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Praise the brand and pass the gag

By David Rowe and Kylie Brass - posted Friday, 11 July 2008


Universities are publicly funded social institutions and it is important that academics contribute to significant public debates. But the higher education sector cannot expect academic public commentary to be the intellectual-but-innocuous wing of their public relations campaigns. Speaking beyond disciplinary peers to broader publics is a necessary - and necessarily risky - business.

Academics are actively encouraged by their employers to “get out there” in the public domain - disseminate research, engage their communities, and influence policy formation and public debates. Managing associations between the university and its various publics is imperative, including attending to financially favourable relationships with private companies and government organisations.

Media exposure makes good business sense, as well as being broadly compatible with the newer forms of academic outreach calling for greater community engagement. But it is also an unpredictable process, with outcomes very difficult to script.

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Academics as public commentators might challenge orthodoxies, court controversy, and offend certain sensibilities.

Some academics find themselves misrepresented, misquoted or induced to say inflammatory things. Even those who are more media savvy and aware of the traps in going public can still become embroiled in media scandals demanding institutional damage limitation.

Universities - and not only in Australia given the global market for higher education - are highly responsive to “brand damage”, and its dire consequences for international esteem and market position.

Governing what academics say outside the academy has emerged as a key area of risk management. Accordingly, Australian universities have adopted increasingly prescriptive policies on academic public comment over the last few years.

The convention that academics should only speak in their area of scholarly specialisation, or on behalf of the university when explicitly licensed to do so, is well established.

But greater concern about corporate profile has meant that universities are now acutely sensitive to the association between the organisation itself and the public comments of its academics.

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Since 2002, many Australian universities have introduced or updated policies and procedures for managing academic-media engagement. We found, after conducting an extensive survey, that 10 out of 38 universities currently employ robust media policies. A majority has bolstered their public comment and/or academic freedom provisions with a view to placing boundaries around the subjects that academics are allowed to discuss in public.

Keen to manage their media profile, many universities prohibit any activity or commentary that, in the terminology of their media policies, “de-position” them - that is, threaten to reduce their standing in the formal and informal rankings that obsess the producers and consumers of 21st century education.

Academics, like sportspeople, can also be charged with bringing the game (education) and club (university) into “disrepute” with key constituencies, including joint-venture partners and local politicians.

For example, the University of Tasmania’s media policy cautions that it is “hard work to keep up a flow of positive stories for the Media” in “a media saturated community” that “divides very quickly on parochial lines”. In a small island with only one university, its “position and reputation can be very quickly undermined by presenting an uncoordinated and undisciplined image to the community”.

Macquarie University expects staff to weigh their competing “allegiances” to their profession, university and to the “community at large”. As these are not always “in harmony”, staff must “weigh the importance of these allegiances in each particular set of circumstances”. Above all, academics should not “engage with the media in any activity or comment which is designed to bring the University into disrepute”.

At the University of Western Sydney, academic experts are described as “valuable media properties” and the university has “rights in the way in which they represent themselves and their opinion to the media”. Where their views may be “controversial or cause offence to some stakeholder groups”, academics are required to check with the Director, Media and Communication whether they can use their university designation.

The more punitive aspects of university media policy - sometimes seemingly made “on the run” - are especially visible during scandals or controversies that erupt with growing frequency.

The Universities of Queensland and Melbourne don’t have new generation media policies in place, but that hasn’t stopped them from recently acting to discourage and smooth over criticisms of organisations with which they have lucrative dealings.

At Queensland, lecturer and GP Dr Andrew Gunn (see On Line Opinion article http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7591) was initially asked to apologise to a pharmaceutical manufacturer for raising perfectly legitimate questions about the marketing of the cervical cancer vaccine Gardasil. The university later conceded that it had over-reacted and retracted its demand for an apology.

At Melbourne, Dr Paul Mees, former lawyer, public transport activist and urban planning academic, was initially threatened with demotion for outspoken public comments about transport policies that offended the State Government, prior to his resignation and move to another university in town.

Both Gunn and Mees were speaking out on matters that obviously fall within their respective areas of expertise. But in these cases being a subject expert afforded little protection. That Mees’s comments were potentially actionable partially explains his university’s actions, but its pre-emptive move is symptomatic of the damage limitation reflex whenever extra-mural relations are involved.

Scandal caused by public academic commentary tends to stimulate more media policy activity, as occurred in 2005 following Macquarie University’s (then) Associate Professor Andrew Fraser’s race-based criticisms of African refugee migrants to Australia.

Queensland University of Technology also moved against Drs John Hookham and Garry MacLennan in 2007 following an op-ed piece in the Australian Higher Education in which they severely criticised a PhD project about disability within their faculty.

In both the Macquarie and QUT instances, disciplinary proceedings and dispute settlements, with their legal implications, placed limits on what could be said in the media.

While there are obvious differences in these cases - Fraser, in particular, has been condemned by several fellow academics - they all display the volatility of university-media relations.

Ironically, the Mees and Gunn cases saw their universities sabotage their own reputations by taking heavy-handed actions against the academics that they encourage to speak widely, and for seeking to stifle public debate.

Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Kim Carr’s comments earlier this year that “researchers working in our universities and public research agencies must be - and must be allowed to be - active participants in [public] debates”, have deeper resonance in the light of such events.

But they’d better read their employer’s latest media and public comment policies first.

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This article was first published in The Australian Higher Education, June 18, 2008.



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About the Authors

Dr David Rowe, FAHA, FASSA is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Research, Western Sydney University; Honorary Professor, University of Bath; and Research Associate, SOAS University of London.

Kylie Brass is a research officer currently working on a project with Professor David Rowe examining strategies adopted by universities to manage public academic interventions. She completed her PhD, Going Public: Pedagogy Beyond the Academy, in the School of English, Art History, Film and Media at the University of Sydney in 2006. Her research interests include academic culture, public intellectualism, pedagogy, media policy, and contemporary American literary culture. She co-edited the book Anatomies of Violence (RIHSS: The University of Sydney, 2000).

Other articles by these Authors

All articles by David Rowe
All articles by Kylie Brass

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