Meta Messaging

Every now and again you come across a blog or article that you wish you had written.

Once the disappointment of what could have been is over, the best recourse is to go meta and to blog-about-the-blog or to try to point out a pithy quote in say, a Powerpoint presentation to a captive audience who will be dazzled by your erudition (or um, deft Google searching.)

I had grand plans for the latter, as at the start of each academic year I typically present a brief talk to our incoming graduate students on communications (primarily warnings about social media etiquette and the proper use of the Harvard identity and my own indulgent list of favorite books and films about academia).

Now if you get bumped, you can blog instead.

This year, in the tradition of late night talk shows, I was, alas, bumped for another, more vital guest: IT and computation.

I have to admit, I was kind of bummed---as when you work in academic communications, you rarely, if ever, get to present. And when you do get a bit of attention (more on that in my next blog post), it is often due to a quote that you really wish you had never said.

With my bruised ego now in check, I turn to the blog posting at hand.

"The 'Faculty Lounge' Problem" by Martin Edwards, an associate professor at the John C. Whitehead School of Diplomacy at Seton Hall University, is brilliant.

For all the talk (and talk) of MOOCs, the real worry for higher education, as Edwards points out, has to be the incessant attacks by politicians and the public.

The charges of elitism by the very elite who attended the elite institutions they are denigrating is reductio ad absurdum at its finest. Wouldn't it be more inspiring if politicians told, say, this story of Morgan Lehmann ’12, the daughter of a schoolteacher and a farmer-turned-FedEx driver who just graduated from Harvard?

Fantastic state institutions, like those in California, are facing the wrath of budget cuts during a time when they might be the very engines that could help mitigate the recession. Given that, even with increased tuition, higher education is a mecca for upward mobility, job creation, and innovation (consider that Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and well, the Internet, are all products, in some sense, of academia), doubling-down would seem to be a wiser course of action. Watch the Social Network for reference and pay attention to the entity and not the famed individual.

A ripping yarn ... about academic politics.

If that isn't enough drama for you, the University of Virgina's "campus coup" made the cover of New York Times Magazine.

The article, likely inside baseball for most but a ripping yarn in the tradition of the defunct Lingua Franca for ivory tower enthusiasts, details a (now foiled) secret plot to dethrone a president.

The underlying message a dire one: “There was once a consensus in America that higher education was a public good,” Hunter] Rawlings says. “What is new now, and radically different, is that after five, six, seven years in reductions in state funding for higher education, the whole system is under stress.”

I cannot wait to see that horror film! "On a placid college campus, an unstoppable evil lurks among the ivy..."

Finally, research universities, especially ones like Harvard that benefit so grandly from government funding through agencies like the NSF and NIH, are truly in the eye of the storm.

For politicians this is a gift that keeps giving: wealthy, elite, liberal (of course), tax-exempt institutions that take public money to do a host of questionable Ig Noble worthy research. Score!

Even the research you'd think Fox viewers would love (robotic bees that could one day be used to root out terrorists?!) generates ire and outrage.

(That much of academic research is primarily directed at say, curing cancer, saving the planet, and bolstering the economy with R&D breakthroughs, doesn't seem to matter all that much.)

These catapults are safe for the ivory towers.

With the (likely flaming) salvos being lofted at the iconic Gothic buildings, what's an academic PR hack to do?

During a grinding recession!

  In a crucial election year!

     With the ozone depleting!

       And amid a massive cheating scandal at one of 
       the most well-known universities in the world
       (which will go unnamed)!

Make sure that everyone reads Edwards' essay. Even better, make sure they act on his advice.

We need to take the offensive in justifying academic research. If scholarship is the mechanism by which we are out of touch, then it is our responsibility as scholars to better underscore (and indeed sell) what we’re learning about the world and why that matters. The good news is that this is something that many of us already do. We train graduate students to justify how their work contributes to broader debates in their theses and dissertations. In our own grant competitions, we are required to explain why our work is important – and indeed, why our proposal merits funding over hundreds of others. We report back to these same funders about what we’ve learned and how their investment in us has been used. What we need are mechanisms that allow us to better articulate and disseminate to nonacademic audiences what academic research is and why it makes a difference.

Fixing this problem is not merely a matter of marketing. It also requires changing incentives. Decisions about tenure and promotion are based on output in scholarly outlets, not the popular press. Individual faculty members will resist devoting energies to outreach as long as there are no professional rewards attached to it. Generating more outreach requires that universities value outreach about scholarly research just as much as they value the research itself . Universities send out press releases to announce athletic recruits and the retention of million-dollar coaches; surely the ideas in a book published by a philosopher merits attention as well. As the political science community has seen this past year, failing to justify what we do as scholars and why can have detrimental consequences.             

Getting back to the talk I like to give to new graduate students, my real aim echoes Edwards' sage advice: convincing those benefiting from the public trust (i.e. taxes) and donors (as all of our Ph.D. students are fully funded) that they are, in large part, responsible for the fate of academia.

That seems a bit weighty when most of them are still trying to figure out why Boston seemingly has no street signs and realizing that, yes, those cars driving through Harvard Square really are trying to hit them.

Yet, those students, many of whom may end up as future faculty or industry or government leaders, are best hope we in academia have for a bright, albeit uncertain, future. They will become our ambassadors and influence everyone they talk to about what they do all those late nights in the lab (and why they do it).

Consider one of our undergraduate alumni, Jean Yang '08 (Computer Science), who has become an influential blogger/communicator about life as a Ph.D. student/academic (and a strong advocate for women in computer science and related fields).

PR in TR matters!

We were also fortune to have two of our Ph.D. alumni named to the Technology Review's TR 35 (Top Innovators Under 35) list for 2012.

• Pratheev Sreetharan
  Mass-producible tiny machines snap into place like objects in a pop-up book

• Nanshu Lu
  Soft, flexible electronics bond to skin and even organs for better health monitoring

These lists really matter---and I am happy to say that most of the award winners won in part because their research generated excitement and publicity.

In short, they were able to tell good stories. Moreover, someone, likely one of our faculty, also had the good sense to nominate them and saw the value in celebrating their achievements to the world-at-large.

In addition to persuading students to protect their own self-interest, administrators there to enable teaching and learning and support faculty and students, also have a role to play.

Colleges and universities need to tell their stories to multiple audiences. This doesn’t merely mean prospective students or Congressional lobbyists; it means opening our doors and sharing what we do with the public. Universities become less easy targets when we promote how first-generation students become Congressional staffers and how the products of single-parent households can win nationally competitive scholarships. We do not merely pour facts into students’ heads. On many days, we change students’ lives.

On that count, a colleague just sent me a brilliant audio series, Crimson Knowledge, produced by the Harvard Office of Postdoctoral Affairs that allows postdocs, often the forgotten workhorses of research institutions, to talk plainly about the cool stuff they are doing.

It does a great job of dispelling what happens, say, five stories down in the shiny Laboratory for Integrated Science and Engineering. We can, and should do more NPR-like endeavors.

Edwards ends with a potent coda:

American higher education is one of the greatest products ever devised for human betterment. We do not need slick slogans or fancy jingles to justify it. All that we need is to take the energy that we get from an interesting article, a fascinating finding, or a great class discussion, and share it. More attention to scholarly outreach and promoting teaching and mentoring can be our own attack ad as we work to elevate higher education in these challenging times.

 Yes, yes, and yes. I do, however, like a good jingle.