A call comes in from a local television station asking if you have an expert on Abraham Lincoln to make a comment about Presidents' Day. Oftentimes when such calls come in, you have to pass: Your faculty is small enough that you simply can't produce experts on many of the topics of interest to the news media.
But this time is different; you have a faculty member who has written a book about Lincoln. Better yet, the humanities division has been asking for marketing help to raise its profile. It's only local television, true, but it's an opportunity to showcase a professor's expertise. There's one catch: The interview must take place tomorrow morning, at the station's studio. You call the faculty member, and she politely declines.
Later, a wire story breaks about the increase in childhood obesity. You are ready to pounce, with an idea for an opinion piece from a nutritionist on the faculty, and an offer to help write the article, as well as place it. Again, the professor declines. It's too near the end of the semester, he says, and he doesn't have time.
For public-relations officers, faculty members can be a tremendous asset. Their vitality and expertise is at the core of an institution's identity, and promoting their work can be a great way to raise your college's profile and enhance its reputation. But not if they don't cooperate.
There are structural and cultural reasons for their occasional lack of cooperation. To begin with, marketing the college simply is not in their job descriptions. Nowhere along the path to getting a Ph.D. was there a requirement to cooperate with the public-relations staff or work with the news media.
The prevailing attitude at most colleges is that it is the job of faculty members to teach and stay current in their fields. They are asked to advise students, and perhaps sit on some committees. It is the job of the admission and marketing staffers to get students, and of the fund raisers and the president to find the resources to support the faculty's teaching and research.
But given the intense competition for students and money, especially in the current economy, that model doesn't make a great deal of sense. And faculty members are not unique in being asked to do something for which they were not originally trained.
Shouldn't faculty members be invested in getting the best possible students into their classrooms, too?
That depends. Some professors may abhor the idea of competing for students. Other faculty members may not care if they are getting only the best students. Or they may see involvement in marketing their college as a violation of the sanctity of the classroom.
An example from another industry helps make the point. In journalism historically, a "firewall" has existed between editors and publishers, to insulate editors from pressures from the business side of the house. If editors felt beholden to advertisers for any reason, it could compromise the news product and undermine the reporters' credibility. Perhaps some professors feel the same way — that getting involved in the messy work of fighting for students could lead to favoritism or pandering.
Some faculty members are just plain shy. They don't feel comfortable in front of a television camera or microphone. Or, like much of the population, they take a dim view of the news media and its ability to present information accurately and in context. Why cooperate if you might end up looking bad?
Given all of those factors and concerns, why should faculty members go out of their way to help the PR guy?
Survival, for one thing. The number of colleges insulated from the impact of the economic downturn is dwindling. If you have tenure, your job may not be at stake, but if junior faculty members or adjuncts are let go, then your teaching load and that of the other remaining faculty members is likely to increase. There may be fewer staff members available to file, make copies, greet students, or answer the telephone.
Career advancement is another reason for faculty members to honor requests for their help from the PR office. Good publicity for the college is good publicity for the featured professor. Many faculty members understand that. An article published in a major newspaper may not carry the weight of one published in an academic journal when it comes time for promotion, but it can't hurt. A local television station may not provide much exposure, but it is good practice for that time when someone comes calling from NPR or The NewsHour.
It can even be argued that scholars, as stewards of their disciplines, have a responsibility to engage with the general public through the mainstream news, to make sure that information that gets reported is accurate and current. If the public has not had an opportunity to hear your ideas on cluster housing, for example, or the merits of pollution credits, or the plight of the honeybee, how can they be expected to fully participate in the life of the nation, or be properly informed when they enter the voting booth? You have to risk something — some of your time, the possibility that the reporter won't get it right — but the payoff could be huge for both professor and society.
OK, OK. We're talking about the public-relations office, not saving the world. The point is that there are compelling reasons for faculty members to be actively engaged in representing their discipline and institution to various audiences. It's our job to persuade professors that it is in their own best interests to help the marketing department do its job.
There are other things we can do to encourage faculty members to help out with marketing. Media training is one. Despite what we know about the specialization of their academic training, we often assume, incorrectly, that faculty members understand how to deal with the news media. By offering to review some basic instructions, do some role playing, and go over the ground rules, we can ease a faculty member's anxiety about this potentially stressful encounter. And we should offer that help even when the media request seems benign or low-key. Helping professors make the transition from feeling at the mercy of the news media to seeing it as a platform for their ideas can be a liberating experience for them.
We can respect the faculty member's time by showing some restraint and not forwarding every request that comes in, but only those for which a faculty member truly has expertise. We can do that, in part, by taking the time to really get to know scholars and the areas in which they excel. The more secure that professors are in their knowledge, the more confident they will feel presenting themselves publicly in the role of "expert."
We can be proactive in our approach, providing an outline, a first draft, or at least a lead paragraph for that proposed opinion article.
Most important, we can refuse to see faculty members as obstacles or adversaries, regardless of their attitudes toward us. We need to keep our sanctimony to ourselves, and not fall into the trap of worrying more about covering our rears than getting the job done. If certain faculty members don't cooperate, that is no excuse for ignoring their programs or expertise.
We can — and should — enlist the help of the academic dean or president to set an institutional tone in which public-relations work is truly valued, and an explicit expectation that everyone, including faculty members, bears some responsibility for attracting and retaining students and dollars. But, in the end, we need to remember that we are the ones accountable.
