When Your Unit Is an Afterthought

April 18, 2026

Read Time - 4 minutes

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” ~ William Bruce Cameron

Ask any campus leader in the arts and they will tell you that a significant part of their role is one rarely found in the job description: educating the people above them. Educating them on what the arts actually do for a campus. How they’re different from most other academic units. How the value they bring to students, to community, to institutional identity doesn’t show up cleanly in enrollment reports or revenue projections.

The institution is often happy to put the marching band or a string quartet in the marketing campaign, ask music students to perform at a board meeting, or bring donors to a theatre production. At least from the outside, it can look like the arts belong at the table.

Then budget season arrives. Or the strategic planning process kicks off. And it becomes painfully obvious exactly where the arts fall on the priorities list.

This may sound familiar. Because it’s not just an arts problem. It’s the career center in the basement of the student union. It’s the humanities division in a research-heavy university. It’s the teaching and learning unit that shows up in the accreditation report but not in the strategic plan. It’s any unit whose value doesn’t convert cleanly into the metrics that too often drive institutional decisions.

The question isn’t whether this dynamic is real. It is.

The question is what you do about it when you’re leading a unit that is fighting for air time.

This Isn’t Just a Resources Problem

When you feel like your unit is an afterthought, it’s easy to take it personally. Don’t.

Institutional leaders are managing a massive portfolio — dozens of units, hundreds of competing priorities, and a strategic plan written around a handful of metrics your unit may not map onto cleanly. Often, what’s crowding you out of the conversation is something else, something louder, filling the space. Some units have a long history of receiving resources and attention — precedent is a powerful force in higher ed. Others have a donor in the room, a board member who cares, or a corporate partner whose name is on a building. That’s not a fair playing field. It’s also the one you’re on.

Here’s the other thing worth naming: most academic leaders were trained to believe that excellent work earns recognition. That’s largely true, but institutional resource decisions don’t operate that way. Waiting for the quality of your work to speak for itself is a strategy. It’s just not a very effective one.

The leaders who change their unit’s trajectory figure out two things — how to make their unit easier to remember, and how to translate what they do into terms that actually matter to the people making decisions.

Five Moves That Change the Trajectory

1. Diagnose Why You’re Invisible — the Reasons Aren’t the Same

There are three distinct situations that can look identical from the inside: your unit genuinely isn’t a strategic priority and leadership knows it; your unit’s value isn’t being communicated in terms that land; or you’re simply not in the right rooms often enough to be part of the conversation. Each requires a different response. Don’t spend a year working on your messaging when the real problem is presence. Don’t keep showing up to meetings when the real problem is that no one understands what your unit actually does. Get the diagnosis right first.

2. Learn the Institution’s Language — and Use It Without Apology

Every campus has a set of terms that move decisions: enrollment impact, rankings, student success outcomes, research funding, major gifts. Find out which ones your decision makers actually respond to — not which ones appear in the strategic plan, but which ones come up when real decisions get made. Then translate what your unit does into those terms. This isn’t spin or self-promotion. It’s making sure the people who control resources can actually see what your unit does.

3. Build Presence Before You Need Something

The worst time to start advocating for your unit is during budget season. By then, the decisions are already half-made and you’re negotiating from the margins. The leaders who consistently get resources are the ones who’ve been present long before the ask arrives — in leadership meetings, in informal conversations, in campus events, and in the story the institution tells about itself. If you only show up when you need something, that’s the only thing you’ll be associated with.

4. Find Your Institutional Allies — and Keep Them Informed

On almost every campus, there is someone in institutional leadership who understands your unit’s value, even if they’re not the primary decision-maker. Identify them. Keep them updated on what you’re doing and why it matters. Let them carry your case into the rooms you’re not in. One well-placed advocate who genuinely believes in your work is worth more than a dozen well-crafted emails to people who aren’t listening.

5. Know if This Is a Battle That Can Be Won

This is the hardest one. Some units are marginalized not because of poor advocacy but because the institution has made a genuine strategic decision — stated or unstated — that your unit doesn’t fit its future direction. Before you spend another year pushing, it’s worth asking honestly: is this a communication problem, a presence problem, or a decision that was made above my level and isn’t going to change? Because if it’s the latter, continuing to fight it the same way isn’t persistence — it’s a fast track to burnout. Knowing what’s actually in play lets you make a smarter choice about where to put your energy.

The Bottom Line

I once worked under a president who, in his final months in the role, shared something on a podcast that stuck with me. He said that when it came to donor cultivation, he deliberately chose to bring them to football games rather than tours of the chemistry labs — because that’s where relationships got built. The chemistry labs still got funded. They just weren’t the vehicle for the relationship.

Sometimes what feels like institutional indifference is actually institutional logic — a set of calculations about what builds relationships, what moves donors, what advances the strategic plan. Your unit may not fit that calculus right now.

But waiting for the institution to notice your unit’s value is a strategy that rarely works. The leaders who change their unit’s trajectory are the ones who decide — usually after one budget season too many — that they’re going to narrate their own story rather than hope someone else tells it. I wouldn’t call that self-promotion. It’s stewardship.

Try This Before Friday

Identify one person in institutional leadership who already understands your unit’s value. Send them a short message this week — not an ask, just a “here’s what we’re doing and why it matters” update. Better yet, invite them to an upcoming event or student presentation. Start building that presence before you need it.

That's all for today.

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