The symbol is the NON-DISCLOSURE AGREEMENT….
[Excerpt from a contribution authored anonymously by a collegiate executive and published in Inside Higher Education’s “The Sandbox,” italics added]
Higher education is not exempt from the proliferation of NDAs as a business practice. Higher education institutions differ from businesses in an important respect: Our missions are educational. In that context, NDAs may carry long-term costs as significant as their short-term benefits. They can limit our ability to learn from one another, both as individuals and as institutions.
NDAs can undermine the collaboration our sector needs as an educational ecosystem, replacing it with institution-specific, competitive approaches. In the apparent interest of consolidation, they can undermine our capacity to learn from and with one another. They create tight connections among a few and disconnection from everyone else.
NDAs can reduce institutional adaptability and limit leaders’ capacity to improve. They can erode collective memory, weaken a community of practice, constrain the creativity that comes from open dialogue, and waste already scarce resources.
CKB Vienna LLP
NDAs cannot prevent gossip or eliminate risk. Even when those bound by an agreement honor it, people outside the process carry no such obligation. Their speculation fills the space that formal knowledge-sharing would otherwise occupy. It is a poor substitute for the collective memory these agreements can place out of reach.
Like much of our work, NDAs require us to navigate the ethical as well as the legal—and to recognize that the two are not always the same.
I have learned this the hard way, and now I ask different questions when secrecy is demanded of me. Most crucially: Is this the right way to build and sustain trust in this context? And, just as important: What do the people I care about lose if I sign, and what do my signature protect?
When needed, I will still sign NDAs. But I will be more cautious. We should also ask whether confidentiality can be narrower, time-limited, and followed by responsible opportunities to share what the sector needs to learn. We must find a way to keep learning from one another, especially in difficult times like these.
