Culture clash: corporate vs. academic PR

PR consultant Dick Jones discusses several of the differences between corporate and academic public relations in this article in the latest PIOnet newsletter. While more college and university campuses look outside the world of academe for PR expertise, those from the corporate side who make the shift to academic PR sometimes struggle with the culture shock.

As Jones explains:

Some fail to appreciate the difference in governance. In the corporate world, the hierarchies typically are simpler. The PR director may take marching orders only from his boss (the vice president) and her boss (the president). And there may be only one message: that Company Name is the undisputed leader in (fill in applicable adjective) technology.

A college or university, however, is more like a feudal kingdom. The president is still the PR director’s chief “client,” but other, additional constituents have real, and sometimes conflicting, PR needs. Continuing Education’s messages and needs differ from those of the College of Liberal Arts, for example.

Jones makes some terrific points in this article. It’s worth a read.

Maybe the world is not so flat, after all

In his best-selling book The World Is Flat, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has made considerable hay touting the idea that the United States is losing its competitive advantage in technological fields to India, China and other behemoths that are graduating manifold more engineers than the U.S. But a new study says that ain’t necessarily so.

This Christian Science Monitor story points to a Duke University study which claims: “Inconsistent reporting of problematic engineering graduation data has been used to fuel fears that America is losing its technological edge. A comparison of like-to-like data suggests that the US produces a highly significant number of engineers, computer scientists, and information technology specialists, and remains competitive in global markets.”

Furthermore:

 

Last year, the US awarded bachelor’s degrees to 72,893 engineering students, according to the American Society for Engineering Education. But using India’s more inclusive definition, the Duke study finds the US handed out 137,437 bachelor’s degrees last year, more than India’s 112,000. The US number is far more impressive in rela-tive terms, since India has more than three times as many people.

China’s numbers are more problematic because its government does not break them down. In its revised figures, the National Academies reduced the Chinese total from 600,000 to 500,000. The Duke study pegs the total at 644,106, as reported by the Chinese Ministry of Education. But the study also points out that, as with India, the Chinese total includes engineering graduates with so-called “short cycle degrees” that represent three years or less of college training.

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