Outrageous:
Why Higher Education Needs a Resistance

At SimpsonScarborough, we’ve spent the past six months declaring, “We are the resistance.” 

The kind of shift that comes from noticing what others overlook and questioning assumptions others quietly accept. We chose the word resistance intentionally because higher education is surrounded by a growing narrative of inevitability. 

Why Resistance Matters

To resist is not to deny reality; it’s to refuse inevitability. It’s insisting that creativity, strategy, and truth still matter. Our partners, CMOs, presidents, enrollment and advancement leaders, and trustees, often hold both the clearest view of their institution’s challenges and the strongest vision for what’s possible. But they can’t carry that alone.   

This moment invites retreat. The instinct is to say less, do less, and wait for stability to return. 

But what’s required is the opposite. 

Resistance means rejecting cynicism and pushing back against the idea that “this is just how things are now.” 

When resistance shows up clearly, it often looks unreasonable at first. 

We’ve seen this kind of resistance before. In 2011, Patagonia ran a full-page ad telling customers not to buy its products. It wasn’t performative. It wasn’t ironic. It was a rejection of the assumptions of its category and a bet that long-term trust mattered more than short-term growth. At the time, it felt outrageous. In hindsight, it was leadership. 

“Outrageous” as a Call to Action

Last month, the idea sharpened even further. “Outrageous” became our headline. It took over our homepage and the cover of our magazine. Not as provocation, but as conviction. It is a refusal to accept cynicism as realism, or decline as destiny. 

Because in this moment, believing in higher education’s potential requires exactly that kind of outrage. The kind that insists on possibility when the world has grown comfortable with doubt. 

For us, outrageous doesn’t mean louder. It means questioning what institutions have been optimizing around for years. It means asking what would happen if we stopped protecting complexity for its own sake, stopped hiding behind prestige, and started telling the truth about what actually matters to students, donors, and the public. 

What “Outrageous” Looks Like in Practice

We’ve seen what this looks like when institutions are willing to act. 

We’ve partnered with advancement teams who chose radical transparency over prestige, launching fundraising platforms that showed donors exactly where their money was going, rather than relying on tradition or hierarchy to carry trust.  

We’ve worked with leaders willing to name a harder truth, treating “no college at all” as the real competitor, instead of pretending the threat lived only within higher education.  

Sometimes, outrageous shows up as subtraction, not addition. 

We’ve told universities to delete more than half their websites before redesigning them, knowing clarity is more valuable than comprehensiveness. We’ve recommended that flagship institutions stop leading with rankings altogether, even when those rankings felt like the safest signal to put forward. We’ve advised presidents to speak directly to public skepticism, not around it, trusting honesty over reassurance.  

None of these choices were easy. All of them challenged long-held assumptions. And all of them required leadership willing to resist the gravitational pull of the status quo. 

What Comes Next?

You’re going to hear a lot more about “outrageous” in the months ahead. It will show up in our ideas, our work, our conversations, and the stories we tell. It will shape how we partner with CMOs and presidents who refuse to settle for the status quo, even when the world tells them to scale back or stop trying 

Higher education doesn’t need quieter voices or smaller ambitions. It needs a resistance. It needs creativity that challenges assumptions. It needs strategy that cuts through noise. It needs partners who believe in its future as much as it believes in its mission.