As communication consultants, we're often brought in to help the leadership of colleges and universities navigate some of their biggest challenges. More and more, that means issues involving diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.

The urge to put communications before progress is understandable based on the expectations for immediate change. The rate at which colleges can realistically make substantive progress on big, complex, and nuanced challenges can be infuriatingly slow. For presidents with numerous mounting issues on campus, it can be tempting to cave to time pressure and the sometimes unrealistic expectations our communities have for how fast improvements can be made. But we urge leaders to avoid resorting to empty words and stick with the hard work.

We ask leaders to stop thinking of campus climate and diversity feedback and demands as something to be dodged or survived. The reality is DEI topics garner campus, media and social media attention because they tell first-person stories and outline changes our communities need. Based on the emotion associated with these calls for action, leaders push themselves for what feels like immediacy and end up with half-baked processes that are not ready to be shared with the community.

Certainly, diversity progress doesn't just live with the chief diversity officer or the president, and work must be done across the institution. All campus community members should be accountable for growth and change. But bringing a communications consultant in to address climate and diversity issues on campus only works if the problem is communications. If the issue is that leadership isn't doing what was promised or isn't working in a substantive way to lead the community, then bringing in any communicator as a fixer will leave leadership that much more vulnerable.

Read the full article about social justice on college campuses by Teresa Valerio Parrot and Erin Hennessy at Higher Education News.