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Addressing the rise of faculty using independent platforms like YouTube and podcasts, Rosowsky contends that universities should train and support, rather than restrict, those with the skills and passion for public engagement. He notes that newer faculty often arrive with entrepreneurial experience, digital fluency, and an instinct for connecting with audiences—skills that higher education should embrace as assets. By lowering barriers and creating supportive structures, he believes universities can amplify their reach, innovate in communication, and better serve the public good.
We can try to prepare our faculty to be most effective in that space, while also protecting their interests and the university's interests. The other thing I'll point out, though, is that all of the faculty are not going to be sent out to the public.
Some will have no interest in doing it. And some frankly, that's really not where their strengths lie. And it probably would be best for the university or for their program not to make them a public face of that work. So you're really talking about a subset of the faculty and that that allows a university, I think, to sort of zero in and focus their resources on preparing them to be effective in that space, training them how to speak with media, answering their questions about what they can and can't say, and then also helping them, where it's appropriate to co-brand whatever they produce.
Whether the university's name appears on it or not or how to navigate that. But I think to say that we don't want you doing it. I think that ship has sailed. And I think rather than putting walls up around our faculty, I think we should lower all of the barriers and set them free. And let's learn from them about how to communicate with the public.
A young faculty, you know, engineering and science, used to be [that] you came to the university essentially fresh off your PhD. Now, almost invariably you have a postdoc, maybe multiple postdocs. But what we're seeing, certainly in my domain of engineering, is that new faculty are coming to us, having started companies or having worked with their postdoctoral advisor to start a company.
So they're way ahead of most of our faculty in entrepreneurship and innovation, tech transfer, protection of intellectual property. Well, the same can be said for new media. They're way ahead of us. So again, higher education clings to tradition. And again, higher ed resists change. And when they do, it's incremental and it's still decades behind where they needed to get to.
Here we have an opportunity. We have, it's like an opportunity to flip the classroom instead of mentoring these young people that are coming to us about how to live and work in a faculty position. That has changed dramatically in the last couple of decades. We on the faculty can learn from these new scientists, new scholars, new researchers about all the different ways to communicate with the public and all the different ways to share your knowledge and all the different ways to engage.