One Year In

The most useful thing I do is walk across campus. Almost every day. Not to a meeting. Just across it. Past students cutting between classes, past the research happening in buildings most people walk by without thinking about what's inside them. I do it to see the product. Not the brochure. Not the campaign. The students and the scholarship this institution exists to produce. It keeps the rest of it honest.

I started at DU on June 1 of last year. I came in with real respect for the talent already here and a clear sense that the university needed its marketing and brand function to operate at a higher level. The year was mostly about foundation: understanding where trust was strong and where it had eroded, who actually held influence and why, how decisions really got made, and how our people, budgets, and processes aligned with where the institution needed to go. That kind of organizational reading is slow work. You can't shortcut it.

The honest part of the year is the part that doesn't make a highlight reel. I have had to make hard organizational decisions, including eliminating positions. Those were real people. Good people, whose work I respected. The budget doesn't carry the weight of those decisions. The strategy doesn't either. That falls on you and on the people still in the room with you.

What the strategy does is make sure the weight means something. The cuts were budget-driven. The question I had to answer was how to absorb them without repeating a mistake institutions have made for decades. Marketing is not an expense to manage down. It is an investment to protect. Brand marketing in particular is a long game: it builds the foundation that enrollment marketing runs on. When students already know who you are and what you stand for before they ever enter a funnel, the performance work converts better, faster, and at lower cost. You're activating demand that already exists instead of trying to generate it from scratch. Treat brand as optional and you don't save money. You move the cost downstream, into harder campaigns and a weaker position every cycle. That is the pattern I was not going to repeat. The question was how to take real cuts without losing that capability, and how to make sure what stays and what goes reflects where this function actually needs to go rather than what was simplest to eliminate. Change at that scale touches people's livelihoods, and the least I owe the people affected, and everyone still here, is that the changes add up to something coherent rather than a string of reactions.

That's why one of the first things I did was build a five-year maturity model: a clear, shared picture of where this function needs to go and what it will take to get there. Not another planning document. A way to decide on purpose. When the budget forces a decision, the model is what keeps it from being arbitrary. You can explain it. You can sequence it. You can tell the difference between a cut that weakens the work and one that focuses it. The model doesn't make the decisions for you. It keeps you honest about why you're making them.

None of this sits easily beside the culture work, and I won't pretend it does. Organizational trust is built slowly and disrupted quickly, and restructuring is among the fastest ways to disrupt it. You can't talk about building trust and belonging while eliminating jobs without feeling the contradiction. I feel it. But both come from the same conviction: that the work matters enough to make it sustainable, and that the people doing it deserve an operation built to last rather than one limping from one budget cycle to the next. Culture is not separate from organizational performance. It is organizational performance. I believe that more than ever, which is exactly why the structural work can't wait.

What I keep coming back to is that this isn't only a DU story. Higher education is facing pressures that would test any industry: a contracting student population, a political environment in some states actively reshaping what universities are permitted to teach, a generation of prospective students asking harder questions about the value of the credential than any before them, and a decades-long erosion of public trust that no single enrollment cycle is going to repair. Those forces are structural. They won't ease when the economy shifts.

The institutions that navigate this moment will be the ones willing to make hard decisions now, on purpose rather than in reaction. Marketing is not peripheral to that. Rebuilding trust in higher education starts with being able to articulate what it is actually for. To students, to families, to employers, to the public. At a moment when the case for higher education is being litigated in legislatures and in living rooms, the brand is doing more than enrollment work. It is making the argument for why institutions that develop critical thinkers, advance knowledge, and prepare people to navigate complexity are worth fighting for. That is what is actually at stake. And every June, I am reminded of exactly what we are fighting for.

A few thousand people cross a stage in front of families who saved, sacrificed, and showed up. For many of them, this is the moment a family's trajectory changes. Not just the graduate's. Their parents', their siblings', the children they haven't had yet. Higher education has always been one of the most reliable levers for expanding what's possible in a life. That is the product. Not the brochure. Not the homepage. The person walking across the stage, and the future that opens because they did. Everything we do sits upstream of that moment.

The work is nowhere near done. The financial environment is tighter, the questions are harder, and the margin for drift is smaller than it has been in a generation. The brand has to become clearer, more visible, and more trusted at the same time the operation behind it gets smaller.

But that is exactly why the walk matters. The purpose doesn't get smaller under pressure. It gets sharper. I came here believing this work matters. A year of it, the hardest parts included, has only made me more certain. I have never hidden from hard work. I have also made sure my voice was heard. In the room. At the table. On the decisions that shape where this institution is going. There is so much more to do, and I am here for all of it.

Matthew Gann, Ph.D.