By Quintina Barnett Gallion, Associate Executive Director, Strategy and Planning, AACRAO, Live from #AACRAO2026
It wasn’t until Cameron Atlas strummed his closing chords in New Orleans that the thread became impossible to miss.
Three speakers. Three wildly different stories. And every single one of them saying, in their own way, the same thing: When the moment comes, you have to show up.
Here’s what stuck with me from the 111th AACRAO Annual Meeting plenary speakers.
Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré: Lead Before the Crisis Hits
The opening plenary set the tone. Lt. Gen. Honoré, who commanded federal relief operations after Hurricane Katrina, delivered his remarks inside a city that lived through that storm. The weight of that context wasn’t lost on anyone in the room.
His message was direct in the way that only someone who has managed mass chaos can afford to be. Do the routine things well. Know your people—really know them. And when someone stops bringing you their problems, you haven’t achieved peace; you’ve lost your influence.
That last one lands differently in higher education than it might in a military briefing room. How often do the people closest to a problem—frontline staff, registrar’s office coordinators, admissions counselors—stop escalating because they’ve learned it won’t matter? Honoré’s framing recasts silence not as harmony, but as a leadership failure.
His most quietly devastating point: when you do not correct a mistake, you create a new standard. In institutions navigating constant policy shifts, staffing turnover, and enrollment pressure, that’s a line worth writing on a whiteboard.
Loki Mulholland: You Don’t Have to Be Remarkable, You Just Have to Do Something
The Tuesday cultivating community plenary brought the AACRAO H.E.A.R.D. podcast to the main stage for a live recording with Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Loki Mulholland, whose documentary work tells the story of his mother, Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, one of the first white women to join the 1963 Jackson Woolworth sit-in.
What makes his mother’s story useful for leaders isn’t its historical drama. It’s the decision-making underneath it. Joan didn’t wait for permission, a title, or a guarantee that the outcome would be favorable. She assessed the situation, chose a lane, and committed to it fully—even when the cost became clear.
Mulholland walked the audience through what that kind of leadership looks like in practice: staying calm when others panic, making decisions with incomplete information, and accepting that doing the right thing and doing the easy thing are rarely the same. His mother didn’t lead from the front because she was the most qualified person in the room. She led because she was present—and willing to act on what she saw.
The moment that most resonated with the room came when Loki described asking his mother what she was thinking as she was dragged back through the crowd. She didn’t describe fear or resolve or a moment of moral clarity. She said she was thinking that she hadn’t finished what she came to do. Get back to the counter. The job wasn’t done.
For anyone managing a team through an enrollment crisis, a policy shift, or a moment of institutional uncertainty, that orientation—head down, task clear, finish what you started—is less about heroism than about professionalism. The leader’s job is to stay at the counter.
Cameron Atlas: Clarity Is Courage
The closing keynote arrived with a guitar, an Australian accent, and a framework simple enough to tattoo on your wrist: be clear, be bold, be relentless.
Atlas grew up nine hours from the nearest city in the Australian outback, graduated college 30 years after his classmates, and has since built a career as a speaker, coach, and National Geographic Explorer. His keynote wove together neuroscience, self-reflection exercises, and a medley of crowd sing-alongs that somehow made the whole thing feel earned rather than gimmicky.
The practical core of his message was a question most leaders never ask: What support do you need? In his feedback loop framework—what worked, what didn’t, what will you change, what support do you need—that last question is the one that gets skipped. It’s also the one that transforms a performance review into a conversation.
“Cameron Atlas brought me back to the Opening Plenary with the gospel choir and their rendition of ‘Lean On Me.’ That connected to all three of the plenaries—the idea that we are a community committed to education and our need to support one another in our mission to support learners,” said Julia Funaki, Director, International Policy, AACRAO.
Atlas’s warning about “shiny object syndrome” also landed in a community staring down AI tools, new platforms, policy mandates, and institutional change all at once: if you’re clear and bold but not relentless, you’ll start strong and finish weak. If you’re clear and relentless but not bold, you’ll play too small. All three are required.
The Thread
Honoré told us to lead before the crisis—to know our people well enough that they trust us with their problems. Mulholland showed us that effective leadership isn’t about waiting for the right moment or the perfect information; it’s about staying at the counter until the job is done. Atlas told us that clarity isn’t a destination—it’s a daily discipline, built through small, consistent feedback loops and the courage to ask for help.
Three different speakers. Three different contexts. One room full of a community of enrollment and academic services professionals trying to answer, “How do I lead well?” in a period that keeps testing that question.
“It is not an easy time we are in, and it likely isn’t going to change. We need to remember that we are a community and keep our focus on the mission and those we serve, ” Funaki concluded
The 111th AACRAO Annual Meeting was held in New Orleans. The 112th Annual Meeting will be in Long Beach. Learn more about upcoming professional development offerings on the AACRAO Calendar.
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