Building Resilience Muscle:
A New Model for Higher Education Leadership
Meaningful institutional transformation starts with a deep understanding of higher education, something the CampusWorks team of more than 300 seasoned professionals brings through decades of leadership experience at colleges and universities across the country, including in New Jersey. For Liz Murphy, Chief Evangelist at CampusWorks, her 43-year career in higher education has given her a unique perspective on the opportunities and pressures shaping the sector today. “Higher education is facing a perfect storm of challenges right now; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a moment as complex as the one we’re in today. Institutions are facing long-standing financial and sustainability pressures while also navigating growing public scrutiny about the value of higher education and its role in society.
“At the same time, we’re navigating rapid technological change, social media, evolving news and information sources, and a political environment that is increasingly affecting institutional leadership and governance. I’m hearing from leaders across the country who are facing new pressures from elected and appointed boards, regardless of political affiliation. When you put all of that together, along with employees feeling like they’re standing on shifting sands, it creates an incredibly challenging environment. Higher education leaders are being asked to navigate a multitude of competing forces while continuing to serve students and their communities. It’s one of the toughest leadership challenges in the country today.”
While many feel higher education should be moving faster, Murphy says keeping pace is difficult when the patterns are unclear. “When you can identify a pattern, you can attack the problem. You can say, ‘I see what’s driving retention loss,’ or ‘I see what’s preventing sustainable change,’ and then build a strategy around it. Right now, the reasons behind behaviors and outcomes are so fractured that it’s difficult to put everything into one box and figure out how to solve it. That uncertainty is a huge part of what makes this moment feel different.
“At the same time, the ongoing debate about the value of higher education is taking a toll on the people who work in this industry. They haven’t lost faith in the mission. They’re simply finding themselves in a position where they must constantly explain why their work matters, how higher education benefits individuals and communities, and how it advances society. That dynamic makes this moment feel distinct. But it also creates an opportunity for institutions to more clearly articulate their purpose, demonstrate their impact, and reconnect with the students, families, and communities they serve.”
“We included AI transparency statements into the course design to normalize how we, as facilitators, were very transparent about our own generative AI use. That allowed us to give faculty an example of how to build and maintain trust, model ethical practices, and establish their own boundaries in the classroom. We gave faculty language they could use as they develop their own classes or incorporate similar approaches if they choose to use AI.”
– Liz Murphy
Chief Evangelist
CampusWorks
Strengthening Institutional Resilience
Resilience has become a defining theme in higher education, but Murphy believes it means more than simply enduring disruption. “The first ingredient to resilience is courage. If you don’t have courageous leadership, it’s very difficult to build resilience. Courageous leaders know how to set the flag and help people understand why they’re headed toward that goal. No matter how rocky the terrain between where they are and where they’re going, people are often willing to endure that journey if they understand the destination. When leaders aren’t confident enough to set the flag, the people who have to follow them become uncomfortable and uncertain.
“The second ingredient is education. People need to understand why they’re following. One of the biggest gaps in higher education is financial literacy about institutions themselves. Faculty and staff often don’t understand why certain decisions are being made or what financial pressures are driving them. There are real challenges facing higher education right now—from government funding pressures to enrollment and tuition concerns—but people don’t need to be CFOs to understand them. They need enough context to understand why decisions are being made, even if they don’t fully agree with them.
“The third ingredient is creating a culture where people become more comfortable with change and movement. This isn’t a moment when institutions can make a few changes and then settle back into business as usual. Higher education will need to continue evolving in order to remain effective. In many ways, that’s at the heart of the questions we’re hearing about the value of higher education. Institutions have an opportunity to demonstrate their relevance not by standing still, but by continuing to adapt to the needs of students, employers, and society.”
For leadership teams who have leaned into these three elements of resilience tend to see very different outcomes across their institutions. “Strengthening resilience leads to higher employee satisfaction and far stronger morale across both faculty and staff,” shares Murphy. “In many cases, even union relationships are healthier because there is more clarity and shared understanding of direction. From a performance standpoint, those institutions often show stronger enrollment and retention outcomes. They may not be completely out of financial pressure, but you can see a steady progression out of what I call the ‘sandpit’ they were stuck in before.
“As organizations build resilience muscle memory, you start to see improvement across multiple dimensions at once. Decision-making is a big one. When an institution is resilient, teams are more willing and able to move into decisions instead of staying stuck in prolonged debate. Many institutions struggle with situations where a decision has been under discussion for more than a year. And in today’s environment, that delay compounds the original problem. Things move too quickly for that kind of inertia anymore. Resilient organizations are simply better at reaching clarity and moving forward with purpose.”
Building Long-term Sustainability
Among the most critical and often overlooked operational vulnerabilities in higher education today are the financial and governance practices that can often quietly undermine long-term sustainability. “One area I would point to is financial literacy, because I think some short-term strategies are becoming long-term habits without institutions fully addressing the underlying challenge,” explains Murphy. “Things like borrowing from the endowment can help in a moment of need, but they are not practices that should become routine.
“When I think about operational pressures, strong governance is essential. The board needs to be in a position of guidance, not management. Their role is to set the parameters and then allow leadership to operate within them. In times of crisis, that boundary becomes harder to maintain, especially because they bring a great deal of experience and naturally want to step in and solve problems. The other major issue is financial sustainability and the tendency to adopt stopgap measures that aren’t truly sustainable. Institutions often wait too long to explore options like shared services or operational redesign, and by the time they do, they’ve already limited their ability to generate meaningful savings.
“There is also a broader challenge around aligning operations with reality. Institutions cannot cut their way to long-term sustainability. You can do it for a year or two, but eventually you have to ask whether your structure matches your actual enrollment and scale. If you’re operating as though you’re serving 5,000 students but you’re consistently at 3,000, that mismatch drives up costs and creates pressure across the system. At some point, institutions have to recalibrate, not based on what they hope to be, but on a clear understanding of what they are today and what they need to become going forward.”
As institutions navigate hiring, retaining, and developing talent, particularly in IT and administrative functions, leaders are also being forced to rethink long-standing staffing models and expectations. “People often ask how institutions reach the point where they bring in a partner like CampusWorks, and there are a few key reasons,” says Murphy. “One is that many institutions simply haven’t been able to attract the level of talent needed for the work that has to be done today. And part of that is because there hasn’t been enough flexibility around things like location, job design, and how roles are structured. Higher ed tends to default back to very traditional definitions of positions—this is what a CIO does, this is what this role looks like—when in reality, IT outside of higher education has been transformed and needs to be reimagined within higher ed as well, especially if the goal is to improve the employee experience and get work done more effectively.
“What we hear from presidents and senior leaders is, ‘We can’t get what we need from IT,’ and then when we step in, we approach it differently. Once there is openness to doing things in a new way, the results shift—people stay, morale improves, and outcomes follow. A big part of this is willingness to invest in talent. In most cases, that investment pays off in stronger performance and, ultimately, better return on investment. In fact, we often end up saving institutions money, even as we improve outcomes.
“Higher education has also been slow to adapt to more modern staffing models. There’s still a strong expectation that roles must be fully on-site, even when much of the work is already being done virtually. That limits the talent pool unnecessarily. A leader in New Jersey, for example, can absolutely hire someone in Oregon, and in most cases, the difference in day-to-day impact is minimal. Another shift is recognizing that you don’t always need a full-time hire. Sometimes what you really need is a fraction of a role, applied strategically. That kind of flexibility changes both cost structure and capability.
“Finally, accountability is a major factor. In higher education, performance management systems often end up weakening retention rather than strengthening it. There can be a tendency to avoid difficult conversations, which sometimes leads to strong performers leaving while underperformance lingers. The organizations that get this right are the ones that hold clear expectations, follow through consistently, and treat accountability as part of sustaining a healthy, high-performing environment.”
Creating a Professional Peer Community
“It is the ability to flex and deliver on these demands that is making managed services and strategic outsourcing more popular solutions. Our clients chose managed services to create a stronger IT environment for their teams, students, and their institutions,” said Murphy. “The perception of managed services for everything from IT to HR and financial management has shifted as more institutional leaders explore these models in new ways. We’ve been very intentional about not treating this as a transactional model. Yes, the network has to run, the help desk has to function, but that’s not enough. The goal is to create sustainable change and real transformation.
“A big part of what makes this work is how we bring people together. Higher education roles are often highly siloed—there may be only one network administrator, one database administrator, and one person responsible for a critical function. In our model, those individuals are brought into a broader professional community of peers doing the same work. That changes everything. The learning accelerates, expectations rise, and people begin performing at a much higher level than they were before.
“AI doesn’t replace judgment, but strengthens it by improving the quality of the information leaders have available, enabling better decision-making. You suddenly have a clearer view of what’s really happening, and once you can see the patterns, you can act on them.”
– Liz Murphy
Chief Evangelist
CampusWorks
Harnessing the Power of AI
As new technology continues to evolve and institutions explore how to leverage advanced tools like artificial intelligence, leaders are seeing a clear divide between skepticism, caution, and rapidly emerging practical applications, particularly in administrative and student success functions. “While a lot of concern tends to center on the classroom, where we’re really seeing impact right now is on the administrative side,” shares Murphy. “We have clients who are amazed by how CampusWorks can help and how quickly it can be done. The immediate reaction is often, ‘Where is all of this coming from, and how do we know it’s accurate?’ The reality is we’re working with information they already have. The difference is they haven’t had the time or the tools to bring it all together, process it, and actually see the patterns.
“That’s where AI becomes powerful. This technology can take data across multiple systems, clean it, keep it current, and surface it in a way that supports faster, better decision-making. AI doesn’t replace judgment, but strengthens it by improving the quality of the information leaders have available, enabling better decision-making. You suddenly have a clearer view of what’s really happening. We saw this recently with a state system where their HR team was overwhelmed with thousands of tickets and ongoing criticism about responsiveness. When we consolidated all of the underlying data—meeting notes, system inputs, case details—it became clear that many issues could be resolved within days. Without that visibility, there was no way to see the patterns. And once you can see them, you can act on them.”
“We also see this play out in student success,” says Murphy. “Traditionally, an advisor might manage three to four hundred students, relying on broad outreach or delayed reports. By the time data is pulled, reviewed, debated, and rerun, which can take weeks, the opportunity to intervene has often passed. With AI-enabled tools like CampusLens, advisors can instead see real-time signals: which students are at risk, what actions are needed, and even how to engage them in a way that reflects their preferences and behaviors. That shifts the entire model from reactive to proactive. This does require a mindset shift, because higher education is used to doing things the hard way. But when you can combine scale with timely, actionable insight, it allows human expertise to be applied where it matters most: making the right decision for the student at the right time.”
That same willingness to do things differently—to trade familiar discomfort for meaningful progress—shows up not just within institutions, but across them. “For example, we partnered with the Collaborative for Higher Education Shared Services (CHESS), a consortium of four community colleges and one four-year university in New Mexico, to determine if a collaboration between these schools made sense. We developed a legislative capacity report for them, and they ultimately moved forward and received early funding. Today, five years later, they are implementing a single instance of Workday, enabling cross-registration and cross-reporting, and operating within shared HCM and finance structures. What’s particularly notable is how they’ve addressed governance by operating on a one-institution, one-vote model, regardless of size. Over time, they’ve built a true collaborative that honors every voice and has required both courage and openness to do things differently. They’ve blended traditional higher education approaches with more transformative practices, and it has been a powerful example of what shared commitment can achieve.”
Another CampusWorks success story is Arizona Western College (AWC) who started with a bold strategic plan over a decade ago and quickly realized that IT and operational constraints were holding them back. “AWC began incrementally, but it became clear that they needed something bigger and more intentional,” shares Murphy. “They opened up the strategic planning process broadly, engaging hundreds of stakeholders, including the community, and made it a living plan that was revisited annually to assess progress and make adjustments. That approach put them on a trajectory where they are now known as an entrepreneurial and resilient institution. They’ve maintained financial stability even in a challenging state environment, and they’ve built real organizational agility. They are also navigating a significant leadership transition, and while change is always difficult, they have built enough resilience that the institution continues to move forward with confidence.
“Institutions don’t have to offboard all their staff to be successful. When performance issues exist, they are addressed, but the focus is on building capability and raising the overall standard of work. The employees who come into this model often become some of the strongest advocates for it, because they see the difference firsthand. From a leadership perspective, this approach also removes a lot of operational uncertainty. You don’t have to worry about turnover in the same way, or about whether a critical role will suddenly go unfilled. In many cases, it becomes a fixed-cost model over a five- to seven-year horizon, which provides a level of predictability that is increasingly valuable. This isn’t about giving up control, but rather about partnership. In our strongest implementations, you often can’t tell who is employed by the institution and who is part of the managed services team. Our proudest moments are when those individuals are recognized by the institution itself as top performers. The idea that managed services means losing control is an outdated one. In practice, it’s about gaining capability, stability, and access to expertise in a way that strengthens the institution overall.”
To learn more about Edge’s IT Professional Services Partner, CampusWorks, and accessing their suite of future-forward services and solutions, visit edgemarket.njedge.net/home/it-pro-campus-works.