bonnerj’s posterous

Paul Baker at educationpr.org posted an excerpt from an essay by Duke University's Michael C. Munger on why faculty need to talk to the media. Paul hits on Munger's key point:

“You can teach more people in 10 minutes on television or radio than you will be able to speak to in an entire year in the classroom,” says Michael C. Munger, political science, Duke University, in The Chronicle, 22 June.

“In the triad of research, teaching, and service,” he writes, “the task of dealing with the news media is both service and teaching, and it should be counted as such.

“Administrators have to reward, and honor, success in media relations: Saying ‘it’s part of your job’ will never work. Even the most outwardly focused campus news service will fail to bring faculty members out into the spotlight unless they are trained to deal with reporters and are rewarded for it.”

[Emphasis added.] Munger, who chairs Duke's political science department, highlights some common reasons why faculty won't talk to reporters -- what he calls "faculty turtle syndrome" -- and goes on to give an excellent run down of the techniques that are needed for successful interactions with reporters. He even throws in a few anecdotes of lessons he learned the hard way. In short, practice makes perfect.

But how do you get reluctant faculty interested in practicing in the first place? Munger's idea of rewarding faculty for doing media interviews is intriguing, but I'm not convinced it will make an impact on the faculty I'm most familiar with: basic research scientists who want nothing to do with media. Munger writes that junior faculty members are advised to steer clear of media interviews by their senior colleagues because they'll be viewed as "not serious or ... relentlessly self-promotional." In my experience, behavioral scientists -- the ones who are observing animal behavior, either in the field or at the lab bench -- are particularly vulnerable to this type of criticism, and ironically (or not) seem to be more willing than others to engage with reporters.

I think the key to getting scientists comfortable with the idea of communicating with reporters and the public at large is to get them early, while they are in graduate school or working as postdocs and before they've become junior faculty members. The American Association for the Advancement of Science is doing this to some degree through its series of workshops on communicating science and has some success to show for it.

I think every university communications office has an obligation to take the initiative and reach out to young researchers and train them in basic communications skills.

Flickr photo by berlin fan

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