Cracking the Fourth Wall: Understanding Data-Sensitive Stakeholders

Higher education transparency unfolds along lines of tension—from histories of suspicion, institutional memory, and lived experience. Data, often regarded as neutral, is in reality steeped in meaning: it is both a ledger and a story wrought with vulnerability. As we lead and participate in sector-wide conversations about transparency, we come to understand that the real work of improving access and clarity is in navigating the intricate, nearly invisible infrastructures that shape how stakeholders experience trust, exposure, and the continuous negotiation of risk.

Obstacles to sharing data are never entirely logistical. Institutions don't wish for more forms or oversight; instead, they ask, sometimes desperately, for guidance. They ask for frameworks that can reconcile the competing demands of legal obligation, regulatory scrutiny, a students-first vision, and ethical behavior. These are not generic worries. Each institution negotiates its own transparency behaviors with risk and honesty, shaped by funding pressures, the disclosure behaviors of the immediate environment, and by the shifting expectations of students who sense, often before administrators do, gaps in protection and comprehension.

Inside Higher Ed’s Student Voice Survey reveals that trust is both subtle and extremely personal. The trust given to a professor, built slowly in the grain of courses and mentorship, stands in some contrast with the suspicion reserved for administrators whose pronouncements seem distant and procedural. And this despite the fact that administrators are the enablers of that overarching trust. In both cases, trust trickles from a kind of intimacy, the sense that information is handled by someone who knows, or at least cares to know, what it may cost to reveal it. The student’s willingness to accept data sharing, to accept exposure, is always a wager on the institution’s good faith—a wager that is fragile, subject to reversal with each breach or tone-deaf rollout of a new reporting protocol.

There is no universal framework for breaking through the fourth wall of data sensitivity; only a patient, conscious, and careful practice of collation, analysis, and disclosure. Attempts to force transparency through mere compliance are met with resistance or apathy, for they mistake technical visibility for relational openness.  A recent and major milestone in the sector, the EDUCAUSE 2025 Horizon Action Plan: Supporting Agency, Trust, Transparency, and Involvement offers a nuanced reading of our current moment—not only mapping the technical demands of compliance and governance, but recognizing the ways agency and participation infuse real meaning into privacy and data stewardship. Drawing on expert panels and sector-wide consultation, the report frames trust and transparency as dynamic, co-constructed qualities—emphasizing that effective privacy culture arises not from rigid protocols, but from deliberate, participatory infrastructures. The Action Plan urges institutions to move beyond compliance checklists, advocating for adaptive practices, collaborative models, and a renewed commitment to authentic stakeholder engagement. Its vision is not simply for safer data, but for a higher education landscape where transparency and trust become shared, living commitments—continuously negotiated between students, faculty, staff, and leadership in a shifting social and technological environment.

Still, the aspirational vision of the EDUCAUSE Action Plan stands in stark tension with the realities many institutions now face on the ground today. As national conversations around transparency morph into a politics of enforcement and penalty, the landscape reveals a widening gap between participatory ideals and the day-to-day pressures guiding institutional disclosure.

Cases in point abound these days, as American universities struggle to deal with an opacity-as-crime (punishable by funding cuts, job losses, program eliminations, and more) narrative, including Harvard, Columbia, and Brown Universities. With the passing of time, we can hope that in environments like universities, shaped by data as they are, deliver that data through the activities of listening and response, and by the capacity to render institutional will and student desire as part of a shared project.

Administrators, in this context, shape the emotional and ethical climate in which disclosure takes place. Real transparency is iterative and dialogic. It must absorb doubt, attend to the often-invisible frayed edges of stakeholder anxiety, and move with humility toward forms of openness that are negotiated rather than imposed. The leaders who do this well embed transparency in a material culture of revision and explanation—one that makes space for fear, uncertainty, and the possibility that data exposure does not always equate with progress.

It is tempting to imagine that with enough will, the wall will simply fall. The more accurate observation—and a more credible hope—is that the wall can be made permeable, that the boundaries between what is known, what is shared, and what is protected can be continually altered, always with the intention to honor real stakes and real stories. Trust is not the residue of openness; it is the evidence of having been met.

As institutions move in new ways, sometimes hesitantly, the question becomes not how much data should be released, but how to share data in ways that uphold the integrity of all participants. It is not simply the construction of transparency, but the creation of conditions under which the meanings of data—and the stakes for disclosure—can be owned, revised, and made safe enough to serve the larger purposes of higher education. In this work, transparency becomes a common ground, a site of negotiation and return for all stakeholders swimming through our current terrain.