As we prepare for an upcoming year, I have to stop and think about the future of higher education. The pandemic changed our students, faculty, staff, and our campus as a whole. The Education Advisory Board (EAB) provides colleges and universities across the country with resources and ideas to help the students of the future.
I confess, I have been a complete fan of EAB and their resources for the past ten years. Their resources are at the forefront of higher education innovation.
🏛 – Dining Halls and Food Spaces
🏛 – Modern Student Housing
🏛 – Hybrid and Flexible Office Spaces
🏛 – Tech-Enabled Classrooms
🏛 – Libraries and Learning Commons
🏛 – Interdisciplinary Research Facilities
Higher education institutions should also focus on the faculty and staff as well. When I ask most of my peers if they are comfortable with the numerous changes happening across their institution, most of them are uncomfortable. We need to prepare our teams for the future of higher education.
Here’s the Millennial Professor’s Call the Action Statements for the Higher Education Industry
🌎 – Higher Education Conferences and Summits Need to Provide Trainings Focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Their Attendees
🌎 – Higher Education Institutions Need to Include Faculty and Staff as Part of Their Planning Process (an Important Part)
🌎 – Higher Education Institutions Provide Wellness and Holistic Support for Faculty and Staff Who are Having Problems With Change (You Need Us and We Need Help)
🌎 – Higher Education Institutions Need to Be Comfortable with Uncommon Spaces (Flexible Office Spaces)
🌎 – Faculty Need to Embrace Collaboration Opportunities with Faculty at Their Institutions and Other Institutions
Here are some additional articles about the future of higher education:
Higher education will continue to transition in an effort to meet the needs of our current and incoming students.
For our particular university, we are striving to modify all of these items simultaneously. It is a challenge, but the changes are well worth the journey.
Here’s the challenge for this post: “In your opinion, which one of the items on the list is MOST important for your institution?”
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.
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
Chinasa Elue, PhD is an Associate Professor at Kennesaw State University where her focus is Educational Leadership and Higher Education. She is also an entrepreneur. Her company, True Titans Consulting is helping leaders and organizations with grief and trauma.
How do you express grief, express loss, online? In this interview, Chinasa gets personal about the loss of her mother. Dr. Elue knows that we’ve been experiencing collective grief.
Welcome to the featured interview series on The Social Academic blog. You can read, watch, or listen to the interviews shared here.
Jennifer: Hi everyone. My name is Jennifer van Alstyne. Welcome to the new season of The Social Academic. I’m here with Dr. Chinasa Elue, an associate professor of educational leadership and higher education at Kennesaw State University.
Chinasa, I’m so happy to talk with you today. Would you please introduce yourself? Let everyone know a little bit about you.
Chinasa: Absolutely. And so thank you so much for having me here today, Jennifer, I’m excited to be here and chat with you as well.
My name is Chinasa Elue. As you mentioned, I’m a professor at Kennesaw State University, but I’m also an entrepreneur. I run my own coaching and consulting business where I am supporting organizational leaders lead with more trauma informed practices in the workplace.
A lot of this work stems from our research around grief, leadership and trauma informed practices in organizational settings. I’m excited to be doing this work. It’s truly an honor to be able to leave such important work in this context that we’ve been navigating these past couple of years. Thank you.
Jennifer: Yeah, thank you for introducing that and letting people know about your business. And I think that’s so important. One of the reasons that I want to highlight professors like yourself on the show is to show that people are doing more than just their faculty work. People are helping the world in different ways.
Journey into the professoriate
Having an online presence is something that becomes a part of that system for helping people. That’s one of the things that I wanted to talk with you about today.
Now, since most of the people who are listening to this are professors themselves, can you tell me a little bit more about your higher ed life?
Chinasa: Absolutely. So in terms of my journey into the professoriate is really interesting because in a lot of ways, when I was finishing my graduate program, I thought I was going to go into higher education administration. I thought I was going to work as the Dean of Students or something of that nature.
But as you know, along the way, I had some really amazing mentors who really encouraged me to pursue a faculty life. They talked about the importance of impact in the field more systemic ways. I applied to many jobs and I was able to land my first gig right out of graduate school teaching.
I think being a professor…It’s a journey in and of itself, right?
There are a lot of ins and outs of this thing that I’ve learned over time. I’m getting ready to enter into my 8th year of teaching. I can’t even believe I’m saying that, but yeah, 8 years of teaching as a professor.
It’s been an interesting journey. That’s the best way I can put it, because there are a lot of reasons why I’ve chosen to navigate my career in the ways that I have. Especially with my experiences and academe in general as a woman of color.
That shaped and informed why I chose to not only be a professor, but also be an entrepreneur because I recognize the importance of having more systemic impact outside of my 9-to-5 job.
I think it’s important to think about to what extent can you really enact change or have a more positive force in that context. I realized that for me, it needed to step outside of the ivory tower and look different in a lot of ways.
Finding your voice on social media
Jennifer: It sounds like you realize that you could help more, that you have that ability and that you knew that you needed to do something. Like you needed to give more of yourself into a different area.
That’s something that an online presence is so helpful for, because we can’t always communicate with everyone all the time. Right? There’s not people around like introducing themselves, “Hi, let me learn more about you.” But there are online. There are people who are looking for help in different areas.
There are also professors who are looking to connect with other professors, you know, working in higher education. And I think that that online presence can be really beneficial in that, in that kind of system of communication.
So what does your online presence look like? What are some of the things that you do to have an online presence?
Chinasa: You know, it’s so interesting when we talk about online presence as a professor, right? In a lot of ways, I see a lot of faculty on Twitter. I think that’s the place of choice in a lot of ways where we’re able to share ideas more broadly.
But I also know at the same time, one of my own pieces with building my online presence is also honing in on my voice and how I wanted to communicate information and in what ways I wanted to share that. And also letting my personality shine. Right?
I think in a lot of ways, it’s very easy to be kind of cut and dry. Being very professional, which I am, but I’m also in a lot of ways, I bring in a lot of humor.
And so what I like to do online, I don’t mind sharing. If it’s Twitter is more professional or whatnot, sharing
Research updates
Recent awards
Accolades
Conversations that are going on locally and in the world at large
But Instagram is kind of where I have a little bit more fun. I share a little bit more personally in that space.
I also have my own YouTube channel where I’ve done videos and those kinds of have a humorous bent to them as well. Humorous but also informative at the same time. I’ve done a lot of work around career coaching and supporting professionals in various spaces professionally. I wanted to bring some humor into a space of times that can be very dry.
And oftentimes where we also have a lot of traumatic experiences in our respective industries that we may not talk about, but I want it to highlight it and make it a little bit more light and palatable so that we can have more systemic conversations.
My preference just looks different depending on the platform, to be honest.
Jennifer: I really like that. I think that it makes a lot of sense to have different audiences, but also different types of content that you share on each platform. And it really is based on your goals.
Free online presence workshop
Get started for in this virtual choose your own adventure workshop for professors, researchers, and graduate students.
It sounds like you have fun on Instagram. You share those kinds of motivational and short videos on YouTube. That can really help people connect with you. And then the more professional side is on Twitter. Is that right?
Chinasa: Yes. Correct.
How much do you share about yourself online?
Jennifer: Well, I think that it’s really important for people to recognize what they’re interested in in terms of
where they want to share
what they want to share
how much they want to share
So that’s my next question. How much do you share online about yourself?
Chinasa: I think I share what I feel comfortable sharing. Right? I don’t use online as my journal entry point.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Chinasa: I don’t come in there to narrate my initial reactions to anything.
I talk about this often when I’m talking to friends or colleagues that whenever there’s a hot button topic, where there is a decision or a case or an event that’s happened…
A lot of times, people will flock online to share their initial reactions or emotions.
Jennifer: They love to do that. It’s like a gut reaction to go and talk about your feelings about something. For sure.
Chinasa: Yeah! But I realized that that in a lot of ways it doesn’t serve me well, personally. That I need time to be in community with people that I talked to more systemically and consistently to really process the events.
Because a lot of times it’s something that’s near and dear to your heart, right? These are some really hot topics that are going to impact me, my children, my family for generations to come.
I realized in a lot of ways, I don’t want to just contribute a hot bite and not then take action.
My reaction is just to not necessarily go online, but to pick up a phone and get in touch with someone where I can process more systemically. And then, make a post that I think could contribute in a more meaningful way.
It just serves me better. And I think in a lot of ways, I don’t want people to come to me and try and take a sound bite without knowing the true impact that this is going to have long-term. So I process, and then I share within reason in terms of what I feel comfortable sharing.
Sometimes I don’t [post]. Sometimes I write a blog. Sometimes it drives me to do research, or to do an article, or something else. Right? But I am more intentional about not emoting outwardly first, but being more reflective in nature.
Jennifer: Oooh, I really like what you said about how that time to reflect and to actually talk with people who you’re close with about the experiences and the things that are happening. It really allows you to focus your energy in your reaction to that. Either, either it goes into social media, but it has all these other options too, which a lot of people don’t consider when they have a gut reaction to something that they’ve experienced.
I like that, you know, that could be channeled into research or into a blog post, like into these different forms of reaction. So I really like that. Thank you for sharing that.
Chinasa: Absolutely.
We are walking through collective trauma
Jennifer: Now, one of the things that you talked about is that you share things that you feel comfortable with online.
And I know that grief is something that we’ve all been dealing with collectively recently, but you yourself have lost your mother. That’s something that you’ve been able to talk about online and even connect with people about. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Chinasa: You know, I never thought that I would be doing research on grief. That wasn’t my initial mo (modus operandi) when I came into the professoriate at all. I was initially studying issues of access and equity to higher ed.
I lost my mom in may of 2019. And when I lost her, that was the first time I’ve lost someone so close in proximity to me. The loss in and of itself was so debilitating in ways I can’t even describe to be honest.
So when I think about being in that space a year before we knew a pandemic was looming ahead. Right? Losing my mom, and having young children at the same time and figuring out how to navigate being a faculty member and being all the other things that I do on a daily basis…It was a really trying time to be frank.
Coming into the pandemic it was almost like I had an awakening of sorts. Right? We started to see loss on a massive scale in the midst of our racial reckoning in this country that’s still ongoing [United States], the social political climate that has continued to traverse even until now.
I recognized that what we’re walking through at the time was collective trauma and collective grief.
I felt a prompting to begin to ask some deeper questions. As a higher ed researcher, I wanted to know how are institutional leaders responding to loss right now? Because I know how debilitating the was for me before a pandemic, before all of the other factors were there, to navigate that.
But let’s say you lost someone due to COVID. Right? And maybe, perhaps you’re a person of color or any other dimension of your identity that’s been impacted by any number of it. You name the headline, it’s present today. Okay?
Based on where you’re socialized in this world and in this country specifically, it really impacts how you’re able to show up every day.
People are quick to move back to a normal or ‘a new normal,’ which is what we keep hearing now that the pandemic is over, which I beg to differ, honestly, but we’re here.
In a lot of ways, if you lost someone during these past 2.5 to 3 years, and then have to face any number of events…The ways in which you’ve had to navigate and cope have had to vary based on who you are in this country.
How are organizational leaders responding to grief?
Chinasa: I wanted to know how leaders, especially as a higher ed scholar, how are leaders responding?
How are you providing space to
with your faculty, staff and students who have experienced traumatic loss? Who are showing up on your campus and they’re not the same person they were before the pandemic, right?
These are not the same people that are returning back to us. And so when I think about grief now in this context, I think we’ve been in prolonged grief. There’s been just so much that has gone on, and it’s been such a trying season to be in right now where we are trying to figure out how to pick up our feet and move forward. But at the same time, we keep getting knocked down every step that we take. Right?
And so in this context, it’s more so okay, how do we continue to create spaces that allow us the opportunities to process the ongoing traumatic onslaught of grief that we’re seeing unfold day in and day out. There is no reprieve right now.
The conversations have to look different.
The events that we’re hosting the organizations that we’re building have to look different because we have to be more intentional about how we are creating spaces for people to show up in their true authenticity, but still be able to thrive.
And to not care about the bottom line, but to honestly care about the individual 1st –before you care about the deadline, the project, the goal at hand. But to know that these are real people that need a real leader to recognize them for the totality of their humanity. They want you to see them.
I think one big piece about The Great Resignation that we’re noticing right now is that people are leaving because they want more, they desire more. They realize that they’re worthy of more.
If leaders wake up to the fact that your employees, your colleagues don’t want to be seen as a bottom line item, they want to be seen as a human being who has been experiencing trauma and loss. Then you have to respond differently. Because if you don’t, this is going to be an ongoing situation that we see for many years to come.
Jennifer: Hm. That was a lot. What it sounds like is that your own grief helped prompt this research that is hopefully going to make this bigger impact on universities around the world and on organizations too. I mean, trauma is something that every company and every organization is dealing with because people are collectively grieving. You’re right.
Talking about the loss of her mom on social media
Jennifer: Now what does that look like with social media for you? Like, you’ve been able to talk about some of your grief on social media. And I’m curious how that’s been. What have people’s reactions been? Have you been able to make connections based on that shared grief?
Chinasa: Absolutely. I think social media, you know, it’s the catch 22 with it, right? It’s a great connector in a lot of ways. You’re able to build a community and networks in that vein. It could be a big detractor at the same time with differing opinions. And then the armchair bullies that show up every now and then, right?
Jennifer: Oh, yeah.
Chinasa: Yeah. For me, personally, I’ve been able to talk about grief in a very authentic and raw way.
I don’t shy away from it because grief is, in my opinion, the final act of love. We’ve loved people deeply. And so we’re going to grieve them deeply. And grieving looks different for any person. For me, I’ve chosen to be more public and sharing my emotions and how I’ve been processing things.
don’t run to Instagram or Twitter as my journal to share. But I share things that I’ve processed through
Events
Milestones
Holidays (i.e. Mother’s Day)
Cooking my mom’s favorite recipe
I’m just remembering those times. I have no issue sharing a picture of her because she’s so near and dear to me, I think about her every day. I think in a lot of ways, I also use social media as a way to memorialize her. To let people know that she was here because it’s very easy to want to power ahead, but that person still lives in a very present part in my heart. My mom does for me, right?
And I think for those who are experiencing loss and being able to share my experiences online and saying that it’s okay. That it is three years later and I’m still grieving. Right? That there’s no timeframe here that you have to give yourself the grace and the space you’d need to
Process
Emote
Take your time
Slow down as needed
And I think it’s a space to gain encouragement when you’re walking through something similar and to connect with others who are on the same path.
Because I’ve been able to make those connections with others who have lost parents, who’ve lost, loved ones who understand and who send me messages, or we connect offline and are able to talk more systemically.
I think that’s a big piece there with leveraging social media when you have different events happen. You can use your online presence to have more personal conversations that are meaningful to you. And also, still have impact by providing encouragement and space to have dialogue that may not exist outside of those online virtual walls. And so I appreciate that about social media for that, for sure.
Jennifer: Chinasa I really appreciate that. And for anyone who’s listening, who is experiencing grief right now, but maybe you’re not so sure how much you want to post about it online, or if you want to reach out to people that way. Remember that you can also use direct messages and actually have those kinds of private conversations about this through social media as well.
So there are many options for talking about grief, but it sounds like Chinasa has gotten a pretty positive response from being able to open up about her mom and the grief that she’s felt online.
Chinasa: Absolutely. And I think in a lot of ways, people are like, well, nobody wants to hear about this anymore. She’s been gone for some while. Right? Like we sometimes get in our own heads and feel like we need to emote or share for other people.
But I put that to the shelf. I think you have to just come out. A big piece of me sharing is also me being honest and authentic. I don’t show up every day just smiling, like the world is glorious and good.
Like it is, right? Some days.
But there are days where I’m really in the pits with grief. And I might feel that to share so that people understand that this is a process. You don’t have to beat yourself up if you don’t feel like you are where you thought you would be a year from now, two years from now.
I think in a lot of ways, it’s great to serve as a possibility model for others who are probably in the beginning stages or midway through who are wondering, will it get better again? Or what does this look like?
You know, we all grieve differently. Right? All I can do is model my process.
I may share more than another person, but I think in a lot of ways that sharing does open up the doors for more prolonged conversations that I think honestly needs to happen more, especially when we think about people die every day. Every day.
And if we can’t talk about death, which is a natural part of life, then when will the conversation ever happen? If we can’t talk about it at work, we can’t talk about it at home, or with our friends or loved ones. Like we have to talk about it because we will all unfortunately experience this.
I think the online community provides a great outlet to have a space to do it.
Jennifer: I’ve lost both my parents. I think the grief has been a long journey. My mom died about 20 years ago and my dad 15 years ago. And I’m still processing it.
Chinasa: Yes.
Jennifer: It doesn’t go away. It doesn’t stop. And being able to talk about it has been something that has been so healing for me.
I think the only reason I haven’t done it online is because so many of the people who knew them have also passed. They were quite a bit older when they adopted me.
And so I think that kind of like public remembrance, that public memorial that you say is part of some of the posts that you do, it’s just so beautiful. I love that. I’ve seen that before, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone talk about what that feels like for them. And what posting about, you know, your mom’s cookies makes it feel like when you post. And so I really liked that. Thank you.
Chinasa helps people who are experiencing grief
Jennifer: Now, tell me a little bit more about your business because your business is now helping some people who are experiencing trauma. Both individuals and organizations, is that right?
Chinasa: Yes. I’m so excited about the work that I’m doing right now with organizations. I’ve had the opportunity to be able to talk more in detail with leaders who are looking for ways to perhaps set the stage for these conversations that I’m talking about right now.
I think if I were to say the most rewarding part of being an entrepreneur in this space, academic entrepreneur of this kind, I think in a lot of ways is being able to leverage your research to do the work. But then also to realize that there are more practical ways to implement it across different organizations and systems. The entrepreneurial route has been very affirming in a lot of ways and very encouraging to me to be able to step out and do this more systemically.
I offer talks to different organizations based on what their needs are, how they want to engage in the conversation.
I’m open and transparent. I bring the research with me. I’m sharing with them real time data because I think at times people need to know. They need to know the statistics. They need to know the experiences of others.
And then they also need to provide the space for those within their organizations to now begin to talk about, well, how do we perhaps cultivate something like this for ourselves? I appreciate that space to be able to do this work in this context.
In the same vein, I also offer grief coaching and grief circles. [Laughs]. I’m laughing because I never thought I would offer that. I never thought that I would be in the space or the head space to do it.
But it was so ironic. At the height of the pandemic, a good friend of mine asked me to start leading grief circles for her organization.
I hesitated at first because you know, in a lot of ways, as an academic, you feel like you need to have all the certifications and credentials under your belt.
In order to step out and do it, but I’ll be frank and say, I started to do it and engage in the work and it has been some of the most eyeopening and rewarding components of what I’ve been able to do since.
To be frank, it’s an absolute honor to be able to support people in this capacity. It’s a tough space to be in. It is a hard place to, you know, step outside of oneself and make yourself available to support others in their journey. But at the same time, it has been absolutely rewarding to see people find what they need in that space at the same time.
I don’t come to it as the guru or the person that’s bringing everything. I come to it as a supportive guide to help people, as they’re thinking through and navigating their own loss. And to think about perhaps how they may begin to forge a path way forward.
A lot of times we just feel stuck. We feel stuck. We don’t think we are going to ever be able to pick up our feet and move one in front of the other.
But when you’re in spaces, when you choose to not isolate, and you get into community with people, I think that is where we’re able to begin to make some semblance of meaning from the gravity of it all.
It’s a lot, but we have to find ways to just think about how may I perhaps begin to move forward. Not necessarily leaving the person in the past by carrying them with you in your heart. And doing things that are intentionally honoring them in yourself along the way.
Jennifer: Oh, that’s beautiful.
I’m so glad that we talked about this because so many people are grieving right now and holding it in. And just trying to stay strong for themselves, for their families to keep moving forward.
And sometimes you just can’t. Sometimes moving forward is just not something you can do on your own. And it’s not something that your family can help you do. Sometimes they don’t have that capacity. Sometimes you don’t have that capacity. But there is help out there. There are ways that you can move forward by working with other people by finding that community. And maybe by hiring Dr. Chinasa Elue as your trauma coach.
I know that I would need something like that. Now that I know that it exists, I wish I had that when I was younger. And I think other people will be glad to have heard you talk about it as well.
Chinasa: Thank you.
Be yourself online
Jennifer: Well, this has been a wonderful conversation. Is there anything else you’d like to add about online presence, about your work, before we wrap up?
Chinasa: I would just say for those who are kind of on the edge of finding their voice online or putting themselves out there. I would just say it’s trial and error. Right? Don’t make it such a high stakes thing.
In a lot of ways, it does take time to find your voice. You’re going to mess up. You might say things…We always worried about getting canceled and the whole nine.
We have to think about perhaps how we might engage in conversations. Like I mentioned beforehand, when there’s a hot button issue that is on the docket for the day. Pick any day, there’s always something new, right? Thinking about our online behaviors is key before we begin to engage in those conversations.
What might we say that contributes in a meaningful way? I don’t like to fan the flame perhaps, but I do like to contribute in ways that provide solutions in a more sustainable way towards action. I think thinking about how you want to engage is key.
And then we think about who you are as a person. We’re not static people, right? There’s depth and range to who we are individually. Let your personality shine forth. That’s the secret sauce. Be yourself.
I think I’ve gotten really comfortable in my skin. I share what I share because it’s who I am, right? And it may not be everybody’s jam, but for me, my jam is just fine. And that’s just the way I choose to present myself.
So if someone is thinking about perhaps ways to express themselves online. I would just say lean into you. Do you. Okay? They can’t go wrong.
Jennifer: Oh, I love that.
Chinasa: Yeah, you can’t go wrong.
Jennifer: Just be you.
Well thank you so much! Be sure to share this interview with your friends.
Dr. Chinasa Elue is a professor, speaker, coach, and the CEO and Founder of True Titans Consulting Group. She is an expert on grief leadership in higher education and trauma-informed practices in organizational settings. She supports leaders in moving forward to make impactful change in the midst of uncertainty with empathy and care. She provides strategic coaching and consulting that opens the doors to transformation through policy and practice. She hosts Grieving in Color, a podcast that explores the various ways we navigate our experiences with grief and loss and a place where we find the courage to intentionally heal in our daily lives.
Dr. Elue is an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Higher Education at Kennesaw State University. She leads the Research Lab for the Study of Emotional Intelligence, Leadership Effectiveness, and Well-Being of Educational Leaders.
Connect with Chinasa on social media @DrChinasaElue.
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!
About once a year a student comes to my office to ask about becoming a law professor. I have to tell him or her there is virtually no chance and that may be overly optimistic. The reason, of course, is that they are not attending one of a tiny handful of — mainly expensive private — law schools that produce what people who went to those schools, and are in charge of hiring, regard as good enough to be law professors. This always seemed odd to me since some of the smartest people I know went to mid level law schools and some of the dumbest and most narrowly educated (including some law professors) went to the fancy schools.
Even if they apply to be a law professor they will be quickly vetoed — without so much as a second look — by someone who did go to one of those law schools. Strange isn’t it. The privileged attend the fancy schools, get all puffed up about it but they actually do not think they are very good teachers. How do we know this? Because rarely, if ever, do they think they have been effective enough in class to elevate even the smartest student to be a potential law professor. They must be lousy teachers since they cannot even explain to others what they claimed to have learned in law school themselves.
So what is up with this. It’s either about rankings or some delusional notion that you have to have gone to a fancy school to be an effective teacher and researcher. I’ve said enough in other blogs about how law schools will sacrifice everything to advance in the rankings. It is the least ethical conduct I have seen in legal education. And, I do not know whether going to a fancy school is correlated with good teaching and research. I once attempted an empirical study of this but could not find enough people who went to non fancy schools to make the study valid.
So what’s is it really about? It’s about status and preserving status– anyway you can. Think about it. You’ve spend a few hundred thousand to attend a fancy school and you are a law professor. (And you are sure to remind the students of your days at Harvard or Yale,) Then someone is hired who did not go to a fancy school and is running circles around you both teaching-wise and research-wise. What does that mean about you? It may mean that you are not so hot after all since some poor schlub from the University of Florida is kicking your elitist ass.
So don’t feel bad. It’s just a way elitists ensure that the caste system is perpetuated. It has nothing to do with your merit and, most definitely, nothing to do with theirs.
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
In Fall 2019, I was truly fortunate to receive a grant from the Hogg Foundation to promote the 2020 Census in East Texas. Yes, this area includes my hometown county – Panola County, then Rusk County and Shelby County. This was an AMAZING project! Thanks Hogg Foundation!
The North East Texas Counts campaign had three goals for the project. Goal one was “to select and train 200 NETX Counts Ambassadors and Junior Ambassadors to tell the importance of the census to the community”. Goal two was “to engage and educate at least 3,000 residents in the tri-county community (especially hard-to-count populations) about the importance of the census”. The final goal, goal three” was “to saturate the tri-county community media outlets with Census information pertinent to their residents”. Through this campaign, we hosted 25 outdoor Census booths, eight interactive community information sessions, an engaging social media campaign, and received coverage in almost 10 newspapers and television outlets.
The North East Texas Counts began the Census season by communicating with key contacts in the community and scheduling large-scale events to educate the community about the Census. We scheduled events at the local community college, library, etc. After the three counties restricted large scale and in-person events, we decided to develop a more robust online training and development process for our interns and volunteers.
We offered numerous outdoor Census education table sessions. However, instead of offering these sessions outside large big-box retailers in the country, we offered these sessions in formats more focused on common pain points experienced by residents of the three counties and safety protocols of the counties. Instead of shopping at big-box retailers, the residents were more focused on shopping in smaller retailers, visiting gas stations, and visiting the post office. As a result, our strategy changed. During this process, we coined the phrase, “from gas stations to grocery stores”, because these were the essential places visited by residents during the pandemic. During this process, we offered information booths outside of gas stations, libraries in each county, Tractor Supply stores, city council areas, and on the side of the major highways. These strategies proved to be very effective because many residents indicated they have not taken the Census before and they did not know the importance of the Census. We were able to provide support for these residents through interactive in-person, on-one-one programming focused on the Census.
Community Communication
The North East Texas Counts team began the Census season by communicating with key contacts in the community and scheduling large-scale events to educate the community about the Census. We scheduled events at the local community college, library, etc. After the three counties restricted large scale and in-person events, we decided to develop a more robust online training and development process for our interns and volunteers.
We offered three pop-up Census education table sessions outside large big-box retailers in the country. During these sessions, participants received USB chargers, Census t-shirts, and USB wall plugs. These technology and apparel items were essential items during the pandemic, because individuals in these areas usually have to travel to larger cities for technology items. People saw our items as they drove on the highways and many turned around to hear about the Census and to receive the items. Many residents commented that they have seen several Census shirts around their town and they wanted to learn more. We did not have any Census t-shirts left after September 30, 2020.
North East Texas Counts Census – Coverage
This project was one of the TOP projects of my faculty career. It truly changed my life and impacted the way that I see local, state, and federal government. This project ENERGIZED me!
Stay tuned!
Sincerely,
Dr. Jennifer T. Edwards Professor of Communication
Executive Director of the Texas Social Media Research Institute & Rural Communication Institute
