Michael HornThought leader creating a world where all individuals can build passions & fulfill their human potential. Author of the national bestseller Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career

There’s a lot of talk about changing “campus culture,” but what does that even mean?

Name: There’s a lot of talk about changing “campus culture,” but what does that even mean?
Uploaded: 2025-04-18T16:18:37+00:00
Duration: 58 s
Channel: Michael Horn
Description: In this brief excerpt, Michael Horn explains the purpose and core concepts of the white paper he co‑authored with Jeff Zalingo, titled Mapping the…

18 Apr 2025 · 1 min

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In this brief excerpt, Michael Horn explains the purpose and core concepts of the white paper he co‑authored with Jeff Zalingo, titled Mapping the Current Culture. The paper is aimed at college and university leaders who want to understand and improve campus culture. Horn first highlights the need to define “culture,” drawing on Edgar Schein’s classic framework. He then introduces a simple two‑by‑two matrix that plots institutions based on (1) agreement on what they aim to achieve and (2) agreement on how they will achieve it. By locating a campus within this matrix, leaders can identify which levers—such as aligning goals, clarifying methods, or shifting underlying assumptions—are available to drive meaningful cultural change.

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Jeff Zalingo and I got to collaborate on our first white paper together and we published this thing called Mapping the Current Culture. It's a white paper designed for colleges and universities to understand what exactly is my culture on campus because you kind of have to know that if you want to make meaningful changes. And so the first question we say is like, we know everyone says we need to fix the campus culture. What the heck does culture even mean? And so we helped define it with our with help from the late MIT's Edgar Schein. And then building off of that, we create a simple two by two to help university leaders understand where you sit on the spectrum of different kinds of cultures, whether it's based on the what agreement on like what we're trying to accomplish and the agreement on how we're going to get there. And based on that, it opens up an understanding of what levers you can pull to actually make changes or not.