The politics we pretend not to see
Universities, fundraising, and and how decisions actually move
There’s a false binary in universities that some people are more pure than others. Some are in it for the mission, while others are out for power. It sounds moral, and it feels clarifying. Except that our assumptions are almost always wrong.
I want to talk about this—why university politics feels so polarizing—and what it means to mature our thinking within the system, rather than pretending we can rise above it. I’ve skirted this topic in various posts, but haven’t addressed it directly until now. It’s time.
Politics is the unspoken context of university work. In the 1950s, political scientist Wallace Stanley Sayre coined what’s now known as Sayre’s Law: “The politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low.” What Sayre captured is a particular kind of intensity—one that emerges when authority is diffuse, outcomes are symbolic, and conflict feels personal.
But that doesn’t mean it is hopeless, and that all university professionals are doomed to suffer. It is possible to understand the political climate as a structural reality, not a moral one. It’s possible to learn skills to improve relationships and navigate systems without losing your integrity along the way.
For starters, let’s consider the structure of universities and how decisions are made. This used to baffle me, despite a lifetime of context. I remember, years ago, during my first alt-academic job at a university, I was assigned to be the fundraising representative on an institutional strategic planning committee. The committee was populated with some of the most intelligent people I’d ever met—professors of linguistics, marketing, microbiology—and I happily attended the two-hour meetings. We would convene every several weeks, take part in fascinating discussions on scenario planning and strategy, and nothing would get decided.
I remember thinking, what is going on? I named it my “happy hour meeting” because it was fun, yet nothing was ever decided. What I couldn’t see at the time was that alignment was being built horizontally, across relationships.
Politics is the process by which collective decisions are shaped in a system where no single actor has full authority.
Universities are layered sovereignties in which influence replaces command. Authority is diffuse and overlapping, and any given decision may require buy-in from a number of constituents, including faculty, administration, and even volunteer boards. Decisions are also often bounded by state and federal oversight, accreditation bodies, and public opinion too. It’s a gnarly environment that requires tuning a message to each room. But without naming this attunement outright, it often feels sneaky or underhanded—even when it isn’t.
Tenure and contracts are another reality that tends to freeze conflict within the system. Protections l like this are brilliant for nurturing inquiry and protecting workers, but brutal for organizational dynamics. It means that power struggles endure, sometimes for years. Instead of resolution, you wind up with tactics like coalition building, procedural warfare, reputational signaling, and moral framing as leverage.
If that weren’t enough, advancement and external relations teams navigate another layer of nuance. Their work clusters around money, meaning-making, and institutional legitimacy, and their professionals are often navigating contexts in which people do not share a common language or logic. They are tasked with translating the university to the public. Translation is not neutrality; it’s political work. It requires emphasis, omission, and framing.
With all of this, you might start to wonder why anyone would want to work in a university at all. For most, the mission still matters, and outweighs the struggles. Nevertheless, the reality can become untenable. I know people who identify as “recovering academics” as a result. It’s particularly heavy to those who value directness, or like to move swiftly, or prefer to build harmony. Those who choose to stick it out often survive by keeping their head down and not rocking the board.
At their most vulnerable, what most everyone wants to understand is how to act with integrity inside a system that cannot be pure.
This is the underlying premise of my work: in universities, there are no good actors. There are no bad actors. Just conditions.
Growing up, my dad was a professor. As families do, we would discuss his job at the dinner table. There’s a story that once, at a holiday party, we met a man named Dean, and I thought he was the dean. That’s how long this world has been a part of my life.
Leaping ahead, when I landed my first job as a director of communications at a university foundation, I thought I’d landed my dream job. As a strategist, and someone who likes to understand how people work as individuals, and in systems, I immediately began trying to wrap my mind around why the environment felt so toxic. What made it so miserable?
When I got serious about studying coaching a decade ago, I unlocked a few insights right away. One, I came to believe that every university leader should have a coach. Two, this isn’t enough. If we want universities to function better, their leaders need to learn the skills of a coach themselves. Armed with this insight, I set out to develop training programs specifically for advancement shops. It is meaningful work, but until now, I’ve skirted around one of the biggest barriers to adoption: the taboo topic of politics.
This is what I want to make explicit, and what coaching skills help address: there’s a gap between how universities are formally governed, and how decisions actually move. Decisions move through undocumented channels. They move through informal alignments, or narrative framing, sequencing and timing. They move through patterns of who shows up, who speaks, and who stays silent. While formal systems of governance may provide legitimacy, it’s the informal processes that actually create motion.
We can make our systems more intelligent and decision-making more transparent. By intelligence, I mean the system’s capacity to make sense of itself. This isn’t about brilliance or tenure. It isn’t about teaching people to “manage stakeholders” better, or learn new influence tactics, or help to build coalitions, or win internal games. It’s not about making people more persuasive or strategic in a Machiavellian sense. Nor can it make power disappear.
What it does do is develop people’s capacity to act with clarity and integrity inside political systems without becoming manipulative, avoidant, or cynical.
This is where I’ve been pointing for years. I thought I could do it subtly, and now I’ve come to admit we need to address it frankly.
What is the promise of learning the skills of a coach? It can reduce unproductive politics. It can teach you how to work with power without being distorted by it. It can help you move from moral certainty to shared inquiry—from who is right to what are we actually trying to do together, given our reality.
In universities, people seek mission through influence. Normalizing this as a fact allows leaders the safety to stop over-performing purity, and accept the mechanism through which the mission moves forward. It doesn’t have to be unskilled—that’s when it turns ugly. Once the dynamics of influence are neutralized, teams can speak more honestly about ambition too, because fundraising runs on ambition.
It’s worth repeating that there are no good actors. There are no bad actors. Just conditions. Even if only a small percentage of you believes this to be true, nurturing this perspective begin to soften your environment overall. It also begins to create containers in which identity can finally relax.
You can be less captured by the system. But you cannot do it alone. Becoming less reactive, less moralized, and more discerning requires education and support. These are skills. It is a practice. The shift happens when the system itself commits together.