Contentious dialogue: University presidential response and the 2016 U.S. presidential election

Abstract

In recent years, technology has made it possible, and at times critical, for college and university presidents to increase their campus-wide public communication. However, there is little research that analyses these frequent and timely presidential communications. Using grounded theory, this study took steps to fill this gap by analysing the unprecedented response campuses had to the 2016 United States presidential election of Donald Trump. The analysis focused on the responses of presidents from the fifty state flagship universities and found emergent themes of unity, contentious election, negative event, university values, civil dialogue, services offered, and emotional rhetoric, while also finding significance in whether the letters were sent proactively or reactively.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.