A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of presenting for an Undergraduate Research Group at my university. When they initially asked me about presenting about visual presentations, I had to think back to the numerous presentations that I have been fortunate to facilitate all over America.
Then, I thought about the items that I wish I would have had on site when I saw the place where I needed to place my poster. So, I decided to make a “Poster Presentation Survival Kit”. This kit contains: masking tape, t-pins, white out, sharpie markers, and cuticle clippers (to serve as scissors for your poster (just in case)).
The presentation was well received and they asked for a copy. I was very impressed with this group and their questions focused on research and the presentation process. We also had a great conversation about presenting information that has not yet been published.
Here’s the presentation:
Here are some additional resources. Thanks UNC, UC Davis, and Bucknell!
Enjoy! Please let me know if you have any questions.
Professor Walter Greason is back with a new in-depth interview
We’re talking about racism in education. This conversation dives into the history of racism in New Jersey. Topics that come up include the January 6th insurrection, the Supreme Court, and how things are affected today.
Walter D. Greason, PhD is Professor and Chair of the History Department at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is author of 6 books including Industrial Segregation (2018) and Cities Imagined: The African Diaspora in Media and History (2018). His digital humanities projects, The Wakanda Syllabus and The Racial Violence Syllabus reached millions of people, and was translated into 7 languages.
P.S. Black Panther fans, this interview has some exciting tidbits about the upcoming Wakanda Forever movie! Don’t miss it.
Jennifer: Hi, everyone. This is Jennifer Van Alstyne on The Social Academic.
Today, I’m talking with Dr. Walter Greason, who has joined us before. He’s back to talk about racism and education in New Jersey. Professor Greason, would you please introduce yourself?
Walter: Thank you so much, Jennifer. It’s an honor to be here.
Again, Walter Greason. I am a former Dean, Department Chair, 1st African American serving those roles at Monmouth University in New Jersey where we met. And so this is just a tremendous joy for me. [Jennifer graduated from Monmouth U with a BA in English in 2013.]
I’m currently a full Professor and Chair of the History Department at Macalester College in Minnesota. Which is kind of like being in charge of the Honor School [at Monmouth], but the entire campus is the honor school. So it’s been really amazing so far.
Jennifer: Oh, I love that.
It’s a reflection of the change in national politics
Jennifer: Now, today you reached out because you specifically wanted to talk about racism in education in New Jersey. And I know you’re in a new place right now, but this is a topic that you spent your career researching. That you’ve written about in Suburban Erasure: How the Suburbs Ended the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey (2012).
I’m curious, why is this topic so important to you?
Walter: Right now it’s a reflection of the change in the national politics. That New Jersey is extraordinary place. A brilliant governor, outstanding state legislature, many of my friends currently doing amazing work to make New Jersey an even better place to live.
However in parts and pockets of the state, there are people who are extraordinarily dangerous. And I’ve seen reports in multiple news outlets about the funders in New Jersey who made things like the January 6th insurrection possible. Who throughout the last five or six years have done everything they could to sabotage the society from being an inclusive and free place.
And so now after this January 6th hearings, people are becoming more aware that there is a dangerous white nationalist threat in the United States.
But I still find that folks are underestimating it. And they’re missing the danger, particularly within our school systems.
Jennifer: Ooh. Okay. So people are already missing some of the danger that is out there and that’s because they’re not aware of it, it sounds like.
So, why is this conversation going to help them? Right? Most of the people who are listening to this are going to be professors, people who are doing research. People who are in the process of deciding what their research subject is if they’re in graduate school.
So what kind of message can we share with them that will help them understand why this is important to them?
Walter: So for folks who are going into Higher Education or really Education at any phase of their career, to understand the way the institutions operate. To understand the ways that bias still prevails in hiring, promotion, retention decisions. This is tremendously significant.
And that piece of the institutional, the governance of the school systems, of our institutions of Higher Ed. The barrier that I’ve seen most commonly, not just at Monmouth, but at many institutions is that there are committed leaders at the top of the institution. There are committed leaders at the grassroots, at the teacher’s levels, where they’re doing face to face work with students and families.
But often in the intermediate tiers: assistant principals, principals, assistant and associate superintendents, people who operationalize a lot of strategic vision…There’s enormous hostility against commitments to equity. And so it’s this middle level of administrative leadership that slows down and derails so much of the work. And frankly, underwrites and expands the ways that people can come and attack school boards.
Or, the ways that they can go out on social media and build white nationalist networks where they’re attacking parents, where they’re attacking families, where they’re attacking teachers who are attempting to make schools more equitable for everyone.
And so that’s the danger I live with every day. That’s the danger I see hour-by-hour creeping in multiple contexts. And, again, not even just in New Jersey, I mean, places like Ohio. I was just down in Alabama. There are so many places where the organized institutional commitment to injustice is winning.
And until we actually take stands together as faculty and really organize just as rigorously, we will lose these battles to try and make better school systems, better institutions for young people and for families everywhere.
Can you tell me more about the history of racism in New Jersey?
Walter: Absolutely. And, I mean, this is something that has a lot of data behind it [laugh]. But New Jersey history as a field really tended to focus on either the American Revolution or the Civil War, or to a lesser extent, World War II. There is very little attention to the social history of New Jersey. And so I’m very proud that the work I’ve done for the last 15, 20 years has changed that.
There’s a lot of attention now to history of immigrants, histories of black people, histories of lesbian, gay, transgender populations. That the openness to learn about different perspectives in our past has really grown. So that’s one of the pieces of my career I’m most proud of.
And you mentioned something that at Monmouth University there’s so many good things that I was lucky to be a part of. But the founding of the Social Justice Academy over the last two years…writing the proposal, winning the grant, getting the funding to be able to bring people like Nikole Hannah-Jones, hiring Nicole Pulliam as the Program Director for the Academy. These are things that are at the absolute top shelf of my life. I’m so proud of everything that goes on with the Academy.
That is pointing to the kinds of barriers that continue to exist.
And I think #1, people don’t understand how segregation persisted in the North after the Civil War. That they tend to even see slavery as a Southern phenomenon. They see Jim Crow segregation as a Southern phenomenon. And that’s not the case at all.
That segregation dominated the North through the 1800s while slavery was thriving. And it ultimately became the template by which the South said, ‘Oh, we can do what the North does and just keep everyone separate from each other.’ And so that in entrenched segregation, particularly with the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896.
And even when you saw Brown challenge that and say, no, “with all deliberate speed,” we must desegregate [Brown v. Board of Education].
The movement was called [Massive Resistance], basically a white nationalist movement led by the White Citizens’ Council to resist nonviolently and politically any attempt to integrate schools or public institutions. And so this effort goes on for 60 Years. Like you go into the Obama administration and there are still people fighting to keep segregation and expand segregation.
It reshapes the Supreme Court.
It basically makes it possible in places like New Jersey that the worst feature that could be possible: all of the organizations that were dedicated to civil rights, and integration, and equal opportunity were dismantled after Brown [v. Board of Education].
So places that we look at old ironsides is the Bordentown Manual Training Institute, was serving African American and immigrant communities to get people trained to succeed in a modern economy–We closed it in 1956 and said, ‘No, this is no longer going to be a part of what we do in our state.’
We fired thousands of black and immigrant professionals and said, “No, they will have to learn to comply within white institutions that had created all the problems to begin with.’
So when we talk about desegregation and integration, we have a really poor grasp of how we dismantle the institutions that made the chance for integration possible.
And then we preserved all the institutions that had maintained segregation.
And then we’re surprised 50, 60 years later that so little has changed. It’s that we didn’t embrace the kinds of organizations and institutions that would have led to more equity and more inclusion.
And that meant firing lots of really qualified even overqualified people within the educational system, especially, that could have made a much stronger society overall.
Jennifer: Wow. That is very new to me. All of this information is something I may have heard you talk about before, but hearing it all together…hearing it all at once makes me see how important this was. And how lacking my own education in history in America was.
And so we had these parallel tracks within the state where municipalities essentially partnered with the real estate industry to decide where there would be high quality education. And where there would be an education that really did not prepare students to be competitive for college and for future careers.
And so that track, when that report comes out, it shocks everyone. But for anyone who had studied the way that these institutions evolved over the previous 40 years, the only inevitable outcome was that you were gonna have disparate educational gaps
Jennifer: Right.
Walter: And as a result, lifelong employment gaps, lifelong healthcare gaps, lifelong wealth gaps, and we’re not providing fair and equal opportunity to achieve and succeed in life to people of different backgrounds based on their race.
And then, when it’s not based on their race, it’s based on their zip code. Which is even more pernicious because we allow that within the market system to say that some people should get less opportunities than others based on their income, based on their education. But it’s all deeply tied to these structures about race and ethnicity.
Jennifer: Tell me more about that in terms of zip code, and real estate, and education. That seems much more closely tied together than people often expect. How does real estate and where people live affect education?
Walter: So a state like New Jersey, and many Northern and Midwestern states, education is tied to human municipality.
This is very different than places in the far West or in the South where it’s often state funded. Here in Minnesota, all counties received the same funding for education. And so, there’s remarkably high quality. And there’s still disparities, but nowhere near as extreme as what we see in a place like New Jersey, or Connecticut, or Delaware, or Virginia. These places really struggle trying to actually serve the people who have the greatest need.
And there’s a reward structure for that. There are businesses that make more money because they target very affluent particular towns, or sections of counties.
Yeah, just in Monmouth [County], around where we met, you can look at Rumson, and Deal, and Fairhaven and you see these extraordinary school systems. How do you even say a place like Middletown, doing really well
But if you go down the street to Asbury Park, if you go into parts of Red Bank, if you certainly go into the Freehold Regional System and look at what happens to Freehold borough…There are just places where people turn against majority Black and Latino populations and are angry when they get quality opportunities.
And so my students did a lot of research on this, going back into the early 2000s, where they were interviewing folks who were going out to find homes, to find apartments and talking to real estate professionals. And they’re steering folks to different communities based on their appearance. And this is a common practice.
The National Association of Realtors had to apologize just two or three years ago for ongoing systemic discriminatory practices.
And so opening the door for people to understand–And thankfully I am working with Governor Murphy on this problem–how do we actually commit to open up doors of opportunity for all people and then break down the systems of financial incentives for skilled professionals to kind of maintain segregation and inequality. Those are the things that I’m looking forward to the 2nd half of this year and into next year. We have the ability to open the door for everyone to have a fair chance to find success in economic stability.
Google ‘Massive resistance’ and ways to take action
Jennifer: So what can people do if this is all of a sudden an issue that they’re hearing about learning about and wanting to learn more about…And to take action…
What’s something that they can do in their local communities? Let’s say maybe a teacher in New Jersey.
Walter: So first and foremost, I would say Google the term Massive Resistance. This is the phrase that I was trying to put my finger on a few minutes ago. But this is where the state of Virginia decided after the Brown decision is they were gonna commit every resource to making sure that desegregation didn’t happen.
And we tend to look at it and be like, oh, they lost in court. And eventually they decided to comply. Absolutely not. That through the early 1980s into the mid 1990s, town-by-town, county-by-county, state-by-state, people continued to push back. To deny equal opportunity to all people.
And ultimately they win that fight. By the time we get to 2014 and you’re seeing the reversal of the Voting Rights Act. And you’re seeing the increasing waves over the last decade of abandoning the idea of equal justice for all people…That’s exactly what we’re seeing play out in the 2016, the 2020 election, now in the 22 congressional election.
It’s what sparked the riot in on January 6th was this idea that this is a white Christian nation and that any anyone that doesn’t fit that parameter, especially those who challenge patriarchy, and want to kind of guarantee women’s equal rights, that they are equal citizens, and deserve something like abortion protections and equal healthcare access.
That’s the battle where some people’s like, ‘No, we are going to dictate that that’s not going to happen. And then we’re gonna cut off the legal basis for it.”
And Clarence Thomas’s recent decision concurrence, he spells out all the rights that he wants the Supreme Court to repeal. And it’s largely all of these principles that are reinforced by the January 6th insurrection. Not surprisingly, his wife is having to testify before the January 6th committee because of her organizing in funding for those events.
But no one on the opposite side of these issues, no one pressing for civil rights, and women’s rights, and immigrant’s rights, for recognition of equal treatment of the LGBTQ community…there is not the same level of organization. Things are fractured. People undercut each other. People feel defensive about giving up space so that they can give voice to other people who share their same agenda.
Until folks who are pressing for equal justice come together and get on the same page, these issues will never gain traction. You’ll never be able to defend the rights of all people and guarantee equity for every person to find their American dream.
Jennifer: You talked about the importance of organizing before. And I think you just talked about it again, the importance of coming together when you have similar interests.
Now, what can that look like? What kind of organizational structure is that? How can people connect with each other? Where can people go to find that community?
Walter: So, there’s extraordinary model. I’m fortunate because I do the work, I know a few.
In Princeton, [New Jersey] there is an organization called Not In Our Town that meets every week and they discuss books. They discuss movies. They listen to music together. They share great food and they actually talk about how do they stand up for justice in that community? And Princeton is an elite place. That Route 1 corridor between New Brunswick and Princeton, that is a place where there is a ton of resources. And they have a long history of cutting people out and not getting access to them.
We need something like that along the Route 36 corridor [laughs]. You know, going out from Middletown down to Point Pleasant, like that’s another area where there’s not that same type of engagement.
I know there are folks who are doing work in the arts community in Belmar. There is an Asbury Park book collective that actually does a lot of great work across the state.
I mean, up in Newark, there’s just long tradition of battling against discrimination. That’s very important. We need more of that in Camden. We need more of that in Atlantic city.
But most of all, I’ve been really pleased to see in places like Union County and Morristown, places that are really affluent, more and more people trying to raise these questions and engage these topics.
And it’s not just about doing just a book club, or doing just a cooking society, cooking circle. You can do all of these good things, but raise the difficult issues. And look at the policies.
Attend the school board meetings, not to shout at the people who serve, but to talk with them about the solutions that they may not be aware of.
Work that I was just doing in Freehold was about participatory budgeting as a model that comes out of Brazil, where local people get to choose the budget priorities on an annual basis. They don’t just leave it to the town council to decide how tax money is spent.
Jennifer: Wow.
Walter: And so there are all number of ways. You know, I work on things like universal basic income here in Saint Paul, [Minnesota] where folks who are really struggling, who are facing disabilities, or are out of work can get additional supplemental income just so they don’t fall behind and get further into debt.
Big ones are ideas that go into like a job guarantee at the state or the federal level so that everybody who can work can find the work they want and go out there. We desperately need this right now.
There’s a lot of fights I have with central bankers about inflationary pressures. And should we go into recession? What will that do to the country in the next 6 to 10 months?
So doing things differently than we’ve done them in the last 40 to 50 years is uniform in my commitment. I’m big on the side of economics and teaching folks how to read business news and actually engage in new business creation.
For young people, especially for folks who are 15 to 25, folks following the example of what you’re doing with this show. There is so much to do, and we need people to do it differently than was done in the past.
Those are the kinds of things, if anyone’s interested, they can hit my website where I give out ideas every day in business models and funding so that folks can get underway.
How Walter responds to negative reactions to his tweets on Twitter
Jennifer: Now Walter, you have almost 33,000 Twitter followers [@WalterDGreason]. That’s a lot of people who are potentially listening when you tweet about racism in education.
What kinds of responses do you typically get to your tweets?
Walter: Wow. So it’s varied a lot.
Jennifer: Yeah!
Walter: So that account has been up now for 10 years. I can’t believe that account is 10 years old now. Early on, you know, there’s just not a lot of acceptance of academic content on social media.
And so that’s another area where I feel tremendously proud that the kinds of models of providing quality graphics to advertise academic content. To emphasize doing things like podcasts and online shows…That these things were just not part of the social media community 2012, 2013, 2014.
Jennifer: Right.
Walter: And then we started to gain traction. Like we started to really change things. And so for me, it was the Racial Violence Syllabus in 2017.
I think I was already in the tens of thousands of followers. But since then, the engagement is just off the chart.
And so by 2017, now you saw a turning point. You know, my profession as a historian embraced social media really aggressively and thousands of well known scholars joined social media and began to promote their books, began to talk about speaking tours.
But Ibram X. Kendi’s (@DrIbram) up there too in How to Be an Antiracist (2019).
These are all folks that kind of were little pups [laughs] and so I had them come up and believe in the vision. And come on board, and it’s been extraordinary to see the success across so many different platforms. And the revolution in publishing in media that came from it.
So yeah, it’s nice. You know, 30,000 followers for an academic is no joke.
Everywhere I’ve taught, whether it is Monmouth, or Drexel, any of these places, Macalester. You know, there’s just an impact where I’m guaranteed to reach 40 to 70 million people with viral impact. And again, for academic content, that’s kind of unheard of.
Most academics in my field, you know, there’s, they’re satisfied if they get 20-25 people to know anything about what they’re talking about.
Jennifer: Right.
Walter: And so I also have to mention the Wakanda stuff was tremendous. And so being able to bring a spotlight to other colleagues. And then to expand the kinds of audiences who engage in these discussions.
You know, there’s a lot of folks who like to attack the idea of being woke. But being aware and having a good vocabulary to communicate effectively about difficult topics. That’s something everybody should have. And then really should not avoid acquiring those skills.
I don’t care if you call it woke, or informed, or discerning. There’s any number of phrases and adjectives we can use to describe it. But the skill set to communicate clearly and find new solutions together, that’s essential. That’s the core of what freedom is. And so, you know, I’m just very proud that we can turn social media into a platform that does that. And not just a platform for disinformation and manipulation for people to just fuel hate and anger.
Jennifer: Now, when it comes to the tweets that you have about your research, there are always going to be people who hate. Or, who very much dislike what you have to say.
When you get those negative reactions, what’s that like for you?
Walter: So I came up in the internet before there were like pictures [laughs]. And so, you know, I was building webpages, and joining list serves, and being on discussion boards when it was so much worse.
[Laughs.] It was so much worse.
I don’t even know if people use this phrase anymore, but there were these things called flame wars where, you know, you would just get into it and try to burn up whoever was disagreeing with you. And shame, them cow them, dox them into submission and drive them from the platform.
I remember being in a lot of those fights in the mid to late 90s and learning that it’s a waste of time going after and trying to destroy people who disagree with you.
And so I typically have a rule, you know, when someone says something snarky, off color, or aggressive…I’ll indulge it, you know, for a message or two. But inevitably I turn to it as an educator and say, well, you clearly haven’t seen X, Y, and Z. Here are some places to continue to kind of learn about what you’re asking about. And then if you take a look at these things, we can kind of continue the discussion.
But I do find, I get bombarded with bot accounts. And that was something I wasn’t prepared for when it really started to happen a lot. And so these are bot accounts that have 0 to 200 followers that are also all bot accounts. And they’re automated. And they repeat their content. And they just spam the communication channel hoping to waste your time and energy. And eventually I just came to the places once I’m able to determine that it’s a bot account. If it’s a network of bots. I just block them and keep moving [laughs].
Cause there are too many people who are sincere and honest about trying to participate in discourse and, and have good conversations that deserve my time.
Not, not these [bot accounts]. And it’s not just from one country or another it’s there are any number of bad actors out there that have learned how to build bots that are designed to disrupt really productive work.
Jennifer: Okay. So that’s really interesting. You have experienced a lot of flame wars, is that what you called it?
Walter: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Jennifer: So you’ve experienced a lot more direct and kind of like ongoing conversations about that in the past. So you don’t really engage in those conversations now.
But you do respond, it sounds like, if someone does leave a comment or a question. You don’t just ignore it if it’s a negative comment or question.
Walter: No, if it’s an actual person. Yeah. If its an actual person, and one just disagrees, I want there to be a constructive way that they can move forward.
I do put a limit on it. That’s like it can go back and forth three or four times, but you’re not gonna take me away from doing the work that brought me to this place.
Jennifer: Right. Oh, well, thank you for sharing that with me.
A lot of the professors that I work with, you know, they’re really anxious about posting anything at all. They’re scared that someone will report them to their university, or that they’ll get death threats, or that they’ll get doxed and actually have cops or SWAT come into their home.
Because of that fear, it really stops them from speaking out. But you’ve been speaking out and you’ve been talking on Twitter for a long time. And it sounds like even though you do get negative comments, you do respond to those and you do engage in those conversations because occasionally they can be helpful or learning experiences. Is that right?
Walter: Oh, yes. Oh yes, no. It’s funny. I just saw a cartoonist, very conservative cartoonist, that I met years ago on Facebook. And he’s become radicalized. He says, and then writes, and draws a lot of really poisonous kinds of stuff.
Jennifer: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Walter: But I still stay in touch. I still tell him, you know, like try to moderate this. You’re not accomplishing the thing that you might think you are.
But ultimately, I find with these folks, particularly in that kind of, you know, Trump MAGA circle is, they’re in a lot of pain. They’re very deeply hurt and sad. And they try to then inflict that sadness and injury on other people around them.
And when I can mostly face-to-face honest, honestly, kind of giving them a way to look at their own humanity–could be through their family members, it could be through friends of theirs–but it gets them to kind of be more introspective.
And that slows down the vitriol. I’m not gonna say it wipes it away or completely reverses the issues that they raise. But shutting them down and casting ’em aside, that’s not always the best way.
There are folks, yeah, you can’t. They are dangerous. And then you need to report them to the police and the FBI. And protect yourself from them.
But it’s even with that mob on January 6th that, you know, you had several hundred out of 10,000 that were really dangerous that needed to be arrested, needed to be convicted, needed to be sent to jail for some time. But there were a lot of folks who were there that looked at what was going on, didn’t like what they saw and backed away and had to kind of reevaluate like, ‘How did this happen?’
And those are the folks that will confront me. And they’re doing it in a way where they’re trying to kind of reconcile, ‘Okay. How do I get back into a conversation that is civil? I don’t want to be a part of something that’s about attacking police and destroying government buildings.’
It’s also hard from the left. There are a lot of folks on the left who feel like I’m way too conservative. That I’m not really ready to burn everything down to make freedom happen for people.
And so, you know, like trying to bring people together in a broad middle where they can see a way to make progress together. That’s a really tough position. That’s a time where lots of folks don’t want to be in the middle because you can get attacked from both sides. But again, I’ve been doing it for 30, 40 years now.
I’m committed to Dr. King’s vision, but I am open to Malcolm X’s methods. [Laughs.]
I pull in a lot of different tools to go after what I think will make all of us better people tomorrow.
Collaboration across sectors helps bridge connections
Jennifer: Now you’ve collaborated with people in kind of every sector in government, in local government, in the media. You collaborated with people on what Wakanda, and all of these things.
What do you get out of collaborating with so many different people? Not just people in Higher Education.
Walter: Yeah. I’ve had a long time to think about that and coming to Macalester helped me get a little bit more perspective on that experience.
I’m not just historian. I’ve PhD in history. I’ve studied history for decades. But I also have a lot of literary analysis skills. I have a strong background as a philosopher. I’ve worked in Africana studies, worked in diplomacy, in peace and justice work. Having that kind of multidisciplinary background working–working in a prosecutor’s office as a high school student. Even growing up on a farm and being a carpenter as like my first real job. Those things challenge me to bridge connections.
And I say almost on a daily basis now, I hear from people who think whatever their approach is the only approach, and it’s the best answer. And I never believe that any of the tools that I bring to the table are the only way, or the best way. I always come in with what I hope is great humility to learn from people what tools they have. And then try to see and understand from their perspective how we can move forward while also providing them with resources that maybe they had never encountered before.
And so I used to do a freshman seminar at Monmouth University on ‘why do we have so many different departments at the college?’ And you know, you have 70 majors at a regional university, you know, to serve everybody and help them choose the thing that they feel like they can be good at and succeed in. But that’s 70 different sets of solutions to any kind of social problems that we’re trying to solve out in the real world. And that’s just the big umbrella. Like you break each of those departments, they have 15 or 20 different methodologies within each department. So you’ve got 1,500 different ways of going after solutions at a school like Monmouth.
Imagine when you go to Rutgers, and that system. And how much they’re offering on a daily basis about different ways to go about building a better world. And then you go to Penn State or Michigan and, you know, it’s ridiculous, the amount of solutions we have.
And we need to have more respect and deference for each other so that we find good answers together.
That you know, we’re not just assuming our way is the only way to go about it.
Jennifer: Wow. Oh, I have just loved this conversation. And I’m so glad that you came back to talk with me again. For anyone who’s listening, be sure to check out that first featured interview with Walter. We talk more about his tweets going viral, the Wakanda Syllabus, all sorts of things that you don’t wanna miss.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever comes out November 11, 2022
Jennifer: Now, Walter, the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever trailer just came out yesterday, I believe. And I remember we talked about Black Panther and your Wakanda Syllabus during our last interview. Are you excited for the new movie?
Walter: Oh, of course. Of course. You know, so I spent a long time working on just the idea that a movie could possibly be made. So it’s a dream. I was teaching Black Panther comics in my classes back in 2002, 2003. Working on drafts of content for the movie.
When I saw the ancestral plane in the first film, I literally cried in the theater. Like it is still one of the great moments of my life to see that something that was so important to me made it onto a Hollywood screen.
And now I’m seeing this sequel and knowing, you know, I knew before the movie came out, there would be a sequel. I was like, this is gonna be too intense. People are gonna wanna see more.
Jennifer: Yes.
Walter: But it’s not just the sequel of the Black Panther. It’s so many other shows. It’s the HBO Lovecraft Country. It’s the way that the Westworld series has evolved. There’s so much good Afrofuturistic content that is out and available now. And so much more to come that’s still in production.
I just saw the Jordan Peel movie, [Nope] just this past weekend. These are things that just couldn’t exist when I was younger, that I was so happy to see emerge.
But yeah, the trailer to come out at San Diego ComicCon. And to see the audience, they had an African dance performance on stage to introduce the section of the program where they brought it out.
Yeah, the change in the sequel because of Chadwick Boseman’s passing is that it’s titled Black Panther, but the more prominent subtitle is Wakanda Forever.
And I said this in the first movie, it’s like, you come for the Black Panther, but you’re gonna stay for the Dora Milaje. Like this entire cast of people who just transformed the way we tell stories. And we imagine what a superhero narrative is about. And there’s so much more layered into the way this sequel’s gonna be done.
So a character named Namor, who was one of Marvel’s earliest characters has been kind of redesigned as a Chicano superhero using Incan and Mayan kinds of expressions in the way it’s costume is designed and the society that he represents.
And I don’t wanna give away too much in the movie, but this movie is really about sadness and loss. And so it’s a way to kind of process the grief of the loyalty of Chadwick Boseman, but it’s gonna be much larger than that.
There’s a devastation to the way that this conflict plays out that is gonna set up a 3rd movie. And the 3rd movie is then gonna lead into the final two Avengers movies over the next 3 years and it’ll make the Thanos conflict, the infinity stone saga, look very, very small in comparison.
And so if anybody has seen the Loki series on Disney+, or the What If series. Those two things are tremendously important.
And I know there’s a lot of folks who are very disappointed that the T’Challa character was not recast for this movie to kind of bring in more audience and honor Bozeman by just not letting the character disappear.
I do think there’s gonna be a surprise at the end of this sequel about the nature of T’Challa character. And so knowing the way the story works, knowing the way the writers work, and then the designers…I definitely think it’s gonna be a different vibe completely from the 1st movie. But it will be something that will be unforgettable. And people will be talking about it for the next 2 years.
Jennifer: Oh, that’s great. Wow. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever comes out November 11, 2022. I’m really excited for it.
And I’m also gonna include the link to that trailer below.
Walter: Yes, please.
Jennifer: Because you should definitely check it out.
Jennifer: Walter, thank you so much for joining me for this interview. Is there anything you’d like to add before we wrap up?
Walter: Oh, this is tremendous. Your work is spectacular. You don’t know. I am so happy to see it every day.
I would say to you specifically tag me every time you have something [Laughter]. So I make sure I am letting everybody know about it.
Your work is so good.
Jennifer: Well, thank you so much for that!
And just on the topic of grief and loss, I do wanna let everyone listening know that my last interview with Dr. Chinasa Elue was focused on grief and loss, especially in these last couple of years during the pandemic. So I want to encourage you to check that out if it’s something that you’ve been experiencing. Your students I’m sure have been experiencing this as well.
Alright, thank you, Walter! I really appreciate it.
Walter: Jennifer, you’re the best. Thank you again.
Dr. Walter Greason is the leading academic expert on Black and Indigenous historic preservation as well as Afrofuturism and the Black Speculative Arts Movement. He is a professor of history and chairs the Department of History at Macalester College, one of the best liberal arts colleges in the world.
Throughout the past few years we have definitely been part of a Zoom and Microsoft Team centric world. As we meet with teams and individuals, we have to account for the life that is happening on the other side of the screen. Through Zoom we have a unique opportunity to gain a glimpse into another person’s life to which we would normally not have access.
This means that we have a moral and ethnical responsibility as peers and as leaders to genuinely care about the people to which we are communicate with on Zoom. Here’s a great resource from the Collective Impact Forum (http://www.collectiveimpactforum.org).
The Team Color Check-In Tool is a communication tool to help people in virtual and face-to-face conversations have a check-in. The colors range from:
Red
Orange
Yellow
Green
Blue
Gray
If you are wondering how to apply this for your teams or classrooms, I would definitely recommend the following:
#1 – Utilize it when you meet with individuals one-on-one (BEFORE) the meeting.
#2 – Utilize it in Zoom via an anonymous poll to gauge how their audience is feeling BEFORE the meeting and providing resources at the end of the meeting (or in a follow-up email).
#3 – Send the check-in tool to your team/organization at the beginning of the week and provide workshops and support throughout the week for the team.
Respond Below – How would you use the resource? Do you think teams would benefit from this resource? How would you modify it?
Thanks for reading!
Sincerely, Dr. Jennifer T. Edwards Professor of Communication
Executive Director of the Texas Social Media Research Institute & Rural Communication Institute
July 5, 2022 by Dr. Candace Goodwin – Although every industry has undergone significant changes over the past several years, higher education has been impacted more profoundly. When the pandemic hit, traditional colleges and universities were abruptly forced to adapt their mindset and move toward thinking differently, scrambling to transform standard brick-and-mortar programs into online or hybrid delivery modalities. Colleges and universities that already had successful online programs could pivot quickly and sustain student enrollment. Universities unable to make these changes rapidly faced many challenges.
High education leadership teams were confronted with workforce challenges they had not faced before. The changes in the economy, staffing shortages, healthcare concerns, loss of international students, diversity, equity, and inclusion were all simultaneously impacting higher education. College leadership focused on enrollment as their highest priority and lost sight of how the pandemic influenced staff and shaped their expectations and preferences. Employees were seeking out empathy, remote work, and flexible work hours and wanted to feel more connected than ever.
As the environment of higher education leadership becomes more complicated by outside events and shifting employee motivations, the benefits of executive coaching only increase. High- quality executive coaching balances organizational priorities like enrollment with the leadership development and insight required to move those priorities forward. Executive coaching is an essential problem-solving tool for higher education executives seeking support balancing leadership challenges and understanding the higher education landscape from both the 30,000 ft elevation and the 100 ft elevation.
1. Executive coaching activates and animates wisdom.
Many executives and aspiring higher education leaders lean most heavily on their level of intelligence. Clayton (1982) defined intelligence as the ability to think logically, conceptualize, and abstract from reality. Intelligence focuses on how to do. It helps leaders accomplish and achieve.
By contrast, Clayton defines wisdom as the ability to grasp human nature, which is paradoxical, contradictory, and subject to continual change. Wisdom provokes a person to consider the consequences of their actions on themselves and the effects on others.
Wisdom helps people decide whether to pursue a course of action. Higher education executives work in concert with many others. It is incumbent on all higher education leaders to work with their wisdom.
The difference between intelligence and wisdom can be described as knowing what vs. knowing how. According to Stenberg (2005), knowing how adds creativity and experience to our knowledge. While an executive has proven intelligence, the wisdom gained by learning from various experiences provides multiple points of view at their disposal to solve problems creatively.
It is no longer sufficient to only have intelligence and management skills to make high- level and far-reaching leadership decisions. Wisdom is a crucial component of good leadership. Staudinger, Lopez, and Baltes (1997) found that individuals who discussed life problems with another person and reflected on the conversation before responding out-performed others. Executive coaching can make the difference in that kind of wisdom and more.
An executive coach for higher education helps college and university executives activate and animate their wisdom. Executive coaches guide leaders to go beyond reporting metrics and learn ways to increase their wisdom through natural reciprocity, investing in their team, and developing new leadership traits. The result is a higher education leader able to make more creative and cultured decisions that are the best for university and college leadership, staff, and students.
2. Executive coaching galvanizes conscious and intentional conversations.
There are two conversations we have every day. One is with other people—and one is in our heads. Having conversations with other people can feel fraught in this increasingly complicated world. Higher education executives need to ensure their conversations are conscious and intentional. Executive coaching can help!
Conscious conversations encourage connection and overcoming differences. The basis is hearing and understanding instead of judging as right or wrong. Participants in a conversation of this nature must be fully present, listen fully and respectfully, keep an open mind, and be patient. It is important to understand that conversations of this kind are a skill to be learned and built upon. There is always room to improve communication as a leader.
Intentional conversations are purposeful and planned. Being intentional means being strategic in how to communicate, what to communicate, and to whom. Intentional conversations can make staff members feel valued and ensure that conversations are productive.
With an executive coach, higher education executives can build confidence in their ability to have conscious and intentional conversations.
3. Executive coaching stimulates creativity.
With the landscape for higher education rapidly changing, a successful higher education executive needs to move beyond the same old, same old. It is time for creativity in all aspects of leadership. Nothing helps creativity like the collaboration that comes from partnering with an executive coach.
Most executives could benefit from switching things up and taking their leadership off auto pilot. A significant outcome could be developing a flexible mindset and considering new ways to get things done. A lack of creativity could result in missing opportunities for innovation and growth. Working with an executive coach helps open the door to explore innovative ideas and getting excited by new, creative possibilities.
4.Executive coaching creates “emotional safety.”
Having emotional safety means feeling secure enough to be your most authentic self, and isn’t that the ideal for all employee-leader scenarios? Who wouldn’t want to bring their real selves to work? Well, that takes work. Emotional safety is an important aspect of having a satisfying connection. Connection is increasingly vital to today’s workforce. It is worth the investment.
Higher education executive coaching cultivates emotional safety so executives can get the most out of their experience. Our brains constantly detect whether a situation is safe or dangerous. When people experience safety, they are better listeners, able to collaborate more, innovative, creative, and able to connect with others. Emotional safety has positive effects that flow to others.
Emotional safety encourages freedom of expression and increased compassion. A skilled executive coach can help guide you to understanding and increasing emotional safety.
Executives and leaders in higher education benefit from the investment in high-quality executive coaching. Coaching is transformative—helping leaders leverage their best selves. An executive coach empowers creativity, impact, connection, and influence. Great leaders have great coaches—everyone can use that kind of support! Especially leaders working in higher education.
Levine, Arthur and Pelt, S. “The Future of Higher Education is Occurring at the Margins.” Inside Higher Education, 4, Oct. 2021, https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2021/10/04/higher-education- should-prepare-five-new-realities-opinion
Staudinger, U.M., Lopez, D. F., and Baltes, P. B. (1997). The psychometric location of wisdom-related performance: Intelligence, personality and more. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23(11). 1200-1214,
Sternberg, R. J. (2005). WICS: A model of leadership. The Psychologist- Manager Journal, 8(1), 20-43.
Sternberg, R. J. (2005a). WICS: A model of leadership. The Psychologist-Manager Journal, 8(1), 20–43
Dr. Candace Goodwin a member of the Edu Alliance Group Advisory Council is a culture strategist and the CEO of Organizational Leadership Partners, an organization that helps leaders achieve exceptional results through the alignment of organizational priorities and culture. Candace’s expertise in culture, employee engagement, emotional intelligence, and leadership development provides guidance to leaders who desire to create an environment where people can do their best work.
Dr. Goodwin has a Doctorate in Organizational Leadership, an MBA in Human Resources, and a Bachelor’s degree in Finance.
Edu Alliance Group, Inc. (EAG) is an education consulting firm located in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, and Bloomington, Indiana, USA. We assist higher education institutions worldwide on a variety of mission-critical projects. Our consultants have accomplished university/college leaders who share the benefit of their experience to diagnose and solve challenges.
EAG has provided consulting and successful solutions for higher education institutions in Australia, Egypt, Georgia, India, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Nigeria, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, and the United States.
Edu Alliance offers higher education institutions consulting services worldwide. If you like to know more about how Edu Alliance can best serve you, please contact Dean Hoke at [email protected]
I love gardening. Whether my gardening takes place in a container, in an urban area, or in a rural area, I am all about it! This year, my daughter decided that she wanted to become a mini-gardener as well.
As a result, we are growing…tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, watermelon, and lettuce. I teach her to watch the prices as they continue to increase. My daughter and I talk about innovative ways to counteract the increasing prices. Our strategy is gardening!
I am part of a wealth of gardening groups. My favorites are “Black Girls Garden” and Black girl container gardening groups on Facebook. These groups give me inspiration and ideas to garden for my family and for the community. One thing that I like the most is the emphasis on sharing seeds and supporting one another. I also work with our community garden group as well.
This summer, I have been very fortunate to learn even more gardening skills from the local Agrilife Extension agent in Panola County, Clarissa Moon. She is an excellent teacher and she provides so much educational outreach for the community.
Another resource that I absolutely love is the USDA, which has great resources for gardening as well. I subscribe to their blog, “Farmers.gov Blog” and it has some incredible tips for gardening. It also features several other sections on their website that feature articles. These categories are:
Of course, my favorite is Farm Life! I love the “Friday’s on the Farm” series.
Check them out! What is your favorite part?
Thanks for visiting! Sincerely, Dr. Jennifer T. Edwards Professor of Communication
Executive Director of the Texas Social Media Research Institute & Rural Communication Institute
Over the past few months, our Rural Communication Institute (RCI) team (Dr. Jennifer T. Edwards, Dr. Subi Gandhi, and Dr. LaShondra Manning) has been tirelessly providing education and outreach for the rural areas of East Texas. This outreach has been both challenging and rewarding since the pediatric vaccine was approved by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS).
Educating parents about the benefits of the COVID-19 vaccine has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. As a parent, I am always very excited to share health information, but especially this information has been very important for me.
Here’s a workshop that we were very excited to view from the Texas Department of Health and Human Services. This workshop was focused on “What About the Children: Changing the Landscape on Rural Vaccine Coverage”. It focused on health in rural areas, especially for our youngest populations.
Also, we have been fortunate to receive funding for travel for our outreach events, shirts, and giveaways. Here’s a special shout out to the Episcopal Health Foundation in Texas, because they provided so much support for our project.
At first, we partnered with existing vaccination clinics and these were not very well attended, but THEN we decided to venture out on our own and to create our own clinics with the health of the Texas Department of State Health Services. We have been experimenting with the best time and date for our clinics as well all content for the clinics.
We decided a “Summer Fun and Health Clinic” approach has been the best outreach strategy for reaching the community. The mid-day clinics (before 5pm) were not as well attended for some audiences (i.e. – parents), but other times had much better attendance (after 5pm).
Also, we partnered with Agrilife (Mrs. Clarissa Moon) and Above Average Health Care and House Calls. Agrilife provided educational outreach sessions and Above Average Health Care and House Calls offered health checks and interpretations of lab results.
Do you have any suggestions for us? We are so thankful for our partners!
RJ Thompson talks about Higher Education as a professor and marketer
In this featured interview interview, meet RJ Thompson, MFA, the Director of Digital Marketing at the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business and College of Business Administration at the University of Pittsburgh.
Many professors and graduate students aren’t sure what the marketing and communications offices at their universities do. That’s why I invited RJ for this featured interview.
What’s it like to be on the staff side and the faculty side of a university?
Awards and accolades have been helpful for RJ’s career, why to put yourself up for more awards.
Learn how to be more creative, especially if you think you’re not creative at all.
Many professors and researchers have fear or anxiety about sharing their accomplishments.
Do you want to know how to get better students? RJ has a secret to share with you.
RJ’s story is inspiring. From his frankness about what professors can get from being open with university communication teams, to opening up about living with an invisible disability, this featured interview is a can’t miss. Watch, listen, or read the interview below.
Jennifer: Hi everyone, I’m Jennifer van Alstyne. Welcome to The Social Academic. Today we’re recording the new featured interview. Actually this is the last featured interview of 2021. So, welcome RJ Thompson. Could you start us out by introducing yourself?
RJ: Hey, thanks Jen for having me, this is really great! And I’m so glad you saved the best for last.
Yeah, my name is RJ Thompson. I am the Director of Digital Marketing for The Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh.
And on top of that, I do a number of other things. I do market research. I do graphic design.
I teach graphic design at Point Park University and the Community College of Allegheny County.
And starting next semester, I’ll be teaching in the business school at Pitt, teaching advertising.
So, I’m kind of all over the place.
And if you’re listening or paying attention, you might’ve seen me through the HigherEdSocial group and the Marketing and Communications (MarComm) group by HigherEdSocial. So I’m everywhere.
Jennifer: That’s exactly why I wanted to invite you on this show and why I wanted to feature your interview especially. Because so many professors, grad students, researchers that are connected with universities out there don’t really know what the marketing communications teams at universities do.
And you’re someone who is on both sides of the aisle.
So, could you tell me a little bit about what you do?
What does a higher education marketing and communications professional do?
RJ: Yeah, you know, to your point, it is an unusual divide, especially like between
design and marketing professors
and design and marketing teams
For as many similarities as there are, there’s many differences.
On the staff side, primarily what we do is, we’re a marketing and communications department. Our work includes, promoting
our programs
the business college and its programs to prospective students
so there’s an enrollment piece to that.
There’s also a heavy public relations component where we’re trying to promote the goodwill and works that we’re doing to not just the local, but the greater regional, national and global communities.
And also along with that on the communication side, we’re doing a lot of internal marketing and communications to our students, to the broader university, University of Pittsburgh.
It’s all inclusive. So, if you needed admissions campaign, we’re gonna work with the admissions team to produce that.If it’s for social media, we’re gonna develop out that social strategy plan, but also the ad spends, the ad spend strategy and execution.
If we’re putting together a magazine, alumni magazine, we’ll work with philanthropic and alumni engagement to produce that.
So, we are at the center of all of these deliverables and we collaborate with the different corresponding units to help them get their messaging out and ultimately create value for the students and alumni.
That value manifests as, primarily as
brand reinforcement
brand management
making sure that the reputation of their degree not only maintains but exceeds and grows.
So, that’s really what we do.
And myself as the Director of Digital Marketing, I am responsible for designing and maintaining our web properties be it our primary website, our micro-site, PPC [Pay-Per-Click] campaigns.
I have responsibility to our social media and also our digital advertising. If it’s digital, I own it.
Jennifer: So, it sounds like you’re working with a lot of different teams. You’re working with people across the university and with your own team in order to share good things about the
University
Student
Alumni
Community
And it really takes that kind of all encompassing approach to really communicate the amazing things that universities can do.
RJ talks about leaving his tenured position and how he loves continuing to teach
Jennifer: Now, it’s really interesting that you’re able to do that and also teach. You have this real passion for teaching and really helping students get to the next place in their careers. Let’s talk about your teaching.
RJ: Sure, so the first part of my career, I’ve spent 13 years on the faculty side.
I’ve taught at so many different institutions. The last one that I was at Youngstown State. I was there for seven years. I was tenured faculty.
To make a long story short, the commute from Pittsburgh to Youngstown, it’s about an hour each way. It was really starting to wear down my body.
I missed a lot of time with my daughter who’s six, so, a decent amount of her infancy I missed.
And one of the things that Youngstown is experiencing now is significant brain drain and enrollment decline. If you look at the data, you can kind of sort of see that coming.
So, I got out about in the summer of 2019. That is when I left the university.
HigherEd is my life. It’s where I belong. It’s where I fit. I never want to leave this industry. I always wanna be on the teaching side. I’m loving the staff side.
But unfortunately, when I decided to transition out of Youngstown State University, there weren’t any full time tenure track positions available in Pittsburgh.
I decided to try something new and pursue the staff route and it’s been amazing actually. It lets me do both things, so I get the salary I want with a good work-life balance. As a part of that balance, it also gives me the time to do a lot of
Side teaching
Freelance
Extracurricular stuff.
And, I made this remark to my wife the other day: “I’ve never felt so liberated.”
When you’re on the faculty side, especially when you’re chasing tenure and promotion, you are always doing some kind of peer reviewed research, peer reviewed projects that help you build your reputation, build your bona fides. Those are typically passion projects you don’t necessarily get paid for. They take an extreme amount of time investment. And I felt like I hit a peak at Youngstown State University.
That’s when I switched gears. When I became staff side, I started taking on more practical work, freelance stuff. I started doing more professional development and certifications.
I read a book! Let me be very clear, you would think that that is like, why is that at such an important point? Some faculty don’t have time to read, I never did. I never had time to actually sit down and read a book, be it fiction or non-fiction. So I have time for that now.
And all the other crazy things that I do that you would see on LinkedIn,
getting involved in HigherEdSocial
starting the competitions
painting a mural
being a poll worker
like I’m just checking off the bucket list stuff. And by the way, you’re absolutely allowed to criticize me for having poll worker on my bucket list.
Jennifer: No, I think that’s so exciting and yesterday must have been a good day for you. This interview was recorded live on November 3, 2021, the day after United States elections.
RJ: It was a long. It was long, long day. For sure.
Jennifer: You know, you’ve done so many things and I just, I’m so glad that you came on this The Social Academic to talk about it. Because, even though you’re talking about how much time that took, you’re still teaching. You’re still doing this and keeping this as part of your life.
You’re working with faculty, you’re working with graduate students to tell their stories through some of the marketing work that you do.
I mean, you really are able to do it all.
So, when you talk about liberation, when you talk about the freedom that this job gives you, it sounds like one of the things that you love most is being able to work on all of those things.
Whereas before maybe your focus would only been able to be research as like the main priority.
RJ: Yeah, yeah.
When it comes to liberation, it wasn’t just the ability to do new things and different things, but it was also the ability to explore my creativity in an area that mattered, in something that mattered a lot.
I’ve become disillusioned with freelance work over the past number of years and a lot of it has to do with clients that I call the low hanging fruit. These are typically the clients that want the world on a shoestring budget with a deadline of yesterday. That’s really stressful for a design faculty person chasing tenure and promotion. So I just decided to put that stuff away.
Awards are important to RJ, why to put yourself up for awards too
RJ: When I came to the business school at Pitt, they’ve got such a great marketing team, but they always had limited capacity to really just rip the lid off of it, go for broke and do some really strategic and creative things.
And, they just let me go. That resulted in a profound amount of accolades. Like I was, not to brag, but just to illustrate the point…
The websites I designed for the business school, back-to-back award winner in the Best of American Web Design by GDUSA [Graphic Design USA], which is one of the top…[Jennifer clapping]. Thank you…one of the top periodicals for the design industry.
Being able to meet folks like you and speak at conferences and help #HigherEdSocial build their foundation, it’s just exciting.
Jennifer: Wow, bragging is one thing that I actually wanted to talk with you about because when we first met, you had invited me on onto your podcast and you had mentioned that awards were something that were important to you.
Not only important for you, but important to put your team up for it, to encourage other people to apply for awards.
I love celebrating with you. I see your news on social media, on Facebook, on Twitter. It’s exciting when something good happens to people. I enjoy seeing that and so, I love cheering you on.
Can you tell me more about looking for awards and why that’s important to you?
I’ve been a competitive graphic designer for 25 years
RJ: Yeah, so this is layered.
The first part is, I’ve been a designer for 25 years. I’m 36. I’ve been doing this since I was a kid. And graphic designers tend to be very competitive people.
They need to be because, they’re competing against each other for jobs in industry and industry typically tends to choose the most talented people.
So, I’m fortunate in that I’ve been doing, I’ve been a designer my entire life, and I know all facets of it. I don’t claim to be a master of any of them, but, you need me to animate something, I can do that. You need to do some video, I can do that. I have a Jack of all trades vibe.
Being able to work in the different aspects of design and compete with others is exciting to me.
And what I get out of that is, it’s not necessarily a satisfaction, it’s like a justification. It’s more like, “hey, you know, you said you could do it and you did it.” And you put all of the work in to get to that point.
Accolades were the foundation for RJ’s career
So the Pitt Business website, when I redesigned it, it took 13 months. That’s all I did every day. It was a real labor of love and I was proud of the work. It’s also important to me that when you do a project like that, you don’t ever do it alone.
To reinforce the point that you made about getting people to submit their work, I made sure that my entire marketing team had their names on that project. My marketing team save for my designer, are in their early career. It’s important to get them those accolades because that’s the foundation for the rest of their career.
I would not have been able to get where I am and doing what I’m doing, had I not pursued design competitively. Those accolades got me my next job and my next job and opened up so many opportunities.
It opened up teaching to me, frankly. I won an award for a book I made. A faculty person happened to see it, and they’re like, “you should teach.”
Four months later I got a teaching job.
So, it’s kind of proof positive. There’s the benefits you get from asserting yourself and putting yourself out there as a competitive person, a high performance kind of person. I think that is attractive to a lot of different people.
RJ has cystic fibrosis, an invisible disability
The third part is, I’m a person with an invisible disability. I have a genetic disease called cystic fibrosis.
Had you met me when I was a kid, I was scrawny and frail and sickly. Over the years, I’ve gotten better and now I’m on gene therapy and my symptoms are gone. I’ve made amazing, great strides in my self care.
But I had a doctor tell me once, “you’re not gonna live to see 40.”
I’m 36.
Now, what that doctor doesn’t know is that I’m actually immortal and I’ll never die.
But what that did was that motivated me to shoot for as far and as wide and as fast as towards my goals as I could. I mean, in high school, I was moderate student, average, but when I got to college, I made it a point to like be A’s across the board. I knew that grades would not necessarily matter when I entered the industry. It was more about personal pride and the stakes that I put into performing.
I put all of my effort, all of myself into my work.
Even at the college level, I got awards there that led on to internships at agencies and the like. It’s been a beneficial thing for me.
At the end of my career, I want to be able to say, I didn’t get to everything I wanted to, but the things that I did get to, I did really well at.
And then I can wipe my hands of it and put it away and go build a bird house or something. Whatever retired people do.
I don’t think I’ll retire ever. Even if, you know, once a designer, always a designer, I’ll still be making something.
Building CommCentered, an archive to celebrate Higher Education Marketers
RJ: So, CommCentered is an interesting little story that started with another inventory that I built. One of the things that I like to do is, I like to understand systems comprehensively, holistically, and I like looking at trends and commonalities.
Myself and one of my colleagues, a retired computer science professor, one of the things that we did was we did an inventory of all of the logos of municipalities in America with populations of 10,000 or above.
We collected thousands of logos, thousands, and I put them into an archive. I was able to look at everything and say like, wow, when you look at the 4,000 logos or whatever it is that we found, half of them have a specifically designed brand concept and then the others are municipal seals.
When you start to really narrow the focus, and understand why half was the way that it was,
and the other half, etc, you learn that it came down to a lot of like complex things like
Elected leadership
Municipal governance
Laws
How communities were financed
That was an informative lesson for me because the company I run is called Plus Public. Part of our work is in branding communities. So I wanted to understand why some of these communities don’t have good marketing.
That inventory was very informative with respect to that.
Are you a professor, researcher, or Higher Education staff member communicating publicly for your school? Whether you’re working on marketing and communications at the program, department, college, or university, HigherEdSocial is an amazing professional society you should join. RJ and Jennifer are both official members of the HigherEdSocial Community, join them!
The sense that I was getting was that a lot of these folks did not have a great swell of pride in their work. Even in the little tiny corners of the world that they work, they may not have had a lot of pride in their work because their messaging is very highly overseen.
Their protocols for how to communicate with people and in some cases, especially on the social media side, it’s kind of a thankless job.
I want to celebrate those people. I want to celebrate
The work that they’re doing
How they’re doing it
Why they’re doing it
The concept of having to advertise education is fascinating to me. This is an act that people learn something new every day, whether or not they are trying. That’s just a part of the human experience. So, the fact that we have to advertise it is just really compelling to me.
Taking that concept and then also wanting to be the biggest cheerleader for these people and celebrate their work led to CommCentered.
When you layer in that brand’s inventory for the community brands inventory, I basically did a study where we took all of the institutions, HigherEd institutions in every state and we looked at the commonalities.
Every state has their own set of trends that some correlate to others. Some do not. It’s been really, really informative.
Right now I’m finishing my series of 50 posts on the brands of HigherEd, just for the United States. And I have plans on expanding that globally.
You know, when you told me that this project had suddenly been created, I was shocked because last time we had spoken, you had said that you were gonna be updating your personal website.
We’d actually chatted about it and you had this plan. Then all of a sudden, there was this massive archive, this big website that really can help people around the world understand more about HigherEd Marketing. That can really celebrate their work in a way that the public can see, that each other can see. It was astounding that you’d created this massive project.
And you’re also working on these other things. You have your job, you have your teaching and here you are creating this non-profit project.
I was just so amazed by you. I think my heart grows bigger every time I talk to you, because you’re so generous with what you give to the world.
RJ: Well, thank you for that.
There was one lesson I learned a long time ago is that nothing happens until someone gets excited. Leave it to an advertising guy to say that. But it’s absolutely true, and I believe that wholeheartedly.
Whatever effort I put into something, I hope that it excites people double the effort that I put in.
Fortunately, I kind of have a knack for choosing the right things. Sometimes I don’t, but for the most part I do and it’s always exciting to build community around common threads.
The thing with people in HigherEd, I think most of them would stay and talent would be retained at a higher frequency, at a higher rate, if certain conditions were met relative to just the work, the daily working life and the process and the experience of those types of jobs.
With CommCentered, it was really important to me to not only be a contrast to some of the other HigherEd marketers that you’ll see out there. I didn’t wanna tell people how the work was done. They know how the work is done.
I wanna show them what work was done. The thinking here is a picture’s worth a thousand words.
If you see one logo, or if you see one ad campaign, that’s gonna kick off a spiral of new ideas for the people that are looking at it.
I also have an additional point to that but I think is a propos. On Twitter, on social media, even in the HigherEdSocial groups, there are a ton of people that assert themselves as HigherEd marketing thought leaders. I’ll use the term know-it-alls as positively as possible.
There are a lot of authors that assert their knowledge and wisdom and it’s valuable. But it consistently skews more towards :here’s the roadmap, here’s the foundation, here are some of the strategies. And that’s where it ends.
Okay, well, thank you, I loved reading your 400 page book. The fact that the strategies and the roadmaps are great, but what have people done with it? I wanna see what people have done with it.
CommCentered, I wanna feature the work that people are creating so that they can understand the context or the outputs of those roadmaps and get inspired on their own.
A bad impression of someone else can create something completely original
The last part of this is I love voice actors. This is a really unique hobby of mine. I watch cartoons with my daughter and I’m able to pick out, oh, that’s Rob Paulsen.
Jennifer: You can recognize them.
RJ: I can recognize the voices, even if they are doing a completely different voice. If you listen to some of the podcasts from voice actors, they love their jobs so much because all they do is play. Playing to them is doing a bad impression of someone else. So it’s additive.
For example, if I did…and I won’t do any impressions, I won’t embarrass myself to that degree…But if I did an impression of Christopher Walken, and it was terrible. That’s okay, because I’ve just created a new character, something completely original.
I can intentionally do something bad and create something really good and funny out of it. That was one of the other inspirations behind doing the archive, the logo inventory, featuring, doing assessments on social media ads and all of that stuff.
When I look at your work, or someone else’s work, I judge it. I’m like, damn, that’s a good idea, I really like that. How can I take that idea, if it’s a box, how can I push one side in and rotate it and make it my own? It needs to be malleable.
So, and the last part to that is that concept, that theme is absolutely part and parcel to who I am as a person and how I teach creativity.
That’s kind of the overarching through line of my entire life and career and teaching career too.
Professors and researchers, do you think you lack creativity?
Jennifer: You teach creativity, I really like that. A lot of professors, a lot of graduate students don’t believe they have creativity. It doesn’t matter what field they’re in.
You talk about creativity as something that can be taught. I think that a lot of those people who feel like they don’t have creativity actually do, and maybe they don’t necessarily recognize it in themselves. What do you think about that?
RJ: So there’s kind of an anecdote or a dosh that I share with my students: I can teach you all the software in the world, but if you can’t think creatively, then all of that knowledge is not really useful.
You’re solving problems that are very finite and technical. And dare I say, just kind of binary, yes or no one way or the other.
Creativity is something that can be, you can be born just with this incredible intrinsic creativity, but you have deficits in other areas.
I relay a story to my students where I’ve always been an ambitious, creative person, even when I was like a five-year-old. When I was four or five, I opened up my parents’ typewriter, typewriter, and I made stories. I pinpecked at the keyboard.
Then I moved on to a neighborhood newspaper. Five, six years old doing this. Who does that? I’m sure it does happen. And I’m not saying that I’m special by any means, but it’s at least indicative of how my creativity manifested organically, naturally.
There are some people that feel that they are not creative at all. And to them, I say, you are creative, but you are maybe a different aspect or facet of creativity.
For the most part, the problem is that people don’t understand the steps in which to be creative. One of the things that I teach them is how to solve problems using a creative inquiry. That’s essentially also an aspect of design thinking.
I had mentioned the project, I didn’t tell you what it was that kicked off my teaching career. It was a book called Thompson Design Methodologies. It was all about all about solving problems visually. This is something I deal with with my clients.
If I’m making a logo for you, Jen, what’s one word that you would want your clientele to associate you with? Let’s say, it’s integrity.
What does integrity look like as a box or a shape rather? Is it a rectangle? Is it a triangle?
Is a triangle proportional? Or is it skewed?
If you had to hold it in your hand, how heavy would it be?
What’s the texture?
Ask really abstract questions to fire up the creative parts of their brain and purposely getting them to zag instead of zig
If you’re always zigging on something, you’re always making the same type of choice. If I put you in a box and make you do something different, that is forcing creativity on you, because you don’t know what comes next.
Then as you branch out from there, every decision you make is based on an unknown output. It’s a lot about challenging conventions, challenging your comfort zones. I talk a lot about fear and the boxes of fear and complacency and all that stuff.
Once people start to really understand why they are in the box and they can’t get out of the box, once they start to understand that, they realize that this isn’t like some tried and true foundation for making creativity happen. It’s more of an understanding and recognition of their own hesitancies and character flaws that they perceive that they have to work out of.
It’s more psychological about them as a person and then once you kind of overcome some of those things, solving problems isn’t hard, it’s fun. If you know how to solve those problems, you have a 12 like a step process and your process is built with error and experimentation built into it, then your work becomes more fun.
But the best thing of all is that your work becomes more informed and it’s of a higher quality so much so that you start solving problems unlike anybody else.
When your employer sees help deeply and immersively you understand a problem and how you use that deep immersion to create a unique and amazing and equally immersive solution, they don’t wanna lose you. I could go on and on, but it’s absolutely true.
It’s one of my favorite things about teaching. Seeing people really break out of the box and rise above and into their careers and meeting their self-concept.
This idea of the idealized self-concept. Who are you in your most ideal sense? If you can use these design methodologies, these creative problem solving tactics, you can get closer and closer to that thing.
If your dream for your career has always been to be a director of digital marketing, and then when you get there and it’s like, oh wow, I was able to get there using these tactics and techniques, what do I do next?
Some people may not have envisioned the next thing beyond that ultimate thing. So it’s liberating in that respect too.
Facing backlash from colleagues when sharing good news (and why to share your accomplishments anyway)
Jennifer: One of the things that you brought up while you were just talking was fear and anxiety, and it actually reminded me that I wanted to ask you about that as it relates to awards that you’ve won.
Professors that I work with and people who are in my courses, feel really anxious when talking about their awards on social media, especially sharing it with their department, even internally. There’s a lot of anxiety when it comes to that.
Have you ever experienced any backlash for sharing your awards?
RJ: As a matter of fact, yes. It’s what led me to leave my tenure teaching position. It’s unfortunate that it worked out the way that it did.
One of the things that I dealt with specifically was, I put all of myself into my work. And I believe in my work whole heartedly. When you put me into a position where you basically say, ‘Hey, in order to get tenure and promotion, you have to have peer-reviewed evaluations of your work. Part of that are competitions, juried exhibitions. That’s part of the game. That is the game.’
I made it a point to put all of my effort into playing that game well.
And I did, so much so that I received one of Ohio’s highest honors in art. I received an art award from the governor and I got to meet him and his wife and everything.
What that did was the community that I was in, they celebrated that work. Because the thing that I made that got me that award was ultimately for the Youngstown region. It celebrated them.
But on the faculty level, all that did was breed jealousy and resentment and inferiority complexes shot through the roof. Because I was junior faculty, that was used against me.
Instead of seeing that as an opportunity to build into my energy, collaborate, let’s share our successes together…
Instead what happened was, some of my peer faculty grew resentful. They grew jealous. They use tactics to essentially punish me.
They made sure that my tenure process was hell. On paper I was very tenurable, so, that’s one of the reasons why I got it. But I know that the spirit of celebrating your peers was not there.
A lot of that came back to graphic design was a popular major. The professors that were jealous and resentful of me were not in graphic design. More importantly, they didn’t understand the forest for the trees. I was responsible for bringing a lot of new students to the design program and also those fine art programs.
And I realized that, that summer of 2019, I didn’t wanna leave tenure, I fought so hard for it. But no amount of tenure or promotion was going to be worth the mental stress and anxiety that they would place on me just by virtue of wanting to do my job really well.
Jennifer: Especially when it’s for, in this specific instance, this is for the community, this is something that you were doing for the town of Youngstown.
RJ: Yeah, they basically said I was trying to be a showboat. And I was being obnoxious with…
I’m a marketer.
I understand how branding works. I understand how marketing works. If I’m gonna put all of my effort into something, I wanna make sure that people know about it. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Frankly, for some of the folks that are concerned about, if they’re too timid to promote themselves in their work, I completely get that because of what I went through. And I say to hell with them, rise above it.
If you submit your work to a competition and you get acknowledged, the people in your life, if they’re worth keeping around, they will celebrate your efforts. They will support you.They will champion you. And you will do the same for them in return.
If they don’t do that for you, then you need to consider your place in that community.
Do I want you to leave that community? Absolutely not.
But it is much easier to leave a situation than it is to change an entire community of people that ultimately don’t want you to be successful. They want the successes that you captured for themselves.
And no one wants to be around folks like that. No one grows when resentment breeds eternal like that.
The benefits from an award hopefully exceeds the criticism you get
RJ: If you believe in your work, you put yourself into it completely, and you have some money to spare to put it into a competition or any peer reviewed situation like that, do it. Because the benefits you get from it will hopefully far exceed the criticism that you get.
To give you an example, when I did that work for Youngstown and got the award from the Ohio governor, I had a number of communities knocking on my door saying, we want you to replicate that work here. We’ll pay you a market value for what you do. We’ll defer to your expertise. We just want good work and you’re a proven commodity. Okay, let’s do it, and so we did.
In the case of just to switch gears real quick, in the case of Pitt Business School, it was really important to me that I was given so much freedom and latitude to essentially do what I felt was best from a marketing perspective, from a design perspective. I was able to completely reboot all of our marketing collateral.
I didn’t do it alone, and I wanted people to know in my college that my marketing team, the one I’m on, is the best. We’re the best ones for the job.
I also wanted to tell all the 300 some odd marketers at the University of Pittsburgh that we’re the best marketing team on campus. And we did it two years in a row. When we do that, we say, yeah, we believe in our work enough to do this.
Let us help you. We will do this because we’re colleagues, because we want to see you succeed as well.
So you build a spirit of camaraderie in this community and rising tide lifts all ships. The ultimate goal would be, hey, my marketing team give some advice to all the different colleges at Pitt and maybe they come out with some better looking work and they see increased enrollment and everybody prospers. So, that’s kind of the intent.
Let me just say that, I think for my supervisors, for my marketing team, they like the acknowledgement. It makes them feel good. It builds confidence in their work and it energizes them to do more ambitious work or more involved work.
It’s not just going through the motions anymore, we’re building something. And it’s that paradigm shift that has caused a lot of our success and just good feelings about our jobs.
How professors and researchers can work with universities to better promote their work
Faculty are busy, there are only so many hours in the day
Jennifer: Thanks for sharing that.
Now, I wanted to ask for the professors and researchers out there, what are some ways in which you as a marketing department have collaborated with them to tell their stories?
RJ: You know, I think, I would say first off, and I know many HigherEd marketers can relate to this. There is a perception in a well-founded perception that faculty generally are too busy to participate in marketing efforts. To an extent that is true. And there’s nothing wrong with that because they’re doing their jobs, right? We only have so many hours in the day.
Part of our goal is we want to celebrate our faculty as much as we celebrate the outcomes and career goals of our students. Fortunately, we have very proactive, productive faculty that are doing world changing work. And they understand the value of marketing that, and they work with us to do that. But it doesn’t mean it’s easy,
It’s not often easy to work with your faculty, to get what you need from them.
Build your reputation within the community, faculty, and student body
If you’re a faculty member and you open yourself up to being promoted, the work that you’re doing, you want it to be signal boosted, because that builds your reputation in your
Community
Faculty
Student body
Be open to letting us help you signal boost your work.
We can do some amazing and creative things if you just give us the time of day. Give us a couple hours every week and we will work our asses off for you.
Collaborating with marketing and communication teams takes reciprocal respect
It’s reciprocal and it’s a reciprocal respect and understanding that in order for collaboration to be successful for all stakeholders and all beneficiaries, you gotta put the time in.
And we have a lot of faculty that are writing books, we just won an $800,000 grant from one of our marketing faculty won this massive grant. We wanna put that out into the world, so, let us help you.
If you’re a faculty person, and you’re wondering how to get promoted, work with us. Respect our work. Respect our capabilities. You don’t have to do it alone. We champion our entire community.
I think that is the best way to do it.
And don’t be afraid to shout your accolades from the roof. It’s okay!
Our students want professors that are doing amazing work.
When I was a tenure track, and even still to this day is on the faculty side, I always show real world practical work that I’m doing because it contextualizes the professional experience for my students: “Oh, wow, he’s still doing something. That’s awesome I can learn from him because he’s still in play.”
Let us in, we’ll tell your story and that will create ripple effects all through our marketing.
Learn a secret to getting better students for the classes you teach
There’s also another basic sort of formula here: The more you help us promote you, the better the students you’ll get.
Every faculty person wants better students, every single one. It makes the teaching experience more enriching for them and for us. We don’t necessarily like having to go through the lecture, here’s the homework assignment, go on your merry way. We don’t wanna go through the motions, if we don’t have to. We have a profound amount of knowledge to share.
If we have better students, they’re gonna be more engaged and more interested in learning those little details, those anecdotes from practice or whatever.
It makes faculty feel good about their job and about the work that they do. So, I think that that is an operative sort of thing to think about.
Avoid going through your dean or department chair
Also consider the opposite, you don’t participate, you ignore us. That makes our lives a lot more difficult because we’ve got to track you down. If you don’t respond to us, then we have to talk to the chair or the dean. Then the dean and the chair come down on you. No faculty person really ever wants to talk to their chair or dean. I kid, I kid. But it’s true. It doesn’t have to come to that.
So just work with us and we will do what we can 100%.
Jennifer: I think that’s such an important sentiment. It’s gonna take work on both sides.
You guys have so much expertise, you’re hoping to share with the faculty who wanna promote themselves and promote their research,
I think that’s wonderful. But it sounds like maybe faculty really don’t know what to expect, they don’t know what the potential is for themselves.
So, there are ways for you to celebrate them, but the faculty need to be more open about it in order for you to even be aware of each other.
RJ: So, on that note, one tactic that I’ve taken recently is I’ve added all 125 of our faculty to LinkedIn. I track their profiles because they’re more prone to update their LinkedIn and self-promote versus telling us.
As soon as I see something, it’s going over here, and then I just traffic control the content. And that actually brings in another point where…
Marketing and communication teams what to make it as easy for professors as possible
Hey, faculty, we wanna work with you as much as possible, but guess what? We wanna make the process as easy for you as possible.
If we need you to record a video, we’re gonna script the whole thing, put it on a teleprompter. You come in, spend 10 minutes with us, read it and you’re out.
You have to go teach their classes and depending on your institution and mine, rankings are extremely important. We need our faculty in the classroom, teaching our students well so our rankings go up, so our student body becomes more enriched and we pull in better prospects and everybody wins.
Jennifer: So if faculty are more open about their accomplishments with their marketing teams and more willing to put in some effort, in order to help those marketing teams promote their work, then it can make a big difference for everyone.
The faculty can get better students, the student body can hear more awesome news about their faculty, and it can really reach a larger audience. I see lots of HigherEd posts about professors, about scientists and researchers, being shared with much wider audiences than just the community. It can reach people around the world. So, this is great.
Your university would love if you join Twitter or other social media platforms
RJ: And you know the next step to that is, they see the results and then they decide to be proactive and really participate.
If I could have 125 different Twitter accounts for every single faculty member and they were off and running and doing really well with it, awesome. Oh my God, the marketing ecosystem that would be working with would be profound and huge. And yeah, It would probably be stressful as hell, but we would have 125 of our biggest advocates out there in the world telling other people how good our programs are. You know, and that’s good branding.
But they’re researchers. By virtue of the description of their positions, they’ve gotta be researching. They’ve gotta be teaching and writing grants, and that’s what they do.
Social media doesn’t have to take all of your time. Just a little bit of practice talking about yourself, maybe talking about your research and sharing it publicly is going to make a big difference for you.
“Eventually I hit a wall…this has all been done before,” and persevering through that feeling
Jennifer: RJ, I’m so glad we’ve had all of these conversations. We’ve talked about your work as a director of marketing, we’ve talked about Plus Public, your business. We talked about CommCentered. We talked about what it’s like to be a faculty member at the same time.
Is there anything else that you’d like to share or chat about before we wrap up?
RJ: I’m all over the place with my interests, but they are mostly HigherEd specific. And I walk on both sides of that HigherEd dividing line.
I’m on the staff side and I’m on the faculty. It’s the best place to be as a marketer because it lets me understand what my audiences want. It’s a very organic transition of data and learning. My marketing savvy helps me teach better, because it’s vocal, it’s public speaking, it’s presentation of my PowerPoints and other things.
On the opposite side, I’m learning how to better communicate with my students, but also prospective students, so they they’re mutually beneficial.
With my HigherEd research on CommCentered, now I’m getting some of that research on the faculty side that I can apply to the staff side.
One thing that I’ve been struggling with that I wanted to share was, and maybe some of the faculty listening can understand that. I often say when the muse speaks, listen. It may not always make sense. It may not always be compatible.
I often have these moments where I’ve just got, the gears are turning in my head, it just randomly clicks on and I just start writing ideas down. Like last Saturday, it was a birthday party for one of my daughter’s friends. I was sitting in a Chuck E. Cheese and I’m at a table by myself with a notebook, like a super nerd and ignoring everyone else and I’m writing down pages of notes, just things that are firing through my head. My energy is like, “oh my God, this is so awesome. I think I can do this.”
Then I eventually hit a wall and like, I look at my notes and I’m just thinking like, this has all been done before.
So if you’re out there and like, you feel like you have this energy to like write a book or a series of books or contribute to the knowledge base in a big way, you actually can and you should.
Don’t be afraid of imposter syndrome or that you feel like everything that has been said or done, can be said or done, has already been said or done.
One of the things that I did was, I reached out to a few people and I said, I’ve got this energy, I know what I wanna say and how to say it, but I don’t quite know the format. Alexa Heinrich, our friend in HigherEdSocial, she said, “Everything that can be said or done in accessibility has been said and done.” The difference is her perspective on it. And she recognized that upfront. Learn about making your social media posts more accessible on Alexa’s website.
That was for me really hard to swallow, to accept, because I come from this faculty academic side where original thought is highly coveted and valued, and I just couldn’t quite get there for whatever reason, confidence issues, self-esteem. I just didn’t have a good mentor to help me guide through this process. And Alexa just, she nailed it.
I was feeling really down on CommCentered, because I hadn’t blogged in a while.
And then I talked to Amy Jauman, who’s the Chief Education Officer for the National Institute for Social Media. Who wrote quite literally a book, this thick on social media. And I said, how did you get to that point? She basically said, “oh, I just sat down at the computer and started writing.”
And I’m like screw you, get out of here. I don’t wanna hear it, I don’t wanna hear it.
But she gave me some really great advice, and then I started to turn the gears a little bit and I’m like, okay, CommCentered should be what it already is. It’s a website. It’s active. It’s an archive. It’s the only inventory of HigherEd logos on the internet.
I’ve already checked the boxes, but because of some lack of objectivity or lack of confidence or something, I feel, I felt like it wasn’t original. And sure enough it is.
It’s one of the reasons why you and I connected and we keep circling this conversation.
As I’m starting to get my confidence back…And if, again, if you’re an academic researcher and you hit that wall where you think no one’s gonna care, this is why you have to stay the course and continue on.
Randomly, I got an email from a journalist at the Australian equivalent of The Chronicle of Higher Education. He’s like, ‘Hey, I came across CommCentered, and it is absolutely stunning. No one else, I’ve never seen anyone do anything like this, period.”
All of a sudden my soul left my body and all of the energy that I took from the universe came right back into my body and I started writing those blog posts.
The other parts of his message was, I wanna have you speak on these topics at Australia’s biggest HigherEd conference. And I wanna have you be a panelist. I wanna learn more about that work. So we got the ball rolling. But that’s not where it ends.
Where it ends is to present day where, I looked at his website and all of the articles and I’m thinking, the Marketing and Communications sector of higher education is gigantic. There are over 9,000 universities globally. But there’s no centralized knowledge base for those people.
So now I’m looking at all right, well, CommCentered was just a champion for the work. CommCentered 2.0, can be something else entirely.
What that is just yet, I don’t know, but it could be big on that scale.
So, stay the course, researchers, what you’re doing absolutely has value.
Jennifer: Ah, thank you so much, RJ. I have loved this conversation. Thank you so much for joining me today.
RJ Thompson, MFA is an award-winning marketing and design professional. He is Director of Digital Marketing at the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business and College of Business Administration at the University of Pittsburgh.
Before joining Pitt, RJ was a tenured Assistant Professor of Graphic + Interactive Design in the Department of Art at Youngstown State University. Previous to Youngstown State, RJ taught at Carnegie Mellon University, La Roche University, and Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. Continuing his career in education, RJ has been an Adjunct Professor of Graphic & Interactive Design at Point Park University since 2019 where he was responsible for writing and teaching the interactive design curriculum. In 2020, he began teaching at the Community College of Allegheny County.
Outside of marketing, design, and teaching, RJ is also the Co-Principal and Creative Strategist for +Public, a Pennsylvania-based social enterprise that focuses on cultivating community and economic development impact through the creation of branded communication platforms, creative place-making, and storytelling initiatives for communities-in-revival.
Throughout his career, RJ has received many accolades for his creative works: In 2015, he was one of several recipients of the National Endowment for the Arts “Our Town” grant, valued at $100,000, for the INPLACE (“Innovative Plan for Leveraging Arts & Community Engagement”) project. In 2017, RJ received a “Best of Marketing Award” from the Ohio Economic Development Association for his efforts in rebranding the City of Youngstown, Ohio. In 2018, RJ was accepted into the prestigious Cohort 2 of the National Arts Marketing Project, a program supported by Americans for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 2019, RJ also received a scholarship to join the National Arts Strategies Executive Program in Arts & Culture Strategy through the School of Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
In 2019, RJ was honored with the Ohio Governors Award in the Arts in Community Development, the state of Ohio’s highest recognition in the arts sector. Recently, RJ was the recipient of a certification scholarship from the National Institute for Social Media and received accolades from GDUSA and the University & College Designers Association for “Pitt Business Backstory” and “Business.Pitt.Edu” websites. RJ is presently a board member of the Pittsburgh chapter of the American Marketing Association.
Yes! I am excited! We are getting back into the training and development mode with the Texas Social Media Research Institute (and the Rural Communication Institute)! Are you looking for a FREE conference focused on social media and rural communication? Check out our conference schedule!
Tuesday, November 2nd
5pm – Journal Club (Discussing “Reality check: How adolescents use
TikTok as a digital backchanneling medium to speak back against
