The Institution Is Not Going To Save You

A Communications Guide for Academics Under Political Attack

One day you’re a respected scholar; the next, you’re the center of a viral outrage campaign, and your university, which you thought would protect you, is suddenly treating you like a liability.

Over the past year, I have advised numerous academic clients who have faced complaints, job losses, or both as a result of their involvement in political activities or discourse in their personal lives. I have also spent considerable time reviewing similar cases I haven’t worked on directly. The information in this post is not related to any one specific person’s situation, but the patterns I have observed across multiple cases.

These are the common themes you need to be aware of:

1. The crisis isn’t yours… yet, it IS

The most common thing university admins appear to do, based on the cases I have examined, is throw targeted individuals under the bus.

There are many reasons for this, and almost all of them come down to the university’s perceived need to eliminate risk. And you are the risk. They are typically under pressure from an external source (whether that’s a government directive, a donor, a board member, social media, the media, etc.) and frame the situation as a performance or safety concern rather than, well, the truth. A decision is made somewhere that you are a problem, and the narrative is built backwards to justify removing you from your position.

The situation isn’t about your actual conduct but the institutional fear of political pressure. Materially, what this means for you is that you are a target who can’t rely on institutional protection because the institution is protecting itself.

The legality of all of this is something for lawyers to handle. If a university can’t point to specific policy violations but your lawyer can build a case around external pressure, that’s a retaliation case. Get copies of everything the university has said to you and, especially, publicly to the community, in emails to students, in the media, etc., and get into the contradictions between their narrative and the truth. The justification on paper for removing you from your position and what the university is really afraid of are almost never the same thing. The gap between them is where the strategy lives.

But you have your own work to do in your communications about the situation with your professional (and personal) network, including the people who might not be on your side.

The crisis is the university’s, but the effects are shifted onto you. The responsibility for managing your reputation is yours. Recognizing that you are in a crisis and are responsible for managing it is the first step in getting through it, because what taking responsibility is in cases like this is not taking blame, but taking back your agency and control over what is happening to you.

You shouldn’t be in this situation. It isn’t fair. It shouldn’t be your crisis. But that doesn’t mean you have to view it as something that happened to you that you are powerless to change. You can shape your own narrative.

2. You need to be able to separate what happened to you from what you want to do about it

Rage is a powerful motivator, and I have yet to meet an academic affected by a politically motivated attack who hasn’t felt it. If you’re telling me your story, I’ll likely even feel the rage with you. The problem with letting rage (or other negative mental states like anger, depression, and anxiety) dictate our decision-making is that it makes actions that will provide temporary relief appear to be the most logical, and they’re not always the best choices for our long-term goals. I’ve talked multiple clients out of making questionable decisions by getting to the root cause of why they want to make them (which I understand, because I’ve made many questionable decisions myself… it’s always good when you can help others learn from your mistakes) and why the decision itself won’t get them the resolution they think it will.

Wanting vindication is understandable. Part of my role (and that of any other crisis manager you might work with) is to help you work through that strong emotional state and desire for ‘revenge’ and understanding to get to a place where you can think clearly about what you want your long-term outcomes to be. If you start traveling before you know what your final destination is supposed to be, you might go off in all the wrong directions and make it harder for yourself to get back to the road you need to be on. I say this as someone who once quite literally moved to Texas from Indiana before realizing I wanted to go home to the UK… a lot of unnecessary miles added to that trip!

So, you need to process what happened to you in a separate mental space from where you plan what you’re going to do about it. What you’re going to do about it will depend heavily on where you want to be in five, ten years from now. Perhaps even next year. Get a clear idea of what you want the future to look like for you and separate how you want to feel in the future from how you feel right now, so that your actions are geared towards getting you to that desired future feeling rather than making the ‘right now’ feelings go away.

Determining whether your action will get you on the right path requires second (and third, and fourth)‑order thinking instead of first-order thinking. First-order thinking is focused on the immediate and obvious consequences of an action; second (and subsequent)-order thinking is asking “and then what?” to get the full picture of where your actions are taking you. For example, “If I post an angry thread tagging the university president, I will feel vindicated” (first-order); “And then the president’s office will view me as hostile” (second-order); “And then they will use my public hostility as further evidence that I am a disruptive presence” (third-order); “And then I might not be reinstated.”

(Feel free to contact me if you want help with this or any other stage of this process. It’s never going to be easy, but doing it with a person trained to handle it, in a judgment-free zone, makes it easier).

Emotional regulation to separate what has happened from what you want to happen next is one of the most important things for developing a rational strategy for moving forward.

3. You need to get clear on what you actually want

That is somewhat stating the obvious… Perhaps what I should say is that you need to get clear on how all of the things you want ‘play’ (or don’t) with each other. One of the most common themes in situations like these is wanting (and attempting to achieve) multiple contradicting things at the same time.

It is possible to start a petition to try to get your job back.

It is possible to manage communications around the issue in a way that helps you get employment elsewhere.

It is possible to make a statement about academic freedom.

It is possible to build a case for academic freedom while also protecting your own academic reputation.

It is possible to use your experience as a jump-start into political activism.

It is not possible to do all of these things simultaneously. If you try, you will not do any of them well.

I am not here to tell you which goal you should have; that’s up to you to decide. But I am here to tell you what goals do and do not work together and how your approach and communications will influence whether you’re moving closer to your goals or further away from them. Coming back to what I mentioned in #2, look at where you want to be in the future. If you feel a strong desire to get into political activism now, what would doing that do to your likelihood of being where you want to be in five years? Do you care about that cause enough to change your career path for it? (I know that’s a challenging question—be honest with yourself and don’t be too hard on yourself if the answer is ‘no’. It’s possible, and reasonable, to care very deeply about something and not want to change your life for it.)

This will require difficult decisions, and it’s likely that you will feel like you’re abandoning parts of yourself and some of your values during the process. It’s important to remember that we can’t always be true to our full selves in everything we do, and sometimes we have to make compromises to be effective. That doesn’t mean we’ve lost the parts we’ve had to compromise on. You’ll come back to them like you will that research project you weren’t able to secure funding for last year.

The specific decisions you’ll need to make and the consequences of them will be highly specific to your situation and goals, but here’s one example:

The scenario: A video of you at a protest for a politically contentious cause goes viral online; you’re wearing a sweater with your university’s logo on it, people on the socials track you down, the university gets bombarded with complaints, and you get put on administrative leave for ‘safety reasons’. You want your job back. You also want to pressure the university to recognize your right to protest for the specific cause.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting either of those things, but you’re not going to get both of them together (the latter, you’re unlikely to get at all in the form presented in this scenario, even if the university wants to do it—there are often reasons why it can’t, regardless of that’s how things ‘should be’).

If your communications around this conflate your goal to get back to work with your right to align with a specific cause and indicate that you want the university to also somewhat (even if indirectly) align with that specific cause, that’s unfortunately not conducive to getting your job back.

To understand why that is, we need to look at who the key stakeholders are—who you need to be talking ‘to’ to achieve your desired outcomes—in this strategy.

For the first outcome, getting back to work, those stakeholders are the university officials with the power to allow that to happen. If you’re using a petition strategy to garner support to help convince the university to allow you to return (and you’re not addressing the ‘safety concern’ here—that’s a red herring, the university wants to know that you’re not going to be a risk to them with future activities), your stakeholders are the academic community members who will sign it.

For the second outcome, your stakeholders are others who support your specific cause. You can rally them to pressure the university to support your right to protest for that cause. And the messaging you need to reach them… will undermine your appeal to the stakeholders you need to reach to achieve the first outcome. Demanding support for your cause transforms the petition from a defense of political freedom into a political manifesto that will be weaponized to paint you as an activist rather than a wronged professional. If there were donors and administrators who opposed your attendance at the initial protest, for example, they could use this to justify their actions and claim that yours proves your focus is the political cause, not your job.

The moment you conflate the situation with political activism, you hand the university an ‘out’ because they no longer have to defend a personnel decision, but their right to not be told what to think about the cause you support. They can win that fight in the court of institutional opinion even if they lose it in an employment lawsuit.

You cannot effectively speak to two opposing stakeholder groups within the same strategy and expect the messaging to land with either.

If you try to address these opposing stakeholder groups simultaneously in this scenario, it will come across as wanting your job back as part of an act of activism for your specific cause. This will do nothing to convince the university that that ‘safety concern’ (risk to them) isn’t a concern. It will do nothing to convince the university to align with your views (if it wanted to, or if it wanted to and also could viably do so, it would have already). It will also alienate people who support your right to have your views but don’t want to align with the same cause as you (there are more of these than you think—internet discourse makes us appear much more polarized than we are in real-world settings).

So, assuming that you don’t want to abandon the fight to return to work, the difficult decision here will be removing the association between the outcome you want and the cause you support. The compromise doesn’t have to be ‘focus on getting back to work and forget about my right to political freedom entirely,’ though. The compromise can be a slight shift in how you discuss that right.

That compromise might look like:

(a) Focusing on your contributions to your role, your students, and the wider community, highlighting your commitment, dedication, and value, and what the institution is missing by not having you at work; focus most of the messaging around what you offer and the value you provide.

(b) Letting your lawyer handle the aggressive legal arguments regarding whether the decision to remove you was legal, where the gaps are between the university’s narrative around them removing you and their actual actions and communications, etc. and how to handle that ‘safety concerns’ narrative in the context of the risk you materially pose to the university; avoid litigating in public, your lawyer will handle this for you.

(c) Discussing your right to express political freedom as a part of general advocacy for political and academic freedom and open inquiry. Don’t tie it to your specific cause. That way, people who support your right to have an opinion don’t have to agree with the specific opinion you have to support you.

It is much easier to garner support for your right to have an opinion (any opinion) than it is to garner support for a specific opinion.

Of course, if your goal is to go all-in on the political activism, the stakeholders, goals, and strategies will be different. This is just one example. There is, unfortunately, no ‘one size fits all’ approach to these situations.

4. It is easier to defend academic freedom as a concept than to defend your right to have a specific opinion

I touched on this in the example in #3, but I want to expand on it more so that it’s clear. Academic freedom has long been a valued concept within university systems, and changes to how things play out in response to more recent developments in political polarization haven’t radically altered that position to the extent that you won’t be able to reach reasonable people who support it.

When we care about a specific cause, it can be easy to tie our right to have an opinion to the cause we have a specific opinion about; however, arguing from that standpoint forces people who don’t agree with you but agree with your right to have the opinion to either not align with you at all or align with an opinion they themselves disagree with. Especially if you’re petitioning, any communications that indicate that support for your rights equals support for your cause alienates anyone who doesn’t support both of these things and it shifts the focus to a debate around the validity and support-worthiness of that particular cause rather than the true issue at stake, which is the right to have any opinion in the first place.

Someone who disagrees with you entirely might be very happy to write in support of your right to have your opinion and not be forced out of work for it, recognizing that they, too, want to have their opinions and keep their position. That we should all be able to. (Note: It should go without saying that I’m not referring to threats, harassment, discrimination, incitement to violence, unlawful activity, or racist, antisemitic, Nazi, otherwise dehumanizing ideologies, etc). I’m not saying every opinion is defensible, just that support for someone’s lawful right to hold an opinion is not the same as support for the opinion itself, and that distinction really matters when we’re trying to get people to ‘hear’ us on issues like academic freedom.

The university is also more likely to be receptive to arguments that speak to overall values that it, as an institution, already has (academic freedom, open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, due process, institutional neutrality, the ability of scholars to pursue and express ideas without fear of professional retaliation), even if it appears to not be acting in accordance with them. This framing gives the university a path to support you without endorsing your specific position, where they can defend themselves against critics by saying, “We’re not taking a position on the substance of this view; we’re upholding the principle that faculty must be able to engage in lawful scholarly, political, or public expression without being punished because others object to it.”

That is a much easier position for a university to defend publicly than one that appears to align it with a contested cause.

This distinction also helps keep the focus where it belongs. Once the conversation becomes a referendum on whether your particular opinion is correct or morally acceptable, the narrative is much harder to control, and the argument can quickly become about the issue itself, driven by the loudest voices. Focusing on academic freedom, due process, and the right to lawful expression keeps the core focus clearer: should faculty members be professionally punished because their views are unpopular, controversial, or politically inconvenient?

More people can understand this argument and support it even if they don’t support you.

5. Universities are creating their own crisis, and that matters for yours

The final thing you need to understand is that the institution acting against you is almost certainly acting from fear rather than a position of strength or principle. Understanding this matters for you, because it tells you something important about the position you are in: you are likely not dealing with an institution that has made a principled decision.

The reputational calculation they often seem to be making is a short-term one: say as little as possible, distance the institution from the controversy, avoid angering donors or politicians, hope the story moves on.

But this indicates a misunderstanding of where the reputational damage is actually coming from.

In these cases, the crisis is much more than “a faculty member said something controversial” or “an outside group has manufactured outrage”. The true institutional crisis is the visible failure to defend the values it claims to stand for. This is why advocating for those values has merit, reminding the institution that they exist. A fearful institution is not going to voluntarily reverse course without pressure, and it is also not an immovable object. It is responsive to reputational risk, peer perception, and the narrative that takes hold in the spaces it cares about. That is where your leverage is.

Because the university is applying the wrong crisis model, treating a politically motivated attack as though it were a genuine institutional failure that needs to be contained, it has left itself exposed and validated the campaign against you by responding as though the campaign had merit. It has rewarded bad-faith actors and signaled to others that the same tactics will work again. That is not a strong position.

What universities are afraid of is often not necessarily the risk they should be most worried about. That risk is that they’ll be perceived as abandoning their own principles when pressured.

You cannot fix the institution’s failure here, but you can use your understanding of it to take back control of your own narrative. The university is not going to tell your story accurately, because an accurate story does not serve its short-term interests. That means you have to tell it. Clearly, strategically, and with a firm grasp of what you want the outcome to be. While institution is managing its fear, you need to be managing your future.

Need help? Contact me directly for confidential, judgment-free advice on managing your approach and communications.