Resilience in the Fog of Uncertainty

A Leadership Playbook for Navigating Higher Ed’s Fourth Disruption

Early in my career at Texas A&M, I sat in a packed Operations Council meeting during the early days of the dot-com recession. Tom Putnam, who led our central IT organization, stood at the front of the room with a piece of chalk in hand. Over the next hour, he walked us through the financial picture: state funding cuts, declining tuition flows, and how we’d manage the downturn through vacancies and belt-tightening. There was no panic, no spin. Just calm, open, honest leadership.

I wasn’t in a leadership role yet, I was still learning, but that meeting left a lasting impression. It was my first glimpse of how external economic forces could ripple through higher education, and how vital steady leadership is in times of uncertainty. Since then, I’ve led through three more major disruptions: the Great Recession, the COVID pandemic, and now a fourth wave shaped by shifting federal policy, enrollment pressures, and growing institutional fragility.

In today’s dispatch, I return to that first lesson and reflect on what it takes to lead through moments like this, with clarity, calm, and resilience, when the road ahead is anything but certain.

The big picture

Higher education is facing its fourth major disruption in a single generation. The dot-com collapse, the Great Recession, and the COVID-19 pandemic each reshaped the landscape; and now, a new wave is building. Political pressure, shifting demographics, and aggressive federal policy changes are converging to create a level of institutional instability that even the most elite campuses can no longer outrun.

A colleague at a top-tier private university, expensive, not Ivy, but deeply research-driven, recently shared what they’re up against: looming losses of tens of millions in NIH indirect cost recovery, a proposed hike in the endowment tax, ongoing struggles to reliably fill the undergraduate class, and the likely elimination of Federal PLUS loans for graduate and professional students. That last change alone threatens to collapse enrollment in master’s programs that his tuition-dependent private university relies on to balance its budget. He’s facing a budget cut of unprecedented scale, and by his account, it’s only the beginning.

This isn’t an anomaly. It’s a preview.

Why it matters

If you’re in a leadership role in higher education IT, or really, any part of campus operations, this moment demands more than operational excellence. It demands emotional resilience.

You’re not just navigating budget models or portfolio reviews. You’re guiding real people: teams, departments, communities, through volatility that feels existential.

The pattern

Higher education has weathered three seismic financial disruptions in the past 25 years and for many of today’s mid-to-late career IT leaders, a fourth is now underway.

• 2001: During the dot-com crash, many institutions froze hiring, delayed infrastructure investments, and saw early signs of the digital divide as campuses struggled to keep pace with commercial tech. IT was often viewed as overhead, not strategy.

• 2008: The Great Recession gutted state funding and slashed endowments. Public institutions bore the brunt, but privates weren’t immune. CIOs pivoted to cloud and centralization, more out of necessity than vision. Budget reorgs and layoffs became a crash course in doing more with less.

• 2020: COVID turned the entire enterprise digital overnight. Remote instruction, hybrid work, and emergency procurement strained teams and systems. Many IT shops delivered heroics, but at the cost of burnout, and often without sustained investment afterward.

• 2025: Proposed caps on indirect cost reimbursements, potential increases to the endowment tax, and the likely elimination of Federal PLUS loans for graduate and professional students will hit hard. For some, this means budget cuts of up to 20% in core IT and operations, even at top-ranked, research-heavy universities.

Unlike previous disruptions driven by economic collapse or public health emergencies, the 2025 disruption is rooted in a deliberate, supply-side policy shift. Instead of incentivizing outcomes, current federal actions aim to reshape higher education through austerity: limiting indirect research reimbursements, reducing access to student loans, and applying tax pressure. The goal isn’t to incentivize change, but to compel reform under significantly leaner financial conditions.

Each disruption came with its own headlines, but the impact is cumulative. Many higher ed IT leaders have spent the better part of their careers in permanent contingency mode. The stress isn’t just fiscal. It’s emotional. Strategic. Cultural.

If this is your fourth disruption, it’s not because you failed. It’s because you’ve stayed.

How to cope and lead your organization

Name the Fear

Uncertainty creates shadows; your job is to turn the lights on. You don’t need all the answers, but you can’t let ambiguity linger. Teams can handle bad news; what they can’t handle is silence. When leaders go vague, people fill the gaps with fear. The best antidote to anxiety is clarity. Say what you know, name what you don’t, and be honest about the path forward. Use plain language. Skip the spin. In moments like this, trust isn’t built through comfort, it’s built through candor.

Shrink the Timeline

When the future is foggy, focus on the next 90 days. Long-term planning can feel impossible in these moments like this and that’s okay. Clarity doesn’t always come from seeing far ahead; sometimes it comes from focusing on what’s right in front of you. Ask:

• What’s within our control?

• What can we improve today that helps us no matter what tomorrow brings?

Shrink the horizon. Rally your team around near-term goals and tangible progress. Short-term wins matter more than ever. They rebuild confidence, create momentum, and remind your team that even in uncertainty, they’re not powerless.

Stay Human

People don’t burn out from hard work, they burn out from feeling powerless. When everything feels uncertain, the emotional toll creeps in quietly. Stress isn’t just about volume, it’s about agency. Your team needs to feel seen, heard, and supported. So listen more than usual. Create space for honest check-ins. Encourage people to step away, take a walk, clear their heads. And say the quiet thing out loud: This is hard. Acknowledging the strain doesn’t make you weak, it makes you credible. In times like this, empathy is strategy.

Keep Mission Front and Center

Even when resources shrink, the mission doesn’t. Budget cuts can make the work feel transactional, but the purpose behind it hasn’t changed. In fact, it matters more than ever. Remind your team why their work counts. Draw the line from code to classroom, from infrastructure to research, from systems uptime to patient care. Help them see that even in constraint, they’re making a difference. Especially in moments like this, mission isn’t just a north star, it’s fuel.

Be the Calm

Anxiety is contagious, but so is calm. In turbulent times, people take their emotional cues from leadership. Your presence, how you show up in the room, how you speak, how you react, can either escalate the fear or settle the noise. You don’t need all the answers, but you do need to model steadiness. Your tone and your posture will carry more weight than your title. Be the person others exhale around. Calm is a leadership skill and right now, it’s a strategic asset.

The bottom line

We’ve talked for years about agility and digital transformation. But this season? It’s not about speed, it’s about endurance. Emotional steadiness. Deep clarity of purpose.

I’ve lived through all four of the major disruptions that have shaped higher education over the past 25 years. During the dot-com crash, I was a staff member at Texas A&M, learning by watching Tom Putnam lead with clarity, transparency, and calm. Since then, I’ve been in CIO roles through the Great Recession, COVID, and now this latest wave, driven by shifting federal policy and deep institutional uncertainty. The context changes, but the leadership challenge stays the same: stay grounded, lead with compassion, and keep your people focused on what matters most.

The institutions that make it through the next five years won’t just have better data platforms. They’ll have stronger, more emotionally intelligent leadership.

Start with yourself. Your team is watching. And in the fog, your example is the clearest signal they have.