I had so many great communicators for professors during my time at UT.
Finding and supporting those people to get their knowledge to a more general audience I think would be great.
There’s a kind of professorial public intellectual archetype that I feel like has been around in one form or another for a long time, so I absolutely think the potential for an audience is there.
Agreed, but it's trickier than I once imagined to figure out how to translate what they do in the classroom, which can be extremely compelling, to the platforms where I operate. It's not a straight translation.
I admire the ambition, but I guess I saw any number of people crash and burn in Columbia PR because they felt doing the particular school's magazine or whatever was their golden key to entering prestige Manhattan media when the molten essence of university communications tends to be as much for internal reference later on or for a donor to immediately throw into the recycling bin as anything almost anyone ever attentively reads or watches. I guess I wonder if compelling storytelling requires a focus and killer arc that open-ended students and researchers are too busy toiling in the weeds to generally capture.
Don't mean this to be discouraging! I just learned in the field that it tended to make more sense to generate a broader spectrum of solid B+ sort of work when so few people would notice the difference than a smaller spectrum of spectacular A+ work that not many people would really appreciate.
Not discouraging. I have crashed and burned many times, over the years, in my efforts to make the job something other than what it is. I've learned my lesson many times over. But I try to leave a bit of space at the margins to run some experiments. If I had to bet on it, I'd bet that none of those experiments will succeed to the point where we could genuinely shift our resources in the direction of more compelling storytelling. But I do believe there's a small chance we could succeed.
To strive when your arms are too weary, to reach the unreachable star!
(I should say that my comment comes after years of having the flair I'd stubbornly add to engineering stories ruthlessly excised! I'd get "track changes" back that looked like a warzone!)
Ha! I feel like the preservation of "track changes" would be of immense value to future historians. All the unspoken norms and codes are contained therein.
I do hope UT-Austin takes care to preserve printouts of at least all the final published versions in a file cabinet somewhere, in my work doing historical materials for Columbia the accessible record just sort of stopped in the mid to late 90s, so it was often much easier to find information from a century earlier than from 5 or 6 years before.
Columbia J-School took down almost everything I'd ever reported for them not too long after I'd left because the comms budget was slashed and they couldn't keep up that sort of prodigious output anymore. Similarly, at the law school most of what I'd ever written for them got taken down as the 'wokeness wars' heated up and they didn't want to provide their critics a "target-rich environment." But that represented hundreds of hours of events coverage and interviews that might have offered future historians with a real-time snapshot of prestige discourse in the Obama years and how that might have helped open the door to Trumpism. I'd like to think all that stuff is still lurking on some servers somewhere deep in the bowels of Columbia but realistically it's probably vanished except for what I can still remember to include in my Substack.
I wish I had a better answer. I think our records go back about a decade or so, but we don't have a great plan in place to preserve them over the long term. Maybe we should. I wonder if the library would take them.
It'd be great to use institutional communications to incubate artists: as a sort of creative testing ground in run-of-the-mill work, with guaranteed pay. That seems the most feasible benefit right now and in the past (I can think of a few serious writers and filmmakers who began in creative agencies as copywriters or camera grips, for instance). Then the trouble is securing funding to contract or hire young, talented freelancers, which can be done over time.
The larger trouble is definitely the question of how many masters, and their many purposes, are at play. Every place I've worked sees communications as a cost-center (always compared unfavorably to salespeople, who are revenue centers) but also as a pet project for leaders to assign publicity that makes them feel good or serves non-communication ends. This use can be institutionally helpful, but as a rule it avoids experiments and difference.
I think the system tends against experiments and difference, but it's not utterly hostile to them. So it should be possible, though difficult, to pull it off. I think it could also be possible to entice donors into supporting interesting projects, though the development folks would have to be willing to float the ideas to them, which is not something they are accustomed to doing.
That's a thought: take an experiment or difference-making advance directly to a donor, almost to solicit patronage or direct support? (Depending, as ever, on the administrative go-between.)
I think it could work, on the donor end. I think the challenge would be working with development on a viable proposal. It's just not a template we have right now.
I had so many great communicators for professors during my time at UT.
Finding and supporting those people to get their knowledge to a more general audience I think would be great.
There’s a kind of professorial public intellectual archetype that I feel like has been around in one form or another for a long time, so I absolutely think the potential for an audience is there.
Agreed, but it's trickier than I once imagined to figure out how to translate what they do in the classroom, which can be extremely compelling, to the platforms where I operate. It's not a straight translation.
I admire the ambition, but I guess I saw any number of people crash and burn in Columbia PR because they felt doing the particular school's magazine or whatever was their golden key to entering prestige Manhattan media when the molten essence of university communications tends to be as much for internal reference later on or for a donor to immediately throw into the recycling bin as anything almost anyone ever attentively reads or watches. I guess I wonder if compelling storytelling requires a focus and killer arc that open-ended students and researchers are too busy toiling in the weeds to generally capture.
Don't mean this to be discouraging! I just learned in the field that it tended to make more sense to generate a broader spectrum of solid B+ sort of work when so few people would notice the difference than a smaller spectrum of spectacular A+ work that not many people would really appreciate.
Not discouraging. I have crashed and burned many times, over the years, in my efforts to make the job something other than what it is. I've learned my lesson many times over. But I try to leave a bit of space at the margins to run some experiments. If I had to bet on it, I'd bet that none of those experiments will succeed to the point where we could genuinely shift our resources in the direction of more compelling storytelling. But I do believe there's a small chance we could succeed.
To strive when your arms are too weary, to reach the unreachable star!
(I should say that my comment comes after years of having the flair I'd stubbornly add to engineering stories ruthlessly excised! I'd get "track changes" back that looked like a warzone!)
Ha! I feel like the preservation of "track changes" would be of immense value to future historians. All the unspoken norms and codes are contained therein.
I do hope UT-Austin takes care to preserve printouts of at least all the final published versions in a file cabinet somewhere, in my work doing historical materials for Columbia the accessible record just sort of stopped in the mid to late 90s, so it was often much easier to find information from a century earlier than from 5 or 6 years before.
Columbia J-School took down almost everything I'd ever reported for them not too long after I'd left because the comms budget was slashed and they couldn't keep up that sort of prodigious output anymore. Similarly, at the law school most of what I'd ever written for them got taken down as the 'wokeness wars' heated up and they didn't want to provide their critics a "target-rich environment." But that represented hundreds of hours of events coverage and interviews that might have offered future historians with a real-time snapshot of prestige discourse in the Obama years and how that might have helped open the door to Trumpism. I'd like to think all that stuff is still lurking on some servers somewhere deep in the bowels of Columbia but realistically it's probably vanished except for what I can still remember to include in my Substack.
I wish I had a better answer. I think our records go back about a decade or so, but we don't have a great plan in place to preserve them over the long term. Maybe we should. I wonder if the library would take them.
It'd be great to use institutional communications to incubate artists: as a sort of creative testing ground in run-of-the-mill work, with guaranteed pay. That seems the most feasible benefit right now and in the past (I can think of a few serious writers and filmmakers who began in creative agencies as copywriters or camera grips, for instance). Then the trouble is securing funding to contract or hire young, talented freelancers, which can be done over time.
The larger trouble is definitely the question of how many masters, and their many purposes, are at play. Every place I've worked sees communications as a cost-center (always compared unfavorably to salespeople, who are revenue centers) but also as a pet project for leaders to assign publicity that makes them feel good or serves non-communication ends. This use can be institutionally helpful, but as a rule it avoids experiments and difference.
I think the system tends against experiments and difference, but it's not utterly hostile to them. So it should be possible, though difficult, to pull it off. I think it could also be possible to entice donors into supporting interesting projects, though the development folks would have to be willing to float the ideas to them, which is not something they are accustomed to doing.
That's a thought: take an experiment or difference-making advance directly to a donor, almost to solicit patronage or direct support? (Depending, as ever, on the administrative go-between.)
I think it could work, on the donor end. I think the challenge would be working with development on a viable proposal. It's just not a template we have right now.