How Empathy Training Culture Change in Higher Education
Every campus has them: the loud advocates for belonging and inclusion on one side, and the dismissive communicators who treat emotion as a workplace liability on the other. Leadership teams spend enormous energy managing the friction between these two groups — and often feel like they’re getting nowhere.
But here’s what most culture change efforts miss entirely: neither group is where the real change happens.
The change lives in the middle. And the middle has been waiting for an invitation.
The problem with how we’ve been thinking about empathy at work
Empathy training in higher education has traditionally come in one of two forms: a half-day DEI workshop that fades within weeks, or a dense theoretical framework that staff nod at and promptly file away. Neither approach moves people. And the reason is fundamental — they treat empathy as something to be explained, not experienced.
Our brains don’t actually learn that way. Real, lasting change in how we relate to other people requires something deeper: it requires feeling something first.
“You cannot think your way into empathy. You have to feel your way there — and then think about what you felt.”
A four-step model built on how learning actually works
The most effective empathy training programs mirror the natural learning cycle that happens when any powerful real-life experience changes us. In practice, that cycle has four stages — and each one matters:
- Step 1 – Experience: Participants step into someone else’s shoes — not abstractly, but in a way that generates real emotion. Emotion is the catalyst. Without it, nothing that follows sticks.
- Step 2 – Reflect: Participants record their thoughts about what they felt. This step converts raw emotion into processable insight — and opens the mind to receive new perspectives without defensiveness.
- Step 3 – Increase perspectives: Curated perspectives from relevant thought leaders ground the personal experience in broader context. Learning feels real and flexible, not preachy or prescriptive.
- Step 4 – Discuss with peers: In a live wrap-up, team members socialize the learning together — building stronger connections and becoming more thoughtful and effective in their day-to-day work.
This isn’t a novel invention. It mirrors what happens naturally when life changes us: something catalyzes emotion, we reflect, we seek out other perspectives, and we integrate the new understanding into how we move through the world. The best empathy programs simply make that cycle intentional and repeatable.
Why investing in “the middle” changes everything
Here’s a dynamic that plays out on virtually every campus: the most passionate advocates for belonging are already in the room. The most resistant communicators are unlikely to change through training alone. And the majority of staff — the well-meaning, caring, quietly observant middle — receive almost no targeted investment, precisely because they aren’t seen as the problem.
The middle majority watches. They are well-meaning. They care. They are not the problem. And so nobody invests in them.
But the middle is where the tone gets set. When the middle shifts, they don’t just shift individually — they bring everyone around them with them. The advocates feel seen. The resisters feel the room change. Culture moves.
The middle is where change has always been. They were just waiting to be activated.
This reframing is one of the most important shifts a university leader can make. Stop targeting only the outliers. Start investing in the quiet majority who are already open, already watching, and already capable of becoming the cultural connective tissue your campus needs.
What this looks like in a higher education context
For universities, the four-step experiential model maps naturally onto existing structures. The “experience” step might involve an immersive scenario drawn from real student or staff interactions — a first-generation student navigating a financial aid crisis, a faculty member misreading a neurodivergent student’s engagement, an RA caught between institutional policy and a resident’s immediate emotional need.
The reflection step can happen individually, in writing, before the group discussion — giving introverted staff members equal voice in the learning process. The perspectives step pulls in research, student testimonials, and institutional data that contextualize the personal experience. And the peer discussion brings it home: real colleagues, real relationships, real accountability to change.
Friction isn’t the enemy — disconnection is
Conflict between staff, between departments, between student groups and institutional priorities — this is inevitable wherever humans work together. The question isn’t how to eliminate friction. It’s whether people have the empathetic capacity to work through it productively, and return to more connected, effective places afterward.
The institutions investing in experiential empathy training are discovering something counterintuitive: the return on that investment shows up not just in culture surveys and belonging scores, but in the harder metrics — productivity, retention, grievance rates, and the cost of unresolved interpersonal conflict that never gets named but always gets felt.
Why it matters
Friction and conflict are inevitable with humans. What experiential empathy training offers is a way to work through them — so teams can return to more productive, connected places. Whether the question is as small as “wouldn’t it just feel better?” or as big as “how much productivity and trust are we leaving on the table?” — the answer is the same: empathy isn’t soft. It’s the infrastructure everything else runs on.