Aug 13, 2018 06:19 PM
https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Ri...nal/244135
EXCERPT: The main tasks of a professor are to teach and do research. The two sometimes vie for priority, but together they encapsulate what we expect professors to do, and they take the bulk of weight in yearly evaluations, tenure judgments, and other professional measures.
Now, it seems, a new task has been added to the job: promotion. We are urged to promote our classes, our departments, our colleges, our professional organizations. More than anything, we are directed to promote ourselves. The imperative is to call attention to one’s writing, courses, talks, ideas, or persona in media new and old. It could be about your new book on Shakespeare or the history of haberdashery, or something you did, or simply yourself, but the key is to get your brand out there — if not in The New York Times, then on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or just the department newsletter. And if not quite to the general public, at least to administrators, boards, funders, students, and other professors.
The conventional standards — teaching your classes well, publishing in reputable journals or with academic presses — no longer are enough. You do not exist unless you fire up your personal publicity machine.
Promotion runs through the institution. At my university, besides the central public-relations office, a few years ago a media person was hired to promote the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and last year we added one solely for the English department, who regularly sends out email blasts. We have meetings where we are asked to tap our inner marketer to figure out ways to promote our programs — worrying about a dip in enrollment, as if the problem is not the price of tuition, or the messages in our culture against the value of the humanities, or the pressure for an explicitly practical degree, but simply that we’re not promoting English enough. Besides providing course descriptions on our regular departmental list, we now advertise underenrolled classes with glossy posters.
Colleagues elsewhere tell me about similar or more advanced cases of promotional fever. Graduate students at a nearby university report that they are pressured to promote their classes at risk of their funding if they don’t reach a certain enrollment (with posters, but they are also supposed to hunt down former students via email). One professor in the Midwest tells me that a publisher offered a contract based not on readers’ reports but on the size of the professor’s Twitter following.
The promotional imperative has not only become part of institutional protocol; it permeates how we understand and conduct our own work and careers. We post pieces on Academia.edu, build our own sites, and paper Facebook with posts and links. At the behest of our publishers, we send information about our new books to any friend or acquaintance we’ve ever had, and cajole them to circulate it, like a chain letter. Friends are no longer just friends but conduits in one’s promotional circuit.
The adage seems to be morphing from "publish or perish" to "promote or perish."
It is, of course, not a bad thing to circulate one’s scholarly work, or to say a good word about a colleague, college, or profession. But we’ve been overtaken by the codes and goals of advertising, without confidence in the normal channels of professional recognition. It does not especially matter what’s sold, only that it’s sold. The promotional imperative has become a self-generating motor of the contemporary academic sphere. Supplanting the model of the traditional scholar or the public intellectual, we have entered the era of the promotional intellectual, with damaging consequences for the academy and the life of the mind.
The promotional intellectual is a natural outgrowth of the entrepreneurial university. In the hard sciences, the criteria for research have, since the 1980s, increasingly emphasized patents and marketable products. Especially in practical fields like computer science and engineering, professors have long consulted for or formed their own businesses. Now the need to hawk one’s brand has leached into the humanities and social sciences. The classic aims of the university — the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and the education of citizens — have taken a back seat.
Where I find a particular rub is that, especially in the humanities, the promotional urge has been painted as an altruistic turn toward the public that makes us public intellectuals. But "public" can be a vague and amorphous category. After all, Walmart aims to reach the public, but it exists foremost to sell things for the benefit of Walmart and its shareholders, not to carry out a cultural, civic, or political mission....
MORE: https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Ri...nal/244135
EXCERPT: The main tasks of a professor are to teach and do research. The two sometimes vie for priority, but together they encapsulate what we expect professors to do, and they take the bulk of weight in yearly evaluations, tenure judgments, and other professional measures.
Now, it seems, a new task has been added to the job: promotion. We are urged to promote our classes, our departments, our colleges, our professional organizations. More than anything, we are directed to promote ourselves. The imperative is to call attention to one’s writing, courses, talks, ideas, or persona in media new and old. It could be about your new book on Shakespeare or the history of haberdashery, or something you did, or simply yourself, but the key is to get your brand out there — if not in The New York Times, then on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or just the department newsletter. And if not quite to the general public, at least to administrators, boards, funders, students, and other professors.
The conventional standards — teaching your classes well, publishing in reputable journals or with academic presses — no longer are enough. You do not exist unless you fire up your personal publicity machine.
Promotion runs through the institution. At my university, besides the central public-relations office, a few years ago a media person was hired to promote the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and last year we added one solely for the English department, who regularly sends out email blasts. We have meetings where we are asked to tap our inner marketer to figure out ways to promote our programs — worrying about a dip in enrollment, as if the problem is not the price of tuition, or the messages in our culture against the value of the humanities, or the pressure for an explicitly practical degree, but simply that we’re not promoting English enough. Besides providing course descriptions on our regular departmental list, we now advertise underenrolled classes with glossy posters.
Colleagues elsewhere tell me about similar or more advanced cases of promotional fever. Graduate students at a nearby university report that they are pressured to promote their classes at risk of their funding if they don’t reach a certain enrollment (with posters, but they are also supposed to hunt down former students via email). One professor in the Midwest tells me that a publisher offered a contract based not on readers’ reports but on the size of the professor’s Twitter following.
The promotional imperative has not only become part of institutional protocol; it permeates how we understand and conduct our own work and careers. We post pieces on Academia.edu, build our own sites, and paper Facebook with posts and links. At the behest of our publishers, we send information about our new books to any friend or acquaintance we’ve ever had, and cajole them to circulate it, like a chain letter. Friends are no longer just friends but conduits in one’s promotional circuit.
The adage seems to be morphing from "publish or perish" to "promote or perish."
It is, of course, not a bad thing to circulate one’s scholarly work, or to say a good word about a colleague, college, or profession. But we’ve been overtaken by the codes and goals of advertising, without confidence in the normal channels of professional recognition. It does not especially matter what’s sold, only that it’s sold. The promotional imperative has become a self-generating motor of the contemporary academic sphere. Supplanting the model of the traditional scholar or the public intellectual, we have entered the era of the promotional intellectual, with damaging consequences for the academy and the life of the mind.
The promotional intellectual is a natural outgrowth of the entrepreneurial university. In the hard sciences, the criteria for research have, since the 1980s, increasingly emphasized patents and marketable products. Especially in practical fields like computer science and engineering, professors have long consulted for or formed their own businesses. Now the need to hawk one’s brand has leached into the humanities and social sciences. The classic aims of the university — the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and the education of citizens — have taken a back seat.
Where I find a particular rub is that, especially in the humanities, the promotional urge has been painted as an altruistic turn toward the public that makes us public intellectuals. But "public" can be a vague and amorphous category. After all, Walmart aims to reach the public, but it exists foremost to sell things for the benefit of Walmart and its shareholders, not to carry out a cultural, civic, or political mission....
MORE: https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Ri...nal/244135