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Corresponding Author

Heather Carroll

Abstract

Public leadership speech is a consequential site of ethical positioning where institutional values are named, contested, and interpreted under pressure, and where the choice of virtue language shapes where attention is directed. Analyzing published quotations from university leaders during the first 100 days of the second Trump administration, we examine how virtue language functioned as a public act of values-based leadership through a socio-ecological framework for flourishing that treats character as dynamic and relational. We find that leaders constructed ethical stances by anchoring commitment to moral virtues that named goods, intellectual virtues that narrated deliberative process, and occasionally pairing both in ways that made goods and methods simultaneously visible. Yet a civic-framing gap runs through this vocabulary. Leaders committed to civic-oriented ends while reaching predominantly for moral and intellectual virtue terms to express them, substituting proxy terms such as community for named recipients. The result is public speech that signals solidarity and resolve while reducing the specificity of who bears risk, receives care, or is owed particular goods. Notably, practical wisdom was narrated through process language rather than named directly. These patterns offer values-based leadership scholars and practitioners a replicable analytical lens for reading how virtue language makes institutional responsibility visible and where it remains implicit, supporting the interpretation of public leadership speech and leaders’ consideration of what their speech makes visible.

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