Co-Evolution Over Collapse: A Reflection on Leading Through the Noise

Co-Evolution Over Collapse: A Reflection on Leading Through the Noise

Higher education has become a space where courage feels risky, and hesitation feels safe.

Across the sector, presidents and provosts are being asked to do more with less—less certainty, less funding, and less time to adapt. The question that keeps showing up in my own leadership circles is this: How do you move forward when it feels like everything around you is pausing or retreating?

At Tiffin University, we don’t claim to have solved this. But over the past year, we leaned into a leadership approach I’ve come to call co-evolution—a simple idea with complex implications: if we want systems to evolve, our people must evolve with them. And vice versa.

What happened when we centered that principle in our strategy surprised even us.

The Courage to Shift Before You’re Ready

In September 2023, we reorganized our Cabinet. It wasn’t because we were in crisis. It was because we knew how we operated wouldn’t serve the institution we were trying to become.

That change—hard, messy, and full of unknowns—became a catalyst for structure and mindset. We started asking better questions: How can we build a leadership team that acts instead of reacts? How do we create space for honest conversations and shared ownership? What would it look like to trust the process before we saw the results?

Leadership, at its core, is a relational act. And if we want to transform our institutions, we have to start by transforming how we relate to one another.

What Co-Evolution Looks Like in Practice

Fall 2024 brought signs that we were heading in the right direction—not just in sentiment, but in substance:

• We saw a 9% increase in enrollment and credit hours.
• We reduced our tuition discount rate while increasing net tuition revenue by $988,000.
• We launched Dragon Pathways, an integrated academic and student success initiative.
• We doubled down on strategic risk-taking—approving a major residential facility and expanding international and workforce pipelines.

But the numbers are not the story. The story is what enabled those numbers.

More than anything, we saw a team that began to move differently—more collaboratively, nimbly, and boldly because we invested in the ecosystem around them. We asked our systems to work for people, not the other way around.

That’s the heart of co-evolution: when you align people and processes toward a clear purpose, growth is no longer accidental. It becomes the natural result of intention.

Three Lessons (So Far)

I hesitate to call these principles because we’re still learning. But here are three ideas that have anchored us—each part of a story that taught us how people, systems, and trust work together in practice:

1. People before process—but never without process.

A few years ago, I noticed something troubling: our institutional aid was quietly creeping up, even as our net tuition trended downward. Instead of reacting with immediate solutions, I began with a question: What are we not seeing here? That question led to a series of conversations—not just with finance, but with enrollment, athletics, and academic leadership. It would have been faster to issue a directive. But we chose the slower, harder route of shared inquiry. And in doing so, we created the conditions for honesty and ownership to emerge.

2. Systems must do more than measure—they must enable.

As the team dug into the issue, we discovered that our athletic scholarship model, though built with good intentions, was creating imbalances that no one system had flagged on its own. The problem wasn’t any single person or policy—it was that our processes weren’t built to reveal this kind of cross-functional friction. Once we surfaced it, we didn’t just tweak the aid formula. We asked: How do we create systems that help us ask the right questions earlier? That led to changes in how we model financial scenarios and how decisions are shared across teams—not to enforce control, but to unlock clarity.

3. Strategic risk is an act of trust.

Rebalancing our aid strategy wasn’t a small decision. It impacted recruitment, athletics, and the budget model. But by the time we reached that crossroads, something had shifted: we trusted each other. The process of uncovering the issue had built new relational capital. No one had been scapegoated. Everyone had contributed. And that made it possible to move forward boldly—knowing we were aligned not just in goals, but in how we chose to lead.

These weren’t silver bullets. They were directional choices. And they created enough space for real change to take root.

Leading Through the Noise

I’ve come to believe that the biggest threat facing higher education right now isn’t declining enrollment. It’s declining nerve.

We’re in a moment where the safe thing to do feels like saying less, doing less, cutting more. But nothing about this moment calls for less. It calls for more clarity, more empathy, and more courage to evolve before we’re comfortable.

At Tiffin, we’re still in process. We’re still asking questions. But we’re also moving. And that, more than any single initiative or outcome, is what gives me hope.

A Quiet Invitation

This is not a blueprint. This is a reflection.

If you’re leading an institution through uncertainty, I’d encourage you to ask:

• What needs to evolve together, not just separately?
• Where can I center relationships to unlock strategy?
• What’s the next right risk we’re avoiding?

We won’t lead the sector forward by being louder. We’ll do it by being braver.

And it starts, I believe, with co-evolution.