How Leaders Can Reclaim the Narrative About Higher Education and Rebuild Public Trust:

Changing Higher Ed Podcast 287 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Peter Murphy Lewis

Public narratives about higher education have drifted away from the real work taking place on campuses. Families hear more from pundits, political operatives, and social media personalities than from the people who teach, mentor, and support students every day. As those outside voices grow louder, institutions struggle to communicate the value they deliver. Leaders need a narrative strategy built on authenticity, clarity, and lived experience.

Peter Murphy Lewis brings relevant insight to this moment. As a CNN political analyst, filmmaker, and director of People Worth Caring About, he works in environments where public assumptions rarely match reality. His documentary approach shows how human-centered storytelling can bridge gaps in understanding, especially when political noise dominates the conversation. 

Lewis’s framework helps leaders understand why perceptions have drifted, how distorted narratives spread, and what institutions can do to rebuild trust through credible voices.

The Growing Gap Between Public Perception and Campus Reality

Public understanding of higher education has shifted sharply in the past decade. Emotional narratives travel faster online than measured explanations. Provocative clips outperform thoughtful discussion. Political commentary frames colleges as ideological battlegrounds or failing enterprises. These portrayals rarely capture the complexity of campus life.

Three Forces Reinforce this Distortion

1. Political rhetoric. Higher education has become a symbolic target in cultural debates. Institutions are portrayed through simplified narratives that match political agendas rather than reality.
   
   
2. Social media amplification. Platforms reward the most extreme claims. Viral confrontations overshadow stories of mentorship, personal growth, and academic challenge.
   
   
3. Institutional messaging gaps. Families want clarity about cost, campus climate, outcomes, and support. When institutions rely on polished generalities instead of addressing real concerns, audiences turn to the narratives they encounter elsewhere.
   
   

As these forces compound, public perception is shaped more by selective anecdotes than by the lived experiences of students and faculty. Leaders cannot afford to stay silent or rely on traditional communications. They must define the narrative intentionally.

Narrative Leadership as a Strategic Priority

Narrative is now a strategic pillar of institutional leadership. Public perception affects enrollment, state funding, policy decisions, philanthropy, and institutional reputation. A clear narrative gives leaders the ability to demonstrate public benefit, explain priorities, and show how the institution serves students and communities. A weak narrative leaves institutions vulnerable to external distortion.

Leaders need to show what higher education provides: community, academic challenge, mentorship, long-term value, and opportunities for personal and professional growth. These strengths remain central to the undergraduate experience but often fade from the public conversation because institutions do not make them visible.

People believe what they can see. Stories grounded in real experiences communicate meaning more effectively than data points or promotional language. When leaders highlight human experiences—students discovering their purpose, cross-ideological friendships, hands-on learning, faculty mentorship—they rebuild trust and credibility.

A Practical Framework for Restoring the Narrative: The CARE Model

Lewis’s CARE model gives leaders a structure for developing intentional, sustainable narratives that match institutional reality.

Confront

Leaders must address the issues families bring to conversations about higher education: cost, ideological tension, job readiness, mental health, and concerns about AI replacing traditional pathways. Avoiding these topics erodes trust. Naming them builds credibility.

Amplify

Every campus has stories that reveal its purpose and impact. Student breakthroughs, mentoring relationships, community engagement, faculty commitment, and workforce preparation efforts offer real evidence of value. The challenge is surfacing these stories consistently.

Reshape

Narratives shift when stories contradict assumptions in believable ways. A student describing how they gained confidence in a demanding course, or a first-generation student explaining the support they received, reshapes public understanding more effectively than any abstract defense of higher education.

Evergreen

Effective stories endure over time. Institutions need a library of adaptable narratives that can be reused across audiences and platforms. Evergreen stories form a durable foundation for public understanding.

Why Students and Faculty Are the Most Credible Messengers

Students and faculty hold a level of credibility that institutional messaging cannot replicate. Their experiences are grounded, specific, and trusted.

Students communicate the emotional reality of challenge, belonging, discovery, and growth. Their stories resonate with prospective students and families evaluating campus culture and support.

Faculty offer depth and perspective from years of working with students. They can articulate how academic challenge strengthens capacity, how mentoring relationships develop, and how students evolve across semesters.

When institutions lift these voices consistently—without excessive polishing—the public sees higher education through human experience rather than political framing.

Reaching the Audiences That Shape Higher Education’s Future

Institutions communicate simultaneously with prospective students, parents, alumni, legislators, and broader communities. Each group brings different concerns, but they all respond to authentic stories grounded in real experience.

One story can serve multiple audiences simply by changing emphasis:

• A student’s growth in an engineering program reassures parents about academic rigor, motivates prospective students, and signals workforce preparation to legislators.
  
  
• A first-generation graduate’s experience highlights student support for families and demonstrates public value for policymakers.
  
  
• A faculty member’s reflection on cross-ideological dialogue challenges assumptions about campus climate.
  
  

Short-form content is especially effective. A single authentic 45–60 second clip from a student or faculty member can outperform pages of written messaging because it travels easily across platforms and feels real.

Embedding Storytelling into Institutional Life

Narrative leadership becomes most powerful when it is part of routine institutional practice. This does not require large budgets or major staffing changes. Simple, consistent habits create a steady flow of credible content.

Examples include:

• First-year seminars that ask students to document initial assumptions about college and how their experiences compare.
  
  
• Departmental efforts to collect brief reflections from faculty about teaching and mentoring.
  
  
• Senior capstone or internship reflections that show how academic work leads to confidence and direction.
  
  
• Student interns or ambassadors capturing everyday moments using their phones.
  
  
• A small library of evergreen stories adapted for different audiences throughout the year.
  
  

These efforts produce authentic material while strengthening institutional identity.

Communicating With Confidence in a Polarized Environment

Leaders operate in a climate where statements are often interpreted through political filters. Clarity requires naming difficult issues, framing them honestly, and showing how the institution serves the public good.

Families want direct engagement on cost, campus climate, job readiness, and long-term value. They respond to leaders who confront these concerns with integrity and support their points with real examples. Stories—showing, not telling—carry more weight than generalized assurances.

This approach strengthens trust and demonstrates that the institution understands and takes seriously the concerns families bring to the table.

Strengthening Governance and Institutional Strategy Through Narrative

A clear narrative provides a foundation for governance. Boards understand institutional priorities more deeply when leaders articulate how the institution is perceived and how they are addressing those perceptions. Leaders who model narrative clarity help trustees make informed decisions about risk, strategy, and external pressures.

Internal alignment also increases. Faculty and staff feel recognized when leadership elevates the stories closest to student experience. Alumni remain connected when they see that the institution still reflects the experiences that shaped them. Narratives grounded in lived experience reinforce strategic goals and institutional mission.

Three Takeaways for University Presidents and Boards

1. Talk about the elephant in the room.
   Name the concerns families and communities already discuss. Clarity builds trust.
   
   
2. Talk about it through a story—show, don’t tell.
   Use real human experiences to illustrate how the institution works. People believe what they can see.
   
   
3. Eat that elephant one bite at a time.
   Begin with simple, consistent storytelling practices. A phone, an intern, and everyday campus moments are enough to start.

Quick Overview

• Public narratives about higher education are shaped largely by external voices
• Political rhetoric and social media distort the everyday reality of campus life
• Leaders need a narrative strategy rooted in authenticity
• Human-centered storytelling communicates institutional value more effectively than data
• The CARE model (Confront, Amplify, Reshape, Evergreen) provides a practical structure
• Students and faculty are the most credible messengers
• Adaptable stories reach parents, students, legislators, alumni, and communities
• Short-form storytelling meets audiences where they already consume information
• Evergreen narratives strengthen long-term reputation and trust
• Addressing cost, outcomes, and campus climate directly increases credibility
• Embedding storytelling into institutional life makes narrative leadership sustainable
• Institutions that define their narrative shape public understanding rather than reacting to it
  
  
  

About Our Podcast Guest

Peter Murphy Lewis, Documentary Filmmaker and Narrative Strategist, doesn’t just tell stories—he lives them. Whether guiding rock legends like Steven Tyler and Paul McCartney through Chile or hosting “Aquí Te Las Traigo Peter” or “El Sueño Americano” on TVN, Peter has spent his career stepping into the worlds he captures on screen. As a CNN political analyst, a filmmaker, and the director of People Worth Caring About, his work bridges cultures, industries, and human experiences. With a profound understanding of human connection, he crafts narratives that inform, inspire, and challenge audiences to see the world differently. Whether on-screen or behind the scenes, he is committed to crafting narratives that move people, challenge assumptions, and bring the world a little closer together through docuseries. His mission is clear: Bring meaningful stories to life.

Connect with Peter Murphy Lewis 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.

Connect with Drumm McNaughton on LinkedIn→

Read the Podcast Transcript

Changing Higher Ed podcast 287  – with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Peter Murphy Lewis

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.

[00:00:31] Introduction and Guest Introduction

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David. My guest today is Peter Murphy Lewis, CNN political analyst, filmmaker and director of People Worth Caring About. Peter doesn’t just tell stories, he lives them. His work bridges, cultures, industries, and human experiences, and he’s guided rock stars such as Stephen Tyler and Paul McCartney through Chile or hosted multiple television documentary series on television networks.

So you may ask, why is Peter on a higher ed podcast whose audience is primarily university and college presidents, board members, senior executives, and mid-level managers? Peter has a profound understanding of the human connection. He crafts narratives that inform, inspire, and challenge audiences to see the world differently.

His mission is clear. He brings meaningful stories to life. How is that applicable to higher ed? Well, think about your enrollment funnel. What you’re doing is creating a connection with your students or think about the folks that you’re marketing to. His mission’s clear: he brings these meaningful stories to life. And he joins me today to talk about how higher ed leaders can reclaim their narrative in a noisy, politicized space, and how higher ed institutions can turn students and faculty into authentic advocates.

Peter, welcome to the show.

Peter Murphy Lewis: I am excited to be here.

Drumm McNaughton: I’m excited to have you on this show. You’ve got quite an incredible background doing documentaries, working in South America. You’ve worked with folks like Steven Tyler and Paul McCartney, of course, nobody knows who they are, of course.

[00:02:16] Peter’s Background and Career Journey

Drumm McNaughton: Please tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into the cause of higher education.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yes, the shortened version, and then you can interrupt or ask me to elaborate, the shortened version is I thought I was going to be an academic or a diplomat all of my life. So I went and studied my master’s in South America with a rotary scholarship, studied my PhD all the way to dissertation, and I got into entrepreneurship. And I kept one foot in upper education as a full-time professor in South America at the University of Chile on US foreign policy, and then one foot in entrepreneurism. And I started to build up my marketing experience, and I just couldn’t balance both, and moved over to entrepreneurship and ran a travel company and built a couple different brands, sold those companies in the last two years, and then got into the documentary space. Which is kind of between education and marketing in a way. It’s kind of educating and teaching and marketing in one way or another. I’ve never thought about that, so that’s my abbreviated version to understand where I am now.

[00:03:20] Documentaries as Educational Tools

Drumm McNaughton: That’s fascinating. I too have never really thought about documentaries as educating, but that’s in fact what they’re doing. They’re bringing a particular situation to light in a medium where people, like to watch.

Peter Murphy Lewis: It’s true, it’s true. If you think about both the negative documentaries, Michael Moore from 20 years ago, you think about the positive ones like My Octopus Teacher, My Octopus Professor, or Ken Burns around country music or Ken Burns around Vietnam—

Drumm McNaughton: Or baseball.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yes. Or baseball you know, that we sit down to learn something new and it’s mixing education entertainment together is what a documentary is going for.

Drumm McNaughton: And the best documentaries do just that. They make a story. They bring something to light in a way that’s tellable. It’s not always easy to see it, but in fact it brings to light a particular issue in a way that people can understand.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Mm-hmm. I don’t have this perfectly polished, but after doing documentaries in the healthcare space for the last year and a half, I’ve come to, a hypothesis that the further the gap between what true reality is, what’s authentic, what is legit, what it is, and what everyone thinks, the bigger that gap, the better the documentary.

And I believe it is because the average human, you and I, we are full of contradictions. I’m a dad, sometimes I say one thing to my son and the next day maybe I think differently or the way that I talk to someone. We’re not, it’s not black and white in the real world. So when we come into a documentary, I think that that resonates with us. It doesn’t come off as polished as a movie because we don’t look like the people in the movies. We look much more closely to the people in the documentaries.

Drumm McNaughton: Great point. Let’s bring this around to higher education.

[00:05:17] The Gap Between Perception and Reality in Higher Education

Drumm McNaughton: Because higher ed is going through all sorts of interesting things, as when we talked last week, it’s not a problem with value of higher education. It’s a problem with perception.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yes I think that there is a huge gap there, right? Like I was born in 1980. My parents didn’t go to college. I can remember probably the most important thing for me was to go to college for myself, for my family, for opportunities, for mentorship, for critical thinking, and I did that and I feel like what the perception was then was very close to what the reality was, what it was for me, what I took away. Today I think it’s very different. The way that people talk about upper education is not the way that I did in 1995 when I was a sophomore in high school. And it’s very, very far from what the reality is. And I think that there’s a huge opportunity for education to fill that gap with a story.

Drumm McNaughton: Let’s talk a little more about this.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Mm-hmm.

Drumm McNaughton: There was less, what I’m hearing you say is, the perception and reality was the same back 30 years ago or pretty close to it. But now perception and reality are different. Why?

Peter Murphy Lewis: I’ll take some stabs.

[00:06:42] Political and Social Media Influences on Higher Education

Peter Murphy Lewis: I think one, it’s become politicized, right? You have very, very strong, well known political advocates, proponents, criticizing upper education, Charlie Kirk, late Charlie Kirk being one. But not just on the right, I, in preparation for this, I was thinking about who are all the people on the left who criticize it. I could go through a list of those as well, but I think that’s politicization, on both right and left.

Drumm McNaughton: You’re saying political entities lie? Is that what you’re saying? No, I’m just kidding.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yes, Yes, Yes. Politicals pull us further from the truth, for clickbait to get our attention. And that goes into the second item, which is social media. And social media tends to accentuate the bottom and the top of whatever is happening, because that gets our attention. It gets us to stay on it, gives us the dopamine. And, so either education is going to be the best or it’s going to be the worst. And which one do you think people are going to click on? Education’s the worst.

Drumm McNaughton: Of course.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yes.

Drumm McNaughton: And I don’t understand why this is, but people tend to focus on the negative.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Hmm.

Drumm McNaughton: From a psychology perspective, I would have to wonder if, if you focus on the negative, that makes your self-esteem get better because you’re better than that. I don’t know.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Hmm. Yes. Yes. I don’t know. I guess to, continue with my third and then maybe you have some ideas as well, Drumm, the third idea that I have around why there’s a big gap between reality and perception is maybe because upper education is behind the times when it comes to storytelling or marketing. Right? They were still printing catalogs of and sending it to seniors in high school, I don’t know if they’re still doing it today, but, I think they probably were four years ago when maybe they should have been embracing TikTok. Maybe they should have embraced YouTube. That’s okay, maybe we’re a little bit behind the time, but education is full of brilliant people between the age of 18 all the way up to professors who are 80. You have 62 years of brilliance that you can catch up with what technology is giving us.

Drumm McNaughton: I think you’re spot on with that last point. You’ve got tremendous amount of smarts, brilliance in education, multiple range, but who is your audience?

[00:09:00] Targeting Different Audiences in Higher Education

Drumm McNaughton: Who really is the person that you’re marketing to? I’ve had, it’s a conundrum for most higher ed institutions and for me as well, who is your customer? Is it the student that’s coming in? Is it their parents or is it society? And in many respects, it’s all three.

Peter Murphy Lewis: I agree. I think that you need to be nuanced in the way that you speak to each one of those audiences. That might mean different channels, or it might mean different handles, right?

[00:09:32] Utilizing TikTok for Higher Education Marketing

Peter Murphy Lewis: So if we’re going to talk about something, let’s just say TikTok for example, I like TikTok because it gives you feedback really quickly and you can publish as many clips as you want in a day, and it doesn’t hurt your reach.

So you and I could put on 25 clips today, and we’re going to know quickly which one is the best. There’s a chance on TikTok that you have three different handles for three different audiences. One is for society at large that is not going to send their kid to college, nor are they going to college. So maybe it’s my aunt and she’s 55 years old. She’s not going to send me to college. She’s not going to college. But she impacts how society thinks.

There might be a different channel aimed at me. I’m 45 years old. I have a 9-year-old. That 9-year-old, hopefully in nine years is going to be going to college. So how are you going to talk to me? Are you going to explain there’s value? Are you going to remind me what I got from my college and that’s still there for my son? And there’s probably extra things that are there for my son that I didn’t have, technology, I can remember my first computer in 1999. Can you imagine what my son could learn today? He could probably build a robot. He could definitely film a documentary. I didn’t have that, I didn’t have access to that.

And then lastly, you’re probably going to have a TikTok handle aimed at a 15-year-old to a 20-year-old who is going to be going to college soon, or they’re in a community college and you need to explain to them, do not drop out. There’s opportunity for you here. It’s not a title, it’s income, it’s thinking, it’s network, it’s community. So you might need to think about it in that way.

Drumm McNaughton: What I’m hearing you say is higher ed needs to be better at marketing and positioning themselves.

Peter Murphy Lewis: 100%.

Drumm McNaughton: That is a challenge because most higher ed folks in their faculty, and that’s who I’m obviously most familiar with, have specialty. Some of them are marketing, but it’s mostly theoretical, it’s not the practical side of the house. So this is a muscle that they need to build.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Or just use one, one of their really smart freshmen in college, who know how to take your theory and put it into practice or execution, in channels that you and I may not use.

Drumm McNaughton: Wait a minute.

Peter Murphy Lewis: The same framework that you and your listeners and I use as an older population who appreciates college. Those frameworks will help for the younger person who needs to do the execution with new channels.

Drumm McNaughton: This is a brilliant, brilliant idea. But it also requires you to understand and actually tap into your freshman. Normally, you’re not doing, internships or externships as a freshman or whatever. But you’ve got to do something to be able to understand that demographic that’s going to be coming in for the next three to four years.

Because your admission materials, your enrollment materials need to reflect what that population wants and needs to hear.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Well, just to give an example of taking your idea over to something that you could actually do.

[00:12:46] Freshman Engagement and Storytelling

Peter Murphy Lewis: When I went to college in August 1999, there are two things that I did that could easily be replaced with this storytelling by your college. The first thing I did is we had a two-week kind of team building activity where they put me in groups of, I think, about 15 freshmen. And we could choose kayak, canoe or hiking. And we went on this amazing experience to upstate New York, and we learned life skills and we learned communication, and we learned some survival skills. And that was mandatory. That exact process could be turned into a five-day sprint to film a documentary for the incoming freshman class.

And you give them five different myths that exist out there right now around upper education. And you charge these students with the challenge of, in five days, film something between 10 and 30 minutes, we’ll put editing software there for your AI, we’ll put an editor we can hire as a freelancer from abroad. And you give them this content, you create the story and you give them five myths. Combat one of these myths in your documentary.

The second thing is I had a freshman seminar. You might have had a freshman seminar. I went to liberal arts college. We had a freshman seminar for the first two semesters where we met in a small room with a professor. I think my professor was economics, I didn’t study economics, I studied Spanish and sociology. And that economics professor led us through books that I probably wouldn’t have come across. Instead of semester two, why don’t they just have that group of us have a mastermind where we do a documentary. And maybe it’s not a documentary, maybe it’s a story, maybe it’s a podcast. Maybe it’s myself and five freshmen, where we interview the faculty of everything that they’ve learned and passed those life lessons down to me as a freshman. We have to embrace storytelling and change the new channels, embrace new channels. The framework that we get from our professors exists the same today as I think it did 35 years ago.

Drumm McNaughton: Interesting points.

[00:14:46] Mentorship and Life Skills in Higher Education

Drumm McNaughton: I just spoke with a president of Stevens Institute of Technology who has one of these mandatory courses. Every freshman goes through it, you develop a mentor relationship with that professor, and what these freshmen come out of this, is life skills, how to navigate through the maze, which is higher education in many respects, we won’t go into that maze, but it’s there. It’s giving them those skills that they need to be successful throughout their college and into life beyond graduation. They’ve got like a 96% placement of their graduates within six months. That’s phenomenal.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Amazing. And is that story being told by the influencers, right?

Drumm McNaughton: It is.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Like that has to be out there? And if you can have a high schooler or a junior in college tell the story instead of me and you, even more impactful.

Drumm McNaughton: So when we were talking the other day, we talked about the importance of dealing with the elephant in the room. What is the elephant in the room?

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yes, this is a process that I have come up with, or a framework, or a blueprint, for how do I help my clients design a story that helps them achieve the goals of bridging the gap between perception and reality? And it’s an acronym. It comes from CARE. I think I started off with CARE just because I started doing documentaries in the healthcare space.

C being Confront, A being Amplify, R being Reshape, and E being Evergreen, or that’s a marketing term for Endure. And so confront is confront the negative perception of what everyone talks about us when we’re not there. So the elephant in the room is we all know as people of proponents of upper education, those of us who admire upper education, we all know what they’re saying about us, but often when we do marketing, we avoid that topic. And that means that we talk about our beautiful campus, we talk about how many students enroll. Right? We talk about our endowment, we talk about technology. But do we talk about the fact that some of those people visiting the college think that they might be able to replace upper education with AI? Are some of those students or parents of those students thinking, “oh, is my son going to come out woke and political?” ” Is my son going to come out, or my daughter going to come out with $140,000 of debt, not be able to get a job?” I think those are the three elephants in the room that every parent is thinking about when they’re about to visit a college.

So you have to confront that. That’s part of the design of the story that you need to tell. Because if you don’t tell it and you don’t confront it, they’re going to tell that story on Reddit, YouTube, Facebook groups, text threads.

Drumm McNaughton: Oh, absolutely.

[00:17:51] Addressing the ‘Woke’ Perception

Drumm McNaughton: Let’s talk a little bit about “woke”, because depending on what state you’re in, that is critical. You’ve got a new accreditor trying to get started down in the south. It’s a consortium of multiple states and multiple state university systems. How would you deal with something like “woke”.

[00:18:12] Confronting Negative Perceptions with Documentaries

Peter Murphy Lewis: If I were in some type of association with other colleges, I would do a documentary to confront that. And we can talk about if we were just a one-off college, how I would do that, but I think I’ll start a little bit higher, partially because I just did a keynote about two months ago to an association of independent colleges about how a documenter could help them.

I would confront the elephant in the room. So I would find out how people are talking about me in terms of woke on YouTube comments, YouTube videos, Reddit, Google, and so forth. And then I would determine what would be a story, not data, what is a story that is closer to the reality that I can show, not tell.

Oftentimes average marketers we tell. We tell with data. Good marketers show, and the showing speaks for itself, and the rest the audience can fill that in with data. So from showing point of view, if I were an association, I would find a very stark example of somebody who is coming into college, an 18 year, a 19-year-old who comes in very conservative. Myself, for example, I came into college very conservative in 1999 and I studied sociology and I didn’t come out “woke”. I would be an example. Right? So film some version of an 18-year-old who comes in studies these supposedly “woke” degrees and show the relationship that they create with their professors that become their friends and their mentors.

I worked with my first professor out of college. It was my very first job doing surveys. And all of my sociology professors helped me get into my master’s, my PhD. And show that story and then show that contrast of this young 18-year-old who might look like Charlie Kirk, who becomes friends with somebody who might look like Gavin Newsom, but in the college. And these people become friends and their ideas don’t change. What they change is the way that they talk to each other. They become friends. That story, I would watch that today.

Drumm McNaughton: That is such a critical point to make is getting the friendship. When I think back, and I jokingly say I didn’t have an education, I have technical training because I went to the Naval Academy. I majored in physics. I flew airplanes when I got out. So very highly technical and very conservative, both from a family perspective as well as my education.

When I think about those kind of things, and I think back to the academy, Yes, I think of my classmates and things like that. But I think about my professor, Herr Doctor Professor Kallam. He was German descent, heavy German accent. He got his doctorate and taught at Harvard for many years, so he had the Boston accent overlaid into it. I can remember having conversations with him in class, as a group. That’s who I think about. And like you, it’s not your being woke or whatever. It’s building that friendship and that relationship. I remember my first, quote, mentor, my faculty advisor. Those are the things that we think about. It’s not about going and becoming woke. I think, it’s not important what I think about that. But to your point, it’s the relationships and you can’t do that through AI.

Peter Murphy Lewis: No, you’re not going to be able to. Going to your example, I just got back from visiting Boston this summer for about two weeks. I went with my wife and my son and my wife let me split off from the two of them for three days. And I went back to the campus where I went to college in Boston. And the very first thing that I did is I went and looked up my professors. And I went and had lunch and coffee with them and walked around the North Shore, and these are all my sociology professors. And it’s that relationship, the chat GPT and Grok and Perplexity, all of those are not going to be able to replace what Dr. Johnson is for me and how he’s formed me. And is that story getting out? I don’t think so, not as much as it should.

Drumm McNaughton: It’s really important that these stories come out and I think the, your point, the associations, this is where a lot of these come out. But as individuals, we can relate these stories as well. Your expertise is in the art of communicating difficult subjects and in difficult times.

[00:22:53] Reframing the Cost Narrative in Higher Education

Drumm McNaughton: So let’s take a stab at reframing the public narrative about higher education to tell a more complete truth.

For example, cost. Cost of higher ed right now, the narrative is out there, it’s not worth the money. You can get as high a salary, et cetera, starting out. And then the counter argument is, oh, but over the lifetime of your earnings, you’re going to earn three to four times more with a college degree than you won’t. All of those are valid stories. How do you deal with this, or how would you deal with this?

Peter Murphy Lewis: So I haven’t spent too much thinking on this, but off the cuff, I would probably approach it not from the college point of view. I would approach it from what is being left out there and being unused. I think the slap in the face to me as a viewer of, hey, you think nobody’s given you a chance, you complain that you can’t afford college, let me show you the amount of scholarships that go unused. Let me show you how much tradesmen are making right now. And the unique degrees that exist in upper education that are giving amazing salaries. So instead of, in my opinion, I think I changed four majors my freshman year in college and I don’t even know if I studied any of the classes that I declared myself as a major.

So I come from the thinking that most 18-year-olds don’t know what they want to do. They follow what’s trending. So if I told a story that showed me where I’m going to make money, where I’m going to be fulfilled, what’s going to be rewarding, then you insert the university. The university is not the protagonist in this story, it is the student. And it’s the offering that’s going to get their attention. And the college is the vehicle to get them to turn them into the hero or to help them find success.

Drumm McNaughton: Interesting. Let’s go a little deeper on that. We talked earlier about the elephant in the room, searching through Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, et cetera, to find out. Then building the message you just talked about what the message is. How do you rewrite the story that is out there about the cost of higher education?

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yes, so I’ll continue with the same example around costs. So going back to the kind of the acronym with C being confront, I would probably spend a couple hours going through all of the Reddit threads, communities that have the most amount of negativity related to upper education cost.

And then I would do the exact same thing through all of the other channels. I would pull those together and I would start to decide what are the key topics or the key themes here? And then I would write what is the exact opposite of that in terms of a hypothesis, making sure it’s accurate. So college is overpriced. I’m going to spend $140,000 for four years and I’m not going to have a job afterwards. Well then I would just write the opposite. College isn’t $140,000, 60% of kids have access to 30% of scholarship relief or 90% of kids that have higher than a B minus average in high school get this amount of support type of thing.

And then I would walk it through where are the success stories that you will see because of college. Because I don’t know you that well, and I obviously know my story well. I’ll give you my example. I walked out of college and I made $8,000 as a social worker. I made $8,000 more than my supervisor because I spoke Spanish. Nobody’s telling you that, right? Like I didn’t study social work. I studied Spanish on the side, and I made more than my supervisor because of what college gave me. I, today, am a marketer. I would attribute 75% of what I do well as a marketer because the way they taught me to think like a sociologist. Right? 25% I’ll give it to my mom and my dad. They taught me to be kind, to think about psychology, to be empathetic, that gives me a good marketing foundation. But the critical thinking, right, the exact same framework that I’m developing right now that came from Dr. Johnson, Dr. Holcomb, Dr. J Anthony Lloyd. Those are the three people I spent the most time with in college. So you take the negativity that you see. And you pull a story to bring out the complete opposite.

Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm. That makes perfect sense. And just doubling back to what we said earlier, you’ve got three different audiences that you’re doing this for. Is this all one quote documentary or, you know, short film. Or is this multiple?

[00:28:07] Creating Evergreen Campaigns

Peter Murphy Lewis: I think this is probably the most important thing that we’re talking about in this entire conversation. Because, I’ll use the terminology in marketing and then I’ll bring it down to Layman’s because probably 5% or 15% of your audience works in marketing. I think of this not as a documentary. I think of this as an entire evergreen campaign for you to bring new audiences in to look at your goals and move them down what we call funnel. In marketing we have what’s called a top of funnel, which is awareness, and then you bring them down to bottom of funnel, which is what you want them to do. That is going to be a solution to the pain that they have and achieve the goals that you have.

So you have this core piece of content, which is a documentary, which is expressing the reality that is not out there. That could live in a bubble and no one sees it. Now, my first documentary, I got it onto every smart television, Apple and Samsung and Hulu.

But you can’t guarantee that’s going to be the case. So let’s assume that’s not the case. You had this documentary.

[00:29:07] Using Short Form Content for Marketing

Peter Murphy Lewis: Now you take that documentary and you turn it into short form content. 30 second, 60 second, 90 second clips, and those go to your social media channels, whether they’re paid like meta ads or they’re organic. I would do organic and I would do YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and all of that.

And that is where you’re going to have different audiences. And that’s where you’re going to bring in people to see it because they’re going to see the clickbait information. And that is where you have one aimed at my aunt who’s not sending her kid to college, she didn’t have a kid. You have one aimed at my at me because I’m sending my kid to college. And then you have one aimed at a high schooler. And I would just have your students create that content and I would separate it. I would say, “hey guys, we have three handles in TikTok this year. We’ve developed a documentary that was filmed last year by the freshmen. Now they’re sophomores. They filmed it. Now you as freshmen, you guys are going to grow these and you’re going to get the information out there”.

[00:30:04] Leveraging Student-Generated Content

Peter Murphy Lewis: I think that would, can’t you just imagine every freshman in college being just thrilled to use a story, promote something that they have decided to do, and learn from the algorithm. This education is going to serve them when they get their next job in three years.

Drumm McNaughton: Oh, oh, absolutely. And I can even see this going a step further than that. As each. School within a university or a college within a university, for your majors, somebody wants to be an engineering major, so you have a someone who is a student, be your, subject in this. Talking about that, so where that people relate, I know we used to have a website that would have multiple different testimonial stories, different people, men, women, people of color, et cetera.

And people will normally click on the person that they identify with. So if you’ve got that story, that, that’s a wonderful way of doing it.

[00:31:02] The Power of Personal Stories

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yes I want to give a concrete example that I think will help everyone visualize this in practice. So, I had a call this morning with my marketing team. And we’ve done five documentaries in the nursing home space. And I said, “hey, we have a call this week where we need to come up with marketing campaigns for our partners. Aimed at three at two different audiences with the same content that we’ve already developed”. And my team said to me, what do you mean how? How can one clip go for two different audiences?” I said, “it’s with the caption and it’s with your call to action.” So one of the documentaries that I filmed a year ago shows two sisters, who before they started working in the nursing home and long-term care, they both worked at Subway. And the story of this documentary is these young girls are like 25 years old who found a place in life that’s so fulfilling that they will never, ever leave long-term care. And in the meeting we said, “how would we use this for two different audiences”?

I said, “this is what it looks like. One clip is aimed at a 15 to 19-year-olds and it says, you don’t want to throw money at college? You’re afraid you don’t know what to do? You don’t have a good community college close by? Consider becoming a CNA today and be as happy as these two girls who worked in Subway. Don’t go to Subway like them. Reach out to your local nursing home. They’ll pay for your education today.” Same clip. Same clip.

Now let’s aim it at somebody who is not a CNA. Let’s aim it at Drumm, or let’s aim it at Peter and they’re going to show it to us on TikTok, the exact same clip. It shows these two girls. The caption says, do you know somebody who’s young and has a big heart? Watch this. They show it to me and you, you and I are like, ‘whoa, those people are going to take care of us.” You and I are going to be in a nursing home in the next 30 years or 40 years. They say, do you know a Mary and a Katie in your life? Tag them today so they know that they can have a career. The same clip, two different audiences. You’re not paying twice the price, you’re using the same thing and you’re hitting Drumm and Peter in one and the other one you’re hitting a high schooler who wants to become a CNA.

Drumm McNaughton: Brilliant. I’m going to double back just a bit. You talked about the marketing funnel. Enrollment has the same thing. There’s an enrollment funnel from inquiry down to admissions.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yep.

Drumm McNaughton: Same type of thing. And more and more institutions are using AI top of funnel, more personal touch down at the bottom of the funnel. Which is a really smart idea, smart way to go. But what if you were able to get your message out via a two-minute clip, via TikTok, via whatever, touting your school, touting the affordability, touting the education, touting the relationships. To me that’s brilliant.

Peter Murphy Lewis: I would actually do it, so going back to your question, like you could do it with an engineer. You could do it with an architect. I would test having different days where different degrees run your social media with the content that you’ve already created in the documentary. So one of the things that I’ve noticed that works really well in social media is not being the smartest person in the room.

So when I have done clips that have a caption right on it, before you click on it says, I had no idea, dot dot, dot. People click on it because people want to know the surprise. So instead of me coming and telling you why you should go to college, me coming and saying, hey, six months ago I didn’t know this. You and I are almost in the same place. Now I’m going to show you what I learned, not tell you what I learned. So we’re going to learn it together. And you have an engineer who’s 20 years old who said, I had no idea when I applied to X College to become an engineer, that engineers are needed in every aspect of life. I’ve already had X company reach out to me because they need an engineer in video games or cybersecurity. Or introduce these concepts to these 19-year-olds who might be thinking, I don’t need to go to college. Everything that I want access to, I can. Well you’re not going to have access to these businesses that are recruiting engineers because they need someone who thinks like that.

Drumm McNaughton: Brilliant. Brilliant. Before we wrap up, there was one thing that you mentioned to me that really struck me when we spoke last week.

[00:35:48] Writing Your Own Narrative

Drumm McNaughton: If you don’t write the story, they’re going to write it for you. You’re just not aware of it.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yep. Yep. I think that this is probably the part that hurts the most. Those of us who have our causes in life. If you’re passionate about the unhoused or the homeless. I worked in the HIV aids population. My brother has a terminal disease. Whatever your passion is, you start to think about how far the perception is away from the reality that you know. And you know, somebody writing that book. You, as a marketer, every single day when you go out and try and talk people to become a Boy Scout or go to church or be against hate language, you are a marketer and you are trying to write the book for the cause that you’re passionate about. And colleges, upper education, universities, nursing homes, they have to write the book otherwise on Reddit and YouTube and in our private conversations and you and I are taking a road trip next time to Texas, you and I repeat what we have heard instead of the truth. And if you and I have watched my Octopus Professor Documentary, you and I are going to be informed and you and I are going to have a completely different conversation about Octopus today.

If you and I watched the Ken Burns documentary about baseball, you and I are going to have a completely different conversation about baseball because they went out and wrote this real story instead of waiting for everyone else to do it. Be your own author.

Drumm McNaughton: Such a critical, critical point, and we see that over and over in politics, in education, whatever, is people are going out and writing a story that suits their own desires, suits their own political bent, et cetera. And it may or may not be the truth.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yes. May I give another example that I think everyone will understand. Which is, Drive to Survive Formula One on Netflix. Five years ago, Formula One was not popular in the United States. Netflix took Formula One, made a dramatic series out of it, and now they grew the population and it’s a billion-dollar industry that they brought in the United States. And not only are men watching it, women watch it. Netflix wrote the book for Formula One. You can do the same thing.

Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely. Folks at ACE, folks at AAC&U, folks at CHIA, we can be doing far more in writing that narrative, versus just trying to react to it. At individual colleges, we can do the same thing for our folks as well.

Peter, this has been fascinating. I thoroughly enjoy these kind of conversations where we’re getting in theoretical and bringing them down.

Three Takeaways for University Presidents and Boards

As we always do, three takeaways for university presidents and boards. What can you do about combating these false narratives that are out there.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Number one, talk about the elephant in the room.

Number two, talk about it through a story. So, show don’t tell.

Number three, eat that elephant one bite at a time. You can start off tomorrow with your cell phone. You can start off tomorrow with an intern coming in. One day at a time. One bite at a time.

Drumm McNaughton: And like we said earlier, if you don’t write the story, somebody else is going to write it for you and you may not like what that story is.

[00:39:26] Conclusion and Future Plans

Drumm McNaughton: So what’s next for you?

Peter Murphy Lewis: Tomorrow my TV production company and crew and my documentary crew are flying in from South America, four people. They filmed 10 years of television with me and all my documentaries. And we are filming three documentaries in the next four weeks. We’re doing one about a bank. We’re doing one about a hippo. And then we’re doing one about a nursing home in Texas.

Drumm McNaughton: Wow, you’re going to be a little busy for the next four weeks, I guess.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yep. I’ll see you in December.

Drumm McNaughton: Very good. Peter, thank you so much. I would love to have you back in, six months or so and talk about what you’ve seen in the higher education industry. Can we do that?

Peter Murphy Lewis: Please. I’d be, be honored.

Drumm McNaughton: Sounds great. Thank you so much for being on a show. I have thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. Cheers.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Thank you.

Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening today and a special thank you to my guest, Peter Murphy Lewis. Peter, I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. I look forward to the next time we get to have a good conversation like we did today. To my listeners, thanks again for tuning in. I look forward to seeing you next week.