Does the U of M faculty share its work with the public enough?
It looks like the University of Minnesota needs to show us news hacks a little more love.
The Center for Public Anthropology recently issued a ranking that put the U 83rd overall out of 94 universities in how much its faculty in the social sciences communicates with the public through the news media.
It scanned 6,000 news sources over a five-year period to see how often each of the 13,000 faculty members studied were cited. It calculated the average citations per professor for each university and then compared that to the amount of federal funding each campus received.
Broken down, here's how five University of Minnesota departments ranked:
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Anthropology: 30th
Economics: 77th
Political science: 75th
Psychology: 83rd
Sociology: 81st
The U's most-cited professors were Larry Jacobs of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, Kathryn Pearson of political science, and William Beeman of anthropology.
(You can see a full list of faculty and how they rated here.)
Why does this matter?
Officials from the center say it raises some key questions, mainly:
1) How much does public funding obligate faculty members to share their insights with the public at large?
2) When making decisions about tenure and promotion, should universities assess a professor's total impact by including his or her citations in the news media?
Emory University professor George J. Armelagos tells The Chronicle of Higher Education that having faculty members in the news media can draw attention to their departments.
But he explains why faculty engagement isn't higher:
... Academic culture often dissuades faculty members from seeking the spotlight, particularly if they are early in their careers and have yet to firmly build their academic bona fides.
"The senior people will think you're trying to establish your career by popularizing and getting notice in the newspapers," he said. "You don't want to be thought of as not wanting to pass the microphone."
The Chronicle adds another reason given by Tufts University professor Daniel W. Drezner:
There is also little reward and large risk to faculty members engaging with the news media ... Complicated ideas often get misinterpreted, misrepresented, or stripped of their nuances. Or reporters simply get things wrong.
And if a faculty member is too good at talking to the news media, he said, that can be a problem, too.
"The perception is that if you're quoted widely in the press, you're an empty head," Mr. Drezner said.