Category: higher education

Duke’s opinion page spotlights faculty expertise

The op-ed page has been a staple of newspapers for decades, home to syndicated columnists and guest contributors who share a broad array of expertise with a paper’s readers. Many colleges and universities have been successful in placing articles by their own academic experts in the op-ed pages of prominent newspapers. Duke University is one such institution. Duke’s office of news and communications regularly distributes faculty-authored articles monthly to 20 major newspapers across the U.S. and Canada.

Recently, Duke unveiled an op-ed page of its own online. The opinion section of Duke Today shines the spotlight on the campus’s essayists and essays.

Screenshot of Duke Today's opinion page - today.duke.edu/opinion
Screenshot of Duke Today's opinion page - today.duke.edu/opinion

Keith Lawrence, director of media relations for Duke’s office of news and communications, shared more insight about this initiative via a recent email exchange.

Higher Ed Marketing: Why did Duke decide to create this site? Briefly, what is your vision for the opinion section of Duke Today?

Keith Lawrence: Duke has an active service that distributes faculty op-ed articles to newspapers across North America. Dozens of our professors have worked with us to publish their articles in major papers through this service and other channels. More recently, a growing number of our professors have embraced social media, such as Facebook, blogs and Twitter. We launched this new site to capture in one place all of the incredibly rich content they’re producing – not only to highlight them personally, but also to advance Duke’s mission of “knowledge in service to society.”

HEM: Who is your main audience for this site and what results are you hoping for from that audience?

Lawrence: The audience is varied. We’re hoping faculty, staff and students will visit the site regularly, and we’re also promoting it to alumni, parents and others. Duke’s Office of Federal Relations will share pertinent content with government officials. As with Duke’s popular site on iTunes U, we hope this new opinion site will also find an audience with people who don’t have a personal connection to Duke but are interested in ideas and intellectual content they can’t find elsewhere.

HEM: Duke has built a strong presence on the nation’s op-ed pages over the years, thanks to your op-ed service. As traditional newspapers struggle with declining readership, what is the future of your op-ed service?

Lawrence: We believe op-ed pages at major newspapers will continue to play a vital role for the foreseeable future. Millions of people who care about the news still read these pages, which exert significant influence on policy makers and opinion leaders. We have no intention of scaling back on that front.

Simultaneously, we’re pursuing new channels, such as through social media, to reach people, especially younger audiences. This opinion site pulls together our older and newer approaches, combining the articles faculty have written for traditional op-ed pages with the opinions they’ve begun writing for blogs and other new forums.

HEM: Is there anything else you’d like readers of this blog to know about the site?

Like the rest of your audience for “Higher Ed Marketing,” we’re always looking for better ways to help our university tell its story. We hope your readers will take a minute to check out our site and share with us any thoughts or suggestions they have about it. We know we can learn from them. I can be reached at keith.lawrence@duke.edu.

Marketing stars and stalwarts

rockstar_parkingI read with interest this Harvard Business Review blog post about an overlooked but very important segment of any organization’s work force. (Hat tip: BoingBoing.) The author, Thomas J. DeLong, who is a professor of management practice and organizational behavior, calls these employees the “stalwarts” of the work force. Not a very sexy name — certainly not on the level of “rock star” — but typical stalwart traits like reliability, steadiness and loyalty are rarely seen as sexy.

Yet, without Stalwarts (DeLong capitalizes the term), organizations would not function so smoothly. These are the “good, solid citizens of the organization” who “largely go unnoticed.”

“They are like the proverbial wheel that never squeaks — and, consequently, gets no grease,” DeLong writes. They also tend to be tremendously loyal, responsible employees who “care deeply about the organization’s values.” They “are intrinsically motivated by the service they can render for the good of the organization. … They feel that they have accomplished something if the company is running like a well-oiled machine.”

You probably work with a few stalwarts. Maybe you are one. In the higher ed marketing field — probably in all of marketing — I suspect the stalwarts don’t get much respect from management.

We tend to do a lot of care and feeding of the so-called stars (this is even more true on the academic side). Not so with the stalwarts. Again, as DeLong puts it, they never get greased because they aren’t complaining. They aren’t the high-maintenance superstars. They aren’t out there in social media trying to develop their personal brand. They’re doing the unglamorous work that keeps the organization humming along.

They’re writing the press releases about local events or student awards — the stories that have no chance of attracting any national or even regional media attention.

They’re creating the code that keeps the university website humming.

They’re managing your calendars, screening your calls, keeping the vendors at bay.

They’re responding to tweets and Facebook posts on behalf of your campus, and in so doing keeping the very vital conversations alive with important segments of your constituents. (Fellow higher ed blogger Tim Nekritz posted some very good thoughts about this recently.)

They’re the stalwarts. And as Professor DeLong has reminded me with his post, I need to reexamine how I think about these folks and their contributions to our department, our university and my own success as a manager. More importantly, I need to do a better job of expressing appreciation for their work.

Remember, not every rock band is made up of rock stars. Sure, you’ve heard of Elvis Costello. But where would he be without the Attractions? And how many Attractions can you name?

* * *

Image: Rock Star Parking, by Torley via Flickr.