing to tell your story, no one’s going to tell it for you, and there’s no one better equipped than you to tell your story.” The environment is rough and tumble. You have to get in the fight, and no institution can afford to be on the sidelines.
The instinct to err on the side of caution now has to become an instinct to err on the side of advocating for yourself.
Setting Parameters in Advance: The Commencement Failure That Spread to Other Campuses
Graduations became platforms for political speech across a large number of campuses, with conflict in the Middle East as the recurring subject for activist graduates over the last couple of years. Far too many institutions were unprepared to confront the phenomenon and didn’t know how to handle it.
Their absence of decisive action to set real parameters around what is and isn’t acceptable, in behavior and in rhetoric, led to people hijacking what should have been an inclusive celebratory occasion for all graduates and turning it into a politically divisive event. Pro-Palestine activists on one side. Others who are Jewish or supporters of Israel feeling marginalized or attacked at the same ceremony.
Nierman watched a version of this at his own alma mater, George Washington University. A graduate delivered what he describes as a one-sided condemnation of Israel. The instructive part came next. The dean of the school rose afterward and thanked her for sharing her thoughts. It was clear to him that the college hadn’t properly planned and didn’t know how to handle it. The speaker should have been cut off, and the conduct named as unacceptable and inappropriate.
In his assessment, the failure to act led to so many other colleges and universities where that behavior was then mimicked and modeled. It took a problem that could have been nipped in the bud and let it proliferate instead.
The same analysis applies to the broader campus antisemitism controversies, and one distinction matters. Some colleges took criticism unfairly. They weren’t condoning anti-Israel or antisemitic sentiment; they were failing to act against it. Other institutions permitted things that were patently unacceptable.
Boards and cabinets should take one thing from this. Decisive action to set real parameters, on behavior and on rhetoric, happens before the ceremony, or it doesn’t happen.
How to Prepare for a Campus Crisis Before It Happens
People believe a crisis is a bolt of lightning out of nowhere. You can’t see where it will strike, you can’t prepare, you just sit there and let nature take its course. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Most colleges and universities can pinpoint with a high degree of accuracy where they’re most likely to find themselves confronting a challenging circumstance. An institution willing to do it can game out with a high degree of certitude the types of scenarios it’s likely to face. You may not be able to pinpoint every single detail, but you’ll have a pretty good idea of the nature of the crisis, and you can have a playbook ready. Maybe not one hundred percent, but ninety percent of the way there, leaving freedom to improvise and adapt and make game-time decisions on the other ten.
The planning often doesn’t happen anyway. Nierman describes an unwillingness that’s almost psychological in some cases, a reluctance to go through the uncomfortable exercise of talking about all that could go wrong. A lot of institutions land on crossing that bridge when they come to it. Nierman’s answer to that: “You don’t want to be figuring out your evacuation plan and your crisis mitigation at the very moment your house is burning down.”
The bulk of the work should happen before you ever have a crisis. McNaughton drew the parallel to strategic planning, where the value was never the plan document. It’s the discussion, the scenario work, and risk planning that surface what nobody had thought through. Crisis preparation pays off the same way.
The money argument is blunt. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure here, in hard dollars. Build the plan and train people on campus, and you’ll spend far less than you will hiring a firm once the media are knocking down your doors, the alumni association has gotten involved, and the administration is arguing with faculty or students in public or in private.
Who Should Be on a University Crisis Communications Team
The core team should be identified before anything happens, with outside expertise added when the circumstances warrant it:
- Executive leadership at the highest level. The president, the provost, whatever the title happens to be.
- Legal counsel for the institution.
- Whoever owns the arena the circumstance touches. An athletics scandal brings in athletics, not a generalist.
- A well-trained media representative. Someone forward-facing to reporters, usually out of marketing or communications.
- An outsider. A crisis manager who does this day in and day out and isn’t seeing it through a limited internal viewpoint. In the middle of a crisis, you’re too close to it, and you can’t manufacture an outside perspective from inside.
- Outside counsel, in some cases. Alongside your in-house lawyers, either general counsel or hired for that specific matter.
Then keep it small. Cover your bases, but not with a group so large it can’t get anything done. As Nierman puts it, “speed and strategy are almost equally important. I would say you never want to sacrifice the strategy or doing the right thing by doing the fast thing, but you’ve got to be able to move at breakneck speed.”
Who Should Speak for the Institution During a Crisis
No two circumstances are one hundred percent identical. That said, most institutions default to the president or the board chair, and in most circumstances that’s a mistake.
You want a professional communicator who is:
- Media-trained, not simply senior.
- Comfortable with print reporters and online outlets, where the job is context and detail.
- Comfortable on camera, where the job is crisp, polished, quick sound bites.
Camera is its own skill, and being crisp and polished there has little in common with supplying the context a written publication wants.
None of this diminishes the president or the board. They still decide what the institution will do, and some public statements should go out in their names. The difference is operational. Day to day, you need someone available at the drop of a hat to return a reporter’s phone call and field inquiries. Nine times out of ten, that’s a communications person, not the most senior tenured person in the building.
The requirement is someone trained and reachable, whatever the title on the door says.
Reputation as an Institutional Asset: Why PR Becomes Powering Reputation
Public relations has outlived its usefulness as a frame. “I actually think that PR is dead, PR in the sense of public relations,” Nierman says. “I think about PR now as powering reputation.”
His reasoning is that reputation takes a lifetime to build and can be eviscerated in mere moments, which is why institutions should focus on preserving it at all costs. Once it starts to crumble, rebuilding it is very hard.
That takes core messaging about the institution itself and about whatever the topic du jour happens to be. You don’t want to be robotic about it, or repetitive in driving talking points. You do want to be clear-eyed, with a clear message about who you are and what your position is on the controversy at hand.
Donor Names, Epstein Adjacency, and Due Process: How Institutions Should Respond
Epstein has been among the hardest topics colleges have had to grapple with, and the reason is structural. His contacts were prolific and ran well beyond Harvard. Those contacts reached influential people, and those people in turn touch institutions, alumni organizations, and booster clubs that aren’t officially affiliated with a college but are connected to it anyway. In Nierman’s phrase, “he is reputational dynamite.” Still destroying reputations from the grave, through proximity alone.
He is so toxic that even institutions not directly connected to him are struggling with how to proceed. Many are under fire because people who were donors to their institution turned up in the Epstein files.
Nierman flagged the position that follows as controversial before he stated it.
Guilt by association is not the same thing as being convicted in a courtroom. Students or faculty may be upset that a donor was connected to Jeffrey Epstein and also connected to their institution, but that conviction of the heart doesn’t hold the same power as a conviction in a courtroom. So he cautions colleges not to rush to throw out the baby with the bathwater: to denounce, to deride, to strip the names off of buildings from donors, simply because those individuals were connected in some way with Epstein.
He’s explicit that institutions do have to protect their reputation. His argument is about how they go about it. All the effort going into what to do about other people whose names may be in the files is, in his assessment, kind of missing the point. Colleges should use the opportunity to talk about their own values, who they are and what they’re about. The alternative is stepping into that morass and letting people critique, criticize, and blast them, or hold them to a certain standard, solely because a donor who built a building on campus turned out to be connected to Epstein.
The position has drawn a great deal of hate mail. His argument is that simply being associated with Epstein doesn’t mean a person took part in, or knew about, his demonic deeds. Plenty of people read that as making him an apologist for Epstein’s crimes. He rejects that reading flatly. On the conduct itself, he leaves no room: it’s horrific, and he decries and condemns it in the strongest terms possible.
He’s defending a principle that comes out of his own work, which often means representing people who’ve been accused. An accusation is not a conviction. Cancel culture is still with us, and it brings an immediate rush to judgment and a pile-on online. The demands that surface are the most strident and far-reaching available: fire this professor, call on this president to resign. People want them, in his read, because they want to feel like they’re doing something and like they’re part of the hot topic of the day. He thinks it’s genuinely dangerous. Hold off on judgment until the facts are known, because everybody deserves due process.
Deepfakes, Data Centers, and AI: The Next Wave of Higher Ed Crises
Asked what institutions should brace for through 2028, Nierman pointed to three things.
Deepfakes come first, and they break an assumption that has held for as long as institutions have communicated at all. Seeing is believing no longer holds. You hear the voice, you watch the video, your mind tells you it’s real, and it’s computer-generated. Red Banyan is already handling more and more of these cases, where people are accused of things and recordings exist of conduct that never happened. If your crisis plan assumes evidence proves itself, revisit that now.
Data centers come next. Public opposition to the construction required to power AI capability is already producing outcry, sometimes for legitimate reasons and sometimes for reasons entirely false and made up. For institutions connected to data-center development through land, energy use, or research, that public opposition could create an additional communications exposure.
Third, and this one lands on the sector directly, is higher education’s own posture toward AI. Most educational institutions, though not all, have framed AI primarily as cheating, as something students use to avoid work or to plagiarize. That’s a poor use of institutional time. The more valuable work is teaching students to employ AI, so they’re highly employable when they graduate. Academia can move too slowly, and right now there’s more blowback against AI than urgency about teaching students and faculty to use it well.
Which brings the argument back to where it started. This is the world we’re going to be living in, and it puts a premium on exactly what the current information environment is degrading: how to evaluate information, how to formulate arguments, how to challenge information that’s out there. Students need both the ability to use the tools and the judgment to use them in a discerning, smart, and strategic way.
Three Takeaways for University Presidents and Boards
The following reflect Evan Nierman’s closing recommendations.
Reputation is the single most valuable asset the institution possesses. Protect it, preserve it, and invest in powering it. That requires institutions to address reputation before it begins to deteriorate.
The time to deal with a crisis is before you have one. An institution without a highly detailed crisis communications plan, without media-trained key people, and without a specific set of operating principles, policies, and procedures for what happens when a crisis arrives is putting itself behind the eight ball, and there’s no need for it.
When it comes, be strategic and be speedy. It isn’t a matter of if. The institution can’t afford to move at the pace academia typically moves. It may feel unnatural, and it may feel like working against institutional DNA, but the environment is fast-paced and media-driven, and the capacity to move quickly while still making the right decisions has to be built in advance.
About Our Guest
Evan Nierman is a crisis PR expert, best-selling author, and Founder & CEO of Red Banyan, an award-winning strategic communications firm. With 25 years in crisis and reputation management, Evan has led top executives, public figures, global brands, and political leaders through complex, high-stakes challenges. His insights are regularly sought by major media outlets covering topics involving reputational risk, public scrutiny, and crisis response.
Connect with Evan Nierman on LinkedIn →
About the Host
Dr. Drumm McNaughton is the founder, CEO, and Principal Consultant at The Change Leader, Inc. A highly sought-after higher education consultant with 20+ years of experience, Dr. McNaughton works with leadership, management, and boards of both U.S. and international institutions. His expertise spans key areas, including accreditation, governance, strategic planning, presidential onboarding, mergers, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. Dr. McNaughton’s approach combines a holistic methodology with a deep understanding of the contemporary and evolving challenges facing higher education institutions worldwide to ensure his clients succeed in their mission.
Read the Podcast Transcript →
Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast 325 – with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Evan Nierman
Introduction to Changing Higher Ed®
Welcome to Changing Higher Ed®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.
Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David. My guest today is Evan Nierman, founder and CEO of Red Banyan, an award-winning strategic communications firm. With 25 years in crisis and reputational management, Evan has led top executives, public figures, higher ed presidents, global brands, and political figures through complex, high-stakes challenges to their reputation and communications.
With all the reputational challenges and negative publicity that higher ed is facing, e.g., cost, value, Epstein, whatever, I thought it would be a great idea to have someone like Evan on the program to let him give us the background of what higher ed communications needs to be, what communications and crisis communications are, and how we can deal with these things going forward.
Drumm McNaughton: Evan, welcome to the program.
Evan Nierman: Thank you for having me. Looking forward to it.
Drumm McNaughton: I am as well.
[00:01:57] Why This Topic Matters
Drumm McNaughton: This is going to be a great conversation, I think one, because of the personality and who you are. You’re a communicator par excellence. We’re also talking about crisis communications, which is one of those things that everybody needs to know about but nobody wants to talk about, so I’m looking forward to having a good conversation.
Evan Nierman: Well, hopefully I won’t disappoint you.
Drumm McNaughton: Oh, you will not. I have no doubt about that.
[00:02:22] Evan’s Background
Drumm McNaughton: Before we get into the topic, please give the listeners a little bit of your background, if you would.
Evan Nierman: Sure. Hello. I’m Evan Nierman. I’m the founder and CEO of Red Banyan. We are a strategic communications firm with a unique expertise in high-stakes rapid response PR, also known as crisis communications.
[00:02:43] Learning Crisis PR in DC
Evan Nierman: And all the time people ask me, “How did you get into this unique line of work?” Well, the answer is I spent the first 15 years of my career in Washington, DC, so there’s no better to learn about all manners of crisis than within the Beltway in our nation’s capital. And since that time, I’ve worked both in-house in various communications positions for a startup for an advocacy organization, and I’ve worked on the agency side, mostly for small, nimble boutique firms focused on high stakes and crisis communications, which is wh- when I set out to launch Red Banyan about 16 years ago, I wanted to create the kind of firm that I was looking for when I was trying to get a job and didn’t really find what I was looking for.
[00:03:28] Building a Special Ops Firm
Evan Nierman: So I figured, you know what? I’ll go out and build it myself, and that was to create the kind of firm that really takes a vested interest in the outcomes for our clients, that’s an extension of their teams, and is just relentless, nimble, really a special, special operations type approach to communications challenges, and not just getting people out of the media, but also the flip side is helping them power their reputation, get their story out, so both proactive positive PR as well as reactive high-stakes rapid response communications.
Drumm McNaughton: Well, you’re absolutely right. Washington is a great place to learn that type of thing. When you were on the Hill or, in DC, I know you’ve worked a lot in higher ed now, but Is that where you got your start with higher ed?
Evan Nierman: Touched on it a little bit, working with academics, taking part in both from the university side as well as with think tanks, which obviously employed a lot of people who were academics and instructors, adjunct professors and full-time professors at George Washington, Georgetown, American, et cetera.
It was my first taste and exposure to it, but the work that I’ve done related to higher ed has mostly come in the 16 years that I’ve been at the helm of Red Banyan
Drumm McNaughton: well, we all know that higher ed isn’t doing particularly well right now with all of the challenges going on, especially the political and as you termed it, the cancel culture.
It’s worse than ever, isn’t it?
Evan Nierman: It’s definitely a challenging time. I think there’s kind of a series of elements that are creating a perfect storm for higher ed.
[00:05:05] Degrees vs Skills Debate
Evan Nierman: There’s definitely a major shift in terms of how people are going about getting jobs, what sort of skills are going to define the optimal worker in the coming century and there’s more questioning, I think, at this time than ever before about the value of traditional higher education degrees with a lot of people in the startup world basically saying, “you don’t need to get a degree. You don’t need to go to school. I want people who know how to use the tools.” Obviously, AI is a game-changer as well.
[00:05:36] Trust and Congress Spotlight
Evan Nierman: It changes the whole paradigm, and I think that there’s also a degree of trust being at an historic low when it comes to institutions of higher ed, and I think we saw that back to all roads always lead back to Washington. We saw that on the screens of our televisions and on the front pages of websites for major newspapers where you had heads of colleges and universities dragged before Congress talking about- … highly controversial issues, including antisemitism on campus and what institutions were and weren’t doing to protect students.
[00:06:10] Reputation Meets Revenue
Evan Nierman: So I just think there’s all these different things taking place at the same time, and higher ed needs to be thinking about high stakes and crisis communications in a way that they never have before because it’s not just a matter of institutional reputation, but there’s revenue and dollars at stake, too, both in terms of the students paying to go to your school or choosing not to because they have some sort of a feeling about the institution and also questions about the degree to which the federal government may or may not be an ally to higher ed.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes. Good point there. We’ll revisit that one at another time maybe.
Evan Nierman: Sure.
[00:06:51] How We Got Here
Drumm McNaughton: How did we get here? There’s a lot of different opinions out there, and I’ve got a few of my own, but how did we get to this point?
Evan Nierman: Well, I think the country is really at an inflection point and I think if you look at where we are today versus where we were even 20, 25 years ago it’s markedly different. And one, I think there’s a hyper-connectedness that exists because we’re growing up in the age of the internet. News spreads very, very quickly. A story that may have taken days or weeks or months to germinate in the past can go viral in a matter of moments.
[00:07:32] Echo Chambers, Algorithms, and Polarization
Evan Nierman: You’ve got also people self-selecting where they get their news and information to a degree that’s never existed before. So you have people finding themselves in echo chambers. They latch onto a certain philosophy or viewpoint, and then they feed themselves a steady diet, or the social media and other sites, the algorithms keep giving them more of what they want to consume, so it ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Someone who goes down the rabbit hole of a certain viewpoint just gets more and more indoctrinated and surrounded by like-minded individuals, and it starts eliminating their ability to even hear an opposing side. I think that fragmentation is out there, and I believe also there’s hyper-partisanship in a way that’s never existed before, and so people are less likely to hear the other side.
[00:08:19] Why Liberal Arts Matters
Drumm McNaughton: And to me, that brings up, and I’ll put my university hat back on again, to me, that brings up the criticality of a liberal arts education to be able to look at all perspectives rather than just whatever party is in vogue at the particular time. Does that make sense?
Evan Nierman: Absolutely and to a large extent we’ve lost our way as a society placing prime value on a liberal education.
By liberal education, I don’t mean progressive. I’m not talking politics. I’m talking about we as a country being open to having a marketplace of ideas where students are taught how to think critically, to formulate- … arguments, to consider arguments from the opposing side, to weigh the information, whether or not they want to choose to believe it, to challenge it.
And I think kids are increasingly growing up with the inability to do that for some of the reasons that I was just describing in terms of where- they’re consuming a steady diet of the same thing day in, day out.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes, it’s kinda like a broken record or you get the … I’m sorry, I’m dating myself on this one.
You get the old vinyl records that have got a skip, and you keep hearing the same, “Talk to me, talk to me, talk to me,” and you don’t get past that, and it gets burned into your grooves of your brain so much that that’s all you can hear.
Evan Nierman: That’s absolutely true. I agree with you.
[00:09:44] Defining Crisis Communications
Drumm McNaughton: So crisis communication is happening much more frequently than ever, and for all the reasons you just mentioned.
[00:09:51] Defining Crisis Communications
Drumm McNaughton: how do you define crisis communications?
Evan Nierman: Well, I think of, a lot of times … it’s a great question, and I get this all the time because sometimes I’ll talk with an individual who maybe their institution is facing a circumstance, and someone suggests that they reach out to Red Banyan. I have a conversation with them, and they go, “Oh, well, you’re a crisis communications firm. We’re not in a crisis.”
And by that, I think there’s an old-school way of looking that the thought is a very narrow definition of a crisis. My definition is considerably broader. I would argue that a crisis is any circumstance with the potential to negatively impact reputation and/or revenue.
Drumm McNaughton: yes.
Evan Nierman: And I think people have really come around to this idea in a way that they hadn’t in the past.
[00:10:40] When Not If a Crisis Happens
Evan Nierman: It is not a matter of if, it is when.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes.
Evan Nierman: Every institution, every private company, every school and university, really even most individuals at some point are going to face a challenge to their reputation or revenue, and so it’s- incumbent upon them in this hyper-connected world where information travels quickly and where you have to drive the message and you have to shape it. You have to advocate for yourself. So if you’re at a college or university and there’s a narrative that’s taking hold in the public, you have to fight to defend your reputation, to challenge misperceptions, to challenge misinformation or disinformation.
Because if you’re not willing to tell your story, no one’s going to tell it for you, and there’s no one better equipped than you to tell your story.
Drumm McNaughton: We see this time and time again, and you brought up a couple of good examples antisemitism, things along those lines, that are hurting higher ed reputation.
It’s the politicalization, I believe, of what’s been going on for so long. But with that, how do you define what a crisis is versus what isn’t a crisis?
Evan Nierman: Well, as I just said, a crisis is really anything with the potential to negatively impact your reputation or your revenue.
[00:12:10] When to Respond Publicly
Evan Nierman: And one of the challenges that organizations have is deciding if and when they’re going to respond in a public fashion. And that’s really something that institutions grapple with. I think in the past, there was maybe a tendency to leave well enough alone, to err on the side of caution, to hope that if you don’t comment on something, that what you’re doing is avoiding giving oxygen to a fire that’s just starting to get kindled.
… But I think the equation really has changed in this modern age, and I think it’s really incumbent to to turn that conventional wisdom on its head and to err on the side of being an advocate for yourself and weighing in because unfortunately, people are forming opinions, and they’re going based on the information that’s available.
And so if you as an institution aren’t wading in, even on these some of … sometimes uncomfortable conversations, if you’re not driving the narrative and you’re not putting out where you actually stand, then you’re ceding the battleground to others who are characterizing your institution’s perspective.
Maybe they’re criticizing you. And while I think within academia a lotta times there’s a hesitancy to even engage with things that you think fall … You don’t want to dignify it even with a response. I think unfortunately in this world, it’s very rough and tumble, and you have got to get in the fight.
You can’t afford to be on the sidelines.
Drumm: Yes.
[00:13:38] UCLA and Campus Antisemitism
Drumm: Give me an example of something like that that’s happened within the last six to 12 months.
Evan Nierman: With- within the realm of higher education or just anywhere or in the marketplace?
Drumm: Higher ed.
Evan Nierman: Higher Ed. Okay, now you’re putting me on the spot here.
Drumm: One I can think of is UCLA and the being accused of antisemitism.
Evan Nierman: Yes, well, look it’s not unique to the UC system. That’s a good one to seize upon because I think it’s been a bit of a quandary for a lot of institutions, and I think they’ve grappled with it.
And I think in some instances, Colleges and universities have been perhaps unfairly criticized because they weren’t necessarily condoning anti-Israel or anti-Semitic sentiment, but they were failing to act against it. And in other instances, you absolutely saw circumstances where colleges and universities permitted things to happen that, that should have been patently unacceptable.
I saw a circumstance play out within my own alma mater, George Washington University, where they had someone stand up… and this was a very, I th- I think this is a, a good sort of illustration of where we are.
[00:14:54] Graduations Hijacked by Activism
Evan Nierman: You had a major problem on a lot of colleges and universities of people getting up at graduations and turning the graduation ceremonies into opportunities to deliver political speech.
And, the hot topic for the last couple of years on the colleges and universities and for a lot of activist graduates has been talking about conflict in the Middle East and using the graduation ceremony as an opportunity to deride Israel. And I think that far too many institutions were unprepared to confront this phenomenon, and I think they didn’t frankly know how to handle it.
And their absence of decisive action to set real parameters around what is and what isn’t acceptable, both in terms of behavior and rhetoric, led to people getting up and hijacking what should have been an inclusive celebratory occasion for all graduates, and instead turning it into a politically divisive event where you had people focusing, on one side, pro-Palestine, and being activists in that way, and then others who perhaps are Jewish or supporters of Israel feeling like they’re being marginalized or attacked at the same graduation ceremony.
And I think, I looked at what happened in actually the same liberal arts college that I went to within GW and at the graduation ceremony, one of the graduates got up and delivered this absolutely ridiculous one-sided condemnation of Israel. And rather than… It was clear to me that the college didn’t know how to handle this and hadn’t properly planned, because when she finished her remarks The dean of the school got up and said, “Oh, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts today.”
Whereas what they should have done was cut off the speaker, mention that it was unacceptable and inappropriate. And I think the failure to act led so… it led to so many other colleges and universities where that behavior was then mimicked, modeled, and- … it took a problem that could have been nipped in the bud, and instead it proliferated.
Drumm: Yes.
[00:17:05] Prepare Before the Crisis
Drumm: Which brings us to an interesting, part of the conversation This is something that should have been thought through prior to it happening. So one of the things that I really gained from you when we spoke a couple of weeks ago was in dealing with a crisis, you’ve got to prepare ahead of time.
You’ve got to go through the risk planning aspects. Let’s go down that path a little bit.
Evan Nierman: Absolutely. It’s incredible to me. People believe that a crisis is something that’s like a bolt of lightning that comes out of nowhere. You have no idea where it’s going to strike. You can’t adequately prepare for it.
It’s just you’re just sitting around waiting, and then nature takes its course. And nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to crisis because most colleges and universities can pinpoint with a high degree of accuracy where they’re most likely to find themselves confronting a challenging circumstance.
And so you can absolutely game out and plan for crisis situations, and I think far too often … and I’m perplexed because, I interact with colleges and universities as well as loads of private businesses, and I think there’s an unwillingness that’s m- almost psychological in some cases to want to talk about all that could go wrong and a reluctance to even go through that uncomfortable exercise.
And so as a consequence, many times that planning doesn’t happen. Yes. And a lot of institutions believe, “Oh, well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” But if you’re trying to put- … out a fire, you want to have a plan in advance. You don’t want to be figuring out your evacuation plan and your crisis mitigation at the very moment your house is burning down.
Drumm: Yes. You need a fire extinguisher standing by right away.
Evan Nierman: Absolutely. And so if an organization and an institution is willing, they can game out with a high degree of certitude the types of scenarios they’re likely to face. You may not be able to pinpoint every single detail, but you’ll have a pretty good idea of the nature of the crisis- the type of thing you could face, and you can have a playbook ready to go, which maybe isn’t 100%, but it’s 90% of the way there, giving you a little freedom to improvise and adapt and make game time decisions on the other 10%.
Drumm: This is the same thing that we tell folks in doing strategic planning. It’s not the plan that is the great thing that comes out of that.
It’s all the conversation, the discussion that happens as you’re coming to that plan because there is your gaming out of the various scenarios, your risk planning that potentially, planning out for the risk that potentially could happen. It sounds like the same sort of thing.
Evan Nierman: Yes. The bulk of the work should actually happen before you ever have a crisis.
Yes. Not only is it good from a strategic perspective- From when you’re talking dollars and cents in a financial investment, it’s actually, this is a circumstance where an, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Y- you will spend far less money, and I’m talking about hard dollars, doing crisis preparations, building a crisis plan, training some of the people on campus in order to handle a crisis situation, than what you’ll end up spending when you call Red Banyan or a firm like ours when you’re already in trouble and the media is knocking down your doors, and the alumni association is getting involved, and the administration is f- arguing with in a public way or private way with the faculty or the students.
So much of this can be mitigated before you even get into the crisis scenario.
[00:20:53] Building a Crisis Response Team
Drumm: Should there be a crisis response team? Should you have a a small cadre of folks who have already talked through these things, they know what their roles are supposed to be if something like this comes up?
Evan Nierman: 100%, which then begs the important question Who’s going to be on that team?
Exactly. And I think the answer to that is you need someone in a, at the highest level in terms of an executive leadership, whether that’s the college president or whatever the provost, whatever the title is. You’re going to need someone who handles legal aspects for the college or the university, the institution.
So you’ve got executive function, you’ve got the legal function. You’re going to want someone who deals with whatever arena is unique to that circumstance. So for instance, if it’s a scandal or a crisis involving athletics, you’re going to want someone who deals with athletics as opposed to just a generalized head of a, of a college.
You’re also ideally going to want a well-trained and prepared media representative, meaning of someone who would be forward-facing to the media, a spokesperson of some sort, and that person typically comes from either the marketing or the communications department of the institution, and it’s often very beneficial to have an outsider sitting in that room as well.
And by that, I mean a crisis manager who deals with these circumstances day in, day out, isn’t seeing things from a limited viewpoint. Sometimes in the midst of a crisis, you’re too close to it. And having that outside perspective can be really, really beneficial. In some cases also other than the in-house legal counsel, it’s advantageous or advisable that you’re going to want to have outside counsel, whether it’s outside general counsel or attorneys who are brought on to deal with that specific circumstance.
But the idea is you want to have your bases covered, but not have such a large group that you can’t get things done and done quickly, because speed and strategy are almost equally important. I would say you, you never want to sacrifice the strategy or doing the right thing by doing the fast thing, but you’ve got to be able to move at breakneck speed in today’s world.
[00:23:15] Choosing the Right Spokesperson
Drumm: So who should be the spokesman? I think I just heard you say it should be somebody out of your communications department who’s trained in this type of thing, but normally it defaults to the president or the chair of the board. What are your thoughts?
Evan Nierman: Yes, look, n- no two circumstances are 100% identical, but I think I would recommend in most situations you want to have someone who’s a professional communicator.
Someone who is well-trained, has been media trained, who’s comfortable interacting with the press, is comfortable ideally speaking to all different types of reporters, print reporters, online outlets, someone who’s also ideally comfortable appearing on camera. That’s very important, too. It’s a different skill set to get on camera and deliver very crisp, very polished, quick sound bites of information versus someone who would go into more detail and provide more context if you’re dealing with a written publication or an online outlet.
But I think it’s a mistake to assume that it’s going to be the president or the chairman or chairwoman of the board and to put them into that role, whereas I’m not diminishing their importance and their centrality in figuring out what the institution is going to do, and sometimes it may be appropriate when you release public statements, et cetera, it should be done in the name of or attributed to that person.
But in terms of the day-to-day, you need someone who’s available at the drop of a hat to return a reporter’s phone call, to field inquiries, et cetera. And so nine times out of 10, that means you need a communications person, not just the most senior tenured person.
[00:25:05] Epstein and Reframing Reputation
Drumm: In doing this type of thing People may be attacking you.
There’s, multiple stories out there. One of the things that I really got from you when we spoke last time was reframing what the communications need to be. The most important thing to a university really is its reputation. So walk me through how you would reframe communication. For example Epstein is, that’s been a, a huge bugaboo for many, many institutions.
Yes. So how do you reframe something like that?
Evan Nierman: Well, the messaging absolutely for every institution, having what I would describe as your core messaging about whatever the topic du jour is as well as the institution, is very, very important. And you don’t want to be robotic or repetitive about driving your talking points, but yet you need to be very clear-eyed and have a clear message about who you are as an institution and where, what’s the position that you’re taking related to the controversy.
Now, I agree with you that reputation is fundamental. That’s why I actually think that PR is dead, PR in the sense of public relations. I think about PR now as powering reputation because- … a reputation is something that takes a lifetime to build but can be eviscerated in mere moments.
For that reason, institutions should be focused on preserving their reputation at all costs because once that starts to take a hit, it can crumble, and it’s very, very hard to rebuild.
I think the Epstein matter has been one of the most difficult topics to grapple with for colleges and universities, and in part that has to do with just the fact that Epstein was so prolific in terms of his contacts and his connections, not just with Harvard, but with lots of other institutions. And then when you take Jeffrey Epstein and his interconnected huge web of contacts with influential people, who then by extension touch so many other institutions, colleges, universities, alumni organizations, booster clubs that are not officially affiliated with the college or university but are still connected, he is reputational dynamite Even from the grave, he is continuing to destroy people’s reputations simply by people or institutions finding themselves in proximity or with any contact to Jeffrey Epstein.
And so I think it’s a unique circumstance where he is so toxic that colleges and universities are really struggling with how can they, if they weren’t directly connected with Jeffrey Epstein, many of them are finding themselves under fire because there were people who were donors to their institution who were found and their names came up in the Epstein files.
Now, I’m going to say something a little controversial here, so, brace yourself Okay. Guilt by association is not the same thing as being convicted in a courtroom, and the conviction of the heart by students or faculty who are upset that someone was connected to Jeffrey Epstein and also connected to that institution does not hold the same power as a conviction in a courtroom.
And so I think I would caution colleges and universities- … not to rush to throw out the baby with the bathwater, to denounce, to deride, to strip the names off of buildings from donors simply because those individuals were connected in some way with Jeffrey Epstein. But again, I think this speaks to they, they have to protect their reputation, but they need to do so in a way to me, all of these efforts around what they’re going to do vis-a-vis other people who, whose names may be in the Epstein files or they’re connected, they’re kinda missing the point.
Colleges and universities should be using that opportunity to talk about their own values, who they are, what they’re about, not necessarily rushing to step into that morass or allowing people to critique, criticize, and blast them or hold them to a certain standard based solely upon the fact that they had a donor or someone who built the building, who donated to build a building on campus who was connected to Jeffrey Epstein.
Drumm: Well said, and not that controversial actually.
Evan Nierman: Oh, you’d be surprised. I’ve gotten a lot of hate mail, a lot of hate emails, and a lot of people saying that, by me taking the position that, that simply being associated with Epstein doesn’t mean that you were a participant or knowledgeable of his demonic deeds.
There are a lot of people who think I’m somehow an apologist for his crimes or what he did. And that’s not the case at all. It’s horrific. I decry it and condemn it in the strongest terms possible, but again I do think and this is one of the, the things about the kind of work that I do, is I’m called upon to represent individuals who are accused many times.
An accusation is not a conviction And we know that in this world where ca- cancel culture continues to be a problem, there is an immediate rush to judgment by so many people in society, and there’s often a pile on online. There are people who want to get involved in a controversy. They want to take strident.
They err on the side of being strident. They want to insert themselves in a conversation. They want to demand the most far-reaching action like, “You have got to fire this professor. You’ve got to call on this university president to resign.” It’s typically these really strident far-reaching things that they want because they want to feel like they’re doing something.
They want to feel like they’re a part of the news and the hot topic of the day. But I just think it’s really dangerous, and I think people should avoid a rush to judgment until facts are known because at the end of the day, everybody deserves due process.
Drumm: Thank you. Well said.
[00:31:16] AI Deepfakes and Final Takeaways
Drumm: What kind of crisis can we expect this year and next year, or maybe probably through 2028?
Evan Nierman: There’s going to be so many and you’ll see that this field has just really exploded in recent years. When I used to tell people I did high-stakes crisis communications, they’d never heard of it before. They didn’t know it was a, a thing to be a crisis communications person. It continues to proliferate because of all the things that we’ve talked about today, but I think AI is going to produce a whole new generation of work for crisis communications.
Deepfakes and AI, the ability to manipulate video and to cr- you know we’re now living in this surreal moment in time where it used to be, seeing is believing, but now we can’t even rely on that. You can hear- Yes … someone’s voice, you can see the video, and what your mind is telling you is this is real, but it’s actually computer generated.
And I think we’re entering a really dangerous territory, and we’re seeing, here at Red Banyan we’re getting more and more deepfake cases that we’re dealing with where people are being accused of things and there are recordings of them doing things that they didn’t actually do.
I think that’s going to be a big area for crisis communications. Another subset of communications and high-stakes communications that I think is going to come out of AI has to do with the data centers that are going to be built in order to power our capabilities in this arena. We’re already seeing that in, in many places there’s an outcry by people in the public that are really opposed to the construction, the building of these data centers, sometimes for legitimate reasons, sometimes for completely false and made-up reasons, but I think , that’s an area of crisis I would look at for some time to come.
And I do think AI is going to provide a lot of unique crises for higher ed because I think by and large, the approach that’s been adopted towards AI by most educational institutions, not all of them, but most, is that they see AI as cheating, as something that students are using in order to get away with not doing their work, to plagiarize, et cetera.
I think a better use of time would be figuring out how to teach the students how to employ AI so that they can be highly employable when they leave college and universities and they go to get jobs in the real world. I think it’s one of these areas where I don’t I think academia sometimes can move too slowly, and there, there’s too much blowback at the moment against AI, as opposed to rapidly figuring out how are we going to teach our students and our faculty how to use it.
This is the world that we’re going to be living in, and so we need to be teaching things like critical thinking. And this comes back to a topic we were talking about at the beginning of our discussion. People need to understand how to evaluate information, how to formulate arguments, how to challenge information that may be out there.
All of that comes from knowing both how to use the tools but to use them in a way that’s discerning and smart and strategic.
[00:34:37] Three Takeaways for Presidents and Boards
Drumm: Yes. Well said. Evan, this has been a fabulous conversation. I love these kind of topics, so I thank you so much for being on. As we always do, three takeaways for presidents and boards.
Three takeaways. What do they need to know?
Evan Nierman: All right. One, the single most valuable asset that you possess as an institution is reputation. You need to protect it. You need to preserve it. You need to invest in powering your reputation. Two, the time to deal with a crisis is before you have one. You can absolutely prepare in advance.
If you haven’t already put together a highly detailed crisis communications plan, if you haven’t media-trained key people, if you don’t have a specific set of operating principles and policies and procedures for what you’re going to do when you find yourself in a crisis, then you’re putting yourself behind the eight ball, and there’s no need for it.
And the third would be when the time comes, because it’s not a matter of if, it’s when, you need to be strategic, and you need to be speedy. You cannot afford to move at the normal pace that academia typically does. We are in a fast-paced, media-driven environment, and so, it may be unnatural, and it may feel like you’re going against your DNA, but you need to put yourself in a position to, to move quickly to make the right decisions.
So those are the three.
Drumm: Those are great. Thank you. What’s next for you, Red Banyan?
Evan Nierman: Well, we’re going to keep doing what we do. So I’m not going anywhere. I’m 48 years old. I intend to condu- continue doing this work for quite some time. This is, for me, this isn’t a job. This is my passion.
It’s my life’s mission. My calling is to help great organizations and great people who find themselves in challenging circumstance, and so I’m excited for what the future holds. I’m an eternal optimist. I do think we’ve lived through a very rocky time in the country. I think there’s been a lot of tumult.
I think there’s a lot of political instability, a lot of infighting. I continue to believe that in the coming years somehow we’re going to find a way to come back together as a country, and this extends across all industries, and my hope is we’re going to get back to not treating one another as the enemy or the other, or you’re on this team, and I’m on that team, and never shall we even communicate with each other because we’re on, on different sides.
My hope is that I’m going to bear witness in the coming years to us finding more common ground in the country and people finding a way to tone down the rhetoric, to be a little bit smarter, a little bit more forgiving. And certainly my hope is that we’re going to, we’re going to get back to understanding that we as a nation have so many more things in common that should be uniting us and not dividing us, and so that’s my hope and my wish.
And so when you say, “Where are we going?” I certainly hope that that’s where we as a country are going.
Drumm: Thank you. Those are great words, and I couldn’t have said them any better. I s- I share that hope with you. Evan, thank you so much for being on the program. It’s been a great conversation.
Evan Nierman: Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening today, and a special thanks to my guest, Evan Nierman. Evan, thanks for a great conversation, great information. Thank you so much. Look forward to the next time our paths cross.
To my listeners, thanks again for tuning in. See you next week
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