Marketing the Liberal Arts: My White Whale

What the University of Nottingham got right

For the past 18 years of my career at UT Austin, I’ve been trying to find the holy grail of university communications: some way of channeling the intellectual, creative, and logistical resources we have as a large research university directly into writing, art, video, and audio that can meaningfully compete with publications like the Washington Post or The New Yorker, the podcasts you listen to, and the blogs or newsletters you follow. How do we create stuff, in other words, that’s a standard deviation or two more compelling than the solid, intelligently produced content that is our bread and butter? How can we grab the non-UT public and compel their engagement because we’re too interesting to ignore?

I haven’t found it yet. And in all my years of surveying the scene, I’ve come across only one university that seems to have cracked this code in a sustainable way (more on that exception in a minute.) Harvard hasn’t done it, nor MIT, RISD, Caltech, Stanford, Oxford, or the Sorbonne. Go to their websites or YouTube channels and what you’ll find is that we’re all basically doing the same thing and speaking with the same institutional voice. There is a lot of variation in the production quality, and some occasional one-off pieces that transcend that institutional vibe, but the default mode is intelligent but bland, smooth, and boosterish.

There are many reasons for this. One is that it’s just extremely hard at a baseline to make stand-out work. You have to find the right people, provide them the right resources and incentives, and then get lucky. It doesn’t happen often. As someone pointed out to me recently, Oprah’s podcast failed. Oprah. It’s hard to be good. But our communications also tend to feel institutional simply because we’re institutions. We serve many masters, and not all of them prioritize the kind of exciting, public-facing, creative cultural products I’m talking about. That’s fair enough — the university is also working to educate students and produce ground-breaking research, as it should — but it can make the search for the communications holy grail that much harder.

The one true exception, about which I’ve been obsessing for much of my career in university communications, is the University of Nottingham, which in 2007 hired BBC video journalist Brady Haran to produce short science videos, featuring Nottingham faculty, for distribution on YouTube. I don’t know what Haran was paid, nor what budget he was given, but I can’t imagine that Nottingham shelled out more than a few hundred thousand total for the project. It cost a fraction, in other words, of the overall communications budget of any major university. But its impact has been much, much wider. The two main video series that Haran produced for Nottingham, Sixty Symbols and Periodic Videos, have racked up more than 250,000,000 views since they launched in 2008-09. That’s about five times as many views as the Yale University YouTube channel has received, for all its videos, in its whole existence.

But what makes these particular videos so compelling? Haran, and I think this is important to note, is not a filmmaker for the ages. There is nothing you would see in any of his videos that you haven’t seen before. Each of the videos in the Sixty Symbols series is about a mathematical symbol. Each Periodic Video is about an element on the periodic table. They all feature a faculty member talking to the camera about that symbol or element for a few minutes, and while the faculty member is talking, Haran will cut in some still images and occasionally some other video. The picture quality is just okay. The audio quality is excellent. They tend to run five minutes or so. The vibe is quick and dirty but always engaged and alive.

If Haran is exceptional, it’s in the combination of a lot of different qualities that perhaps very few people have. He’s good. He’s smart. He obviously has a good rapport with the faculty he’s interviewing. He’s not intimidated by academic knowledge. And he’s incredibly, incredibly fast.

Here’s an example I like, from a series he subsequently did for Nottingham’s School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies. The series is “Words of the World.” This video is on the word “vindaloo.”

The construction of this video is super simple. Five minutes of a Nottingham faculty member talking to the camera from his office. A few still images that pan up or down or in. And a few grainy video clips. That’s it. But it’s consistently interesting and smart. Within a few short minutes we learn about the etymology of the word, Portuguese and British colonialism, English football culture, and shifts in British identity in the late 20th century. Haran replicates this feat of thoughtful entertainment over and over again, over hundreds of videos about astronomy, food, numbers, the periodic table of elements, the Bible, and so on. None are excessively technical, but they’re not dumbed down. They are actually doing what universities exist to do, which is raise the general level of intelligence in the world.

In the 15 or so years since Haran got started producing these videos, he’s become much more sophisticated. If you look at his recent work, most of which he’s producing as an independent YouTuber rather than for Nottingham, it’s more visually striking and innovative than his early stuff. He’s evolved as a filmmaker, and he makes enough money from YouTube to support work that is more resource intensive than what a university could realistically support. But the new stuff isn’t the key example for university communications. The old stuff is. We have all the technical skill we’d need to equal or surpass the production quality of his early videos. We also have the content expertise. When the History Channel or PBS needs to get experts for its documentaries, it calls up people like me to find them experts. I put them in touch with our faculty members, and then they fly those experts to New York, or they fly film crews to Austin. We already have these experts in walking distance. When the Discovery Channel wants to go out and do a cool science video, they have to go find the science. We are the science.

What Brady has had that many university communicators don’t yet have—and honestly may never have—is the risk tolerance and runway. A university that wanted to follow in Nottingham’s footsteps would have to commit some real money over a few years. It would have to hire or contract out with the kind of people it’s not used to hiring or contracting—under-employed independent filmmakers, idiosyncratic writers, edgy artists, etc. It would have to push past its comfort zone in terms of the kind of content it’s used to disseminating as part of its brand. And it would have to be willing to fail. It’s hard out there for a YouTuber, for a podcaster, for a Substacker. Most endeavors fail. Oprah failed. Prince Harry and Princess Meghan failed.

I’m not knocking anyone, including myself, for not going all in on such a strategy. We have jobs to do, and priorities to prioritize. My job isn’t to hit the 10 million views mark on YouTube. I don’t even know if the University of Nottingham is still funding such work. If it is, it hasn’t expanded beyond funding Brady Haran. But there are smaller lessons we can all take from Nottingham’s example. We can run low-stakes experiments (like this Substack) and launch podcasts (like this one on AI) and video series. We can make our websites more engaging. We can highlight new and daring voices. And we can wait for the lightening to strike.