PR-Bridge

This is the first part of a three-part post examining the communications lessons drawn from a short romp through American popular culture. Today, I will focus on the CBS hit television show Survivor. Next, I will tackle the NRA. The last installment will focus on the so-called “Tea Party” movement.

Despite what may seem like a tenuous connection, there are significant communications insights that can be pulled from these entities. Importantly, what they reveal has consequences for professionals who make their livelihood interacting with mass audiences. They also show the tight link between popular culture and communications.

As scholar Gary L. Harmon explained in a 1983 article in Studies in Popular Culture, “The goal of popular culture study is a better understanding of what we as participants in mass culture believe, fear, hope for, and gain or lose as a result of that participation and of how we ‘process’ and use popular culture in our private and public lives.”

Given today’s popular culture-soaked society, there has never been a more necessary time for studying culture and its consequences, particularly as a means of communications.

Survivor

Another season of Survivor ended with the “Finale” and “Reunion” shows airing last night on CBS. For the second straight competition, arch-bad guy Russell Hantz watched as a jury of cast-out castaways (who he manipulated to get to the finals) voted someone less deserving the $1 million winner’s purse. Russell played a brilliant game, yet did not win, because the people voting for him could not get past the reason they were on the jury and not in the finals — his cunning. One would expect, in this season of experienced Survivor contestants, that the ultimate vote would be based on skill in the confines of the game. If someone beat me again and again and again in a competition, I might hate them for it, but I would also hold a great deal of respect for that person as a more skilled competitor.

The irony in the way Survivor determines its winner is that the people “voted off” get to decide. From a viewer’s perspective, the way the jury ultimately votes is often laughable, at best. The game — so many jury members somehow forget that it is a game somewhere between being eliminated and joining the jury — is described as “outplay, outwit, outlast,” yet the contestants that excel in this avenue are not rewarded for their skill. The hypocrisy is rampant when it comes time to vote.

In last night’s episode, for example, hero Rupert Boneham congratulated himself for exemplifying heroic characteristics, without considering (remembering?) his own actions that were outside those boundaries. Benjamin “Coach” Wade was another hypocrite, often talking about ideas that touched on values and ethics, but then not walking the walk. At the finale, he wondered about whether he could change his image during the all-star season, after watching himself on television and seeing that he acted like an arrogant jerk in the past. The live audience applauded when he reported that his Survivor experience made him a better person, but once again, these were just words.

The continuing success of the game show is in the way it reflects society. The communications lessons emerging from Survivor are instructive:

• Left to their own devices, people almost always make decisions based primarily on self-preservation and self-aggrandizement.
• When thwarted, one’s focus becomes even more hyper-self-centered, basically elevating gut reaction and anger over critical assessment.
• The “general good” is virtually nonexistent [see the first lesson].
• Despite what people learn in their lives about judging others based on merit, etc., image is often more important than one’s actions.

This kind of insight into people and the way they create their personal worldviews is invaluable in the communications world. First and foremost, it points to a basic flaw in the way organizations think, which hinges on extensive/intricate structures, planning, enacting, and reacting. Taking a cue from postmodernist thought, I wonder if most of the “strategic” work done in organizations isn’t basically busywork disguised as an attempt at controlling things that are basically uncontrollable.

For example, I worked with a company that conducted annual strategic communications planning late each year. However, that work never got completed until well into the first quarter of the planned year and changed dramatically along the way — kind of basing the plan off of events that took place that influenced the plan. Hundreds of employees spent countless hours preparing the annual strategic plan, wasting untold resources and time better spent actually doing necessary work, ultimately causing frustration up and down the corporate food chain.

What Survivor and other so-called reality programs expose is the utter focus on self-preservation that really drives people. As in the example above, workers may go through the motions of planning, but often without commitment to the effort or the outcome. Instead of paralysis by committee and structure, organizations should better link overall strategy/aspirations with those of their employees and audiences. Rather than assume that planning and structure equal control, organizations would benefit from a more realistic confrontation with reality. Perhaps in this way, organizational arrogance might lessen, where blinders cause companies to trumpet the “world’s leading” this and the “industry standard” that language.

Perhaps the challenge is simply a lack of context in which organizations operate, which creates a false environment. This translates into inauthentic practices, such as a hypothetical company that provides the funds to build a playground in a poor, urban area to curry favor with a minority constituency or key politician. As a result, true leadership is replaced by “wink-and-a-nod” management, which lacks authenticity or context.

Perhaps the overriding problem is that organizations are thought of as people in today’s world, rather than the false structures run by individuals that they actually are. The quest for power and its trappings leads people to act in their own interest first — just like the jury members on Survivor who punished Russell for his role in ousting them.

“Thought leader” is such an interesting term, particularly in the midst of the information age. Yet, even now — when anyone with Web access can “publish” — compelling voices rise above the din and establish themselves as true thought leaders. My Kent State colleague Bill Sledzik is such an example.

Consistently over years of professional experience and in the classroom, Bill stands as an innovator. He realized the power of Web-based communications early. Subsequently building ToughSledding into a “go-to” site for compelling information about topics central to the profession. As a result, Bill is the dean of PR educators on the Web. No one consistently or as powerfully delivers great content that mixes real-world insight with the perspective gained from teaching generations of young professionals, whether it is commenting on Millennial struggles with criticism or the “challenges” of mixing PR and marketing.

The wise editors at Bulldog Reporter recently interviewed Bill on the current and future state of public relations and the challenges the industry faces. I found the analysis of students’ current interests (TMZ v. WSJ) particularly interesting. We see this all the time as faculty members, but I think it might wake up Bulldog’s readers in the professional world. More people need to be talking about his problem, since students cannot understand issues that are newsworthy or what might make a story worthy to an editor if the only “news” they have ever read is from celebrity gossip sites.

Read the interview with Bill for more insight and observations. These issues matter!

On Friday, April 16, the Third annual YouToo Social Media Conference takes place. The all-day conference, co-sponsored by the Akron Area Public Relations Society of America Chapter and the PRSSA Kent State Chapter, will include hands-on sessions with expert presenters in such branding tools as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. There will also be a dessert reception for professionals and students to network.

My presentation in the Student Track examines a subject near-and-dear to my heart — the education and acquisition of knowledge by future communicators and the consequences it has for them and on the profession — “Becoming the Smartest Person in the Room: Intellectual Curiosity, Critical Thinking and Your Communications Career.”

Here’s the overview:

Young professionals face relentless demands as they enter the work world. This session focuses on how and why   communicators must be the smartest people in every room they enter and examines the fundamental skills essential for success in today’s chaotic environment — intellectual curiosity and critical thinking. Learn how to put these ideas to use (today!) for a more rewarding career (and well-rounded, well-lived life).

In addition, the conference features well-regarded social media experts, such as Phil Gomes, senior vice president of Edelman Digital in Chicago and Kyle Lacy, founder and CEO of Brandswag.

For more information, check out the conference Web site.

The Fourth Summit on Communication and Sport is taking place this weekend in Cleveland — a gathering of some of the smartest people exploring these issues on the planet. I spent yesterday chairing two research sessions at the conference, as well as taking in the fascinating keynote address by sports historian Robert Bellamy, a professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.

The multitude of topics provided for a day of intense thinking among panelists, chairs, and the audience. I found the summit intellectually stimulating, but simultaneously disconcerting. On the one hand, I feel personally indebted to my own limited sports career for developing some of my leadership skills and ideas I hold about the necessity of hard work. I have also written quite a bit about sports, particularly in the book: Basketball in America: From the Playgrounds to Jordan’s Game and Beyond. In fact, I will continue working on sports-related topics, including a three-volume anthology examining the history of sports in America across its broad history, which will be published by Praeger.

Yet, on a deeper level, I also revile the public’s intense preoccupation with sports. The NCAA Tournament and resulting “March Madness” is a perfect example, as it seems the round-the-clock coverage of the games feeds directly into the 24×7 news cycle, basically diverting people’s attention from virtually everything else. Most troubling is the role sports plays as a tool for establishing the way people view others.

One of the most intriguing ideas that scholars at the Fourth Summit on Communication and Sport returned to repeatedly was the way sports directly or indirectly shapes the public’s most fundamental beliefs. For example, Meredith M. Bagley, a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas - Austin discussed how the idea of female athletes playing a “pure” version of sports such as basketball and hockey is actually coded language that inhibits the perception of women athletes and pushes the notion that they are less athletic than men. In another session, Bagley spoke eloquently about how sportswriters shape the public’s understanding of WNBA athletes by discussing them in terms of how they act as mothers and their looks, rather than as gifted athletes. Placing them in this narrative enables the public to view them in “acceptable” terms.

In these instances and thousands more, one sees sports and sports communication accentuating negative stereotypes. For example, I tuned into a couple minutes of the first half of the St. Mary’s–Villanova men’s basketball game and heard the announcer waxing on regarding the intelligence and “smart play” of St. Mary’s center Omar Samhan, the kind of talk that is often used to describe non-black players across sports, just as in the NFL, white quarterbacks are noted for smartness and the ability to strategically manage a game, while black quarterbacks are described with coded language, such as “athletic” or “quick.”

What seems increasingly more apparent in my own life is that fascination or obsession with sports amounts to a monumental waste of time. As a kid, growing up as ESPN launched, I remember watching the game recaps all summer, while playing the board game All Star Baseball and keeping in-depth statistics on my make believe leagues. Then, I would meet up with my friends and play whiffleball, basketball, baseball, and other sports until sundown. Most nights, we would turn on the garage lights and shoot baskets late into the night.

Now, so many decades later, I wish I would have put that kind of effort into more productive avenues. And, when I consider the future of my now-four-year old daughter, my fervent hope is that she does not obsess about sports the way I did. If the choice is between basketball star and math league captain, I pick the latter, if nothing else in hopes that she avoids many of the nagging injuries I sustained and pay for daily.

The more I think about the role of sports in society, the whole equation seems like little more than a giant shell game to make small numbers of people a whole lot of money off the backs of the many, with the added bonus of diverting the attention of people from issues that need attention, such as joblessness, the national debt, warfare, injustice, and the millions of other points that need addressed.

I understand that it is somewhat hypocritical to complain about sports and its role in society when I am actually contributing to the problem. However, when I look back at a lifetime of true sports obsession on my part, I am ashamed that I wasted this time. Certainly, there were physical benefits and perhaps psychological ones too, but I can’t help but come to the conclusion that I am deluding myself.

Perhaps the real issue at hand is that the more I study and think about popular culture, the more I am forced to see it as a bad thing. At one point earlier in my career, I promised myself that I would not become one of those older scholars who disparaged popular culture. Yet, the distraction it causes as a means of diverting attention from important issues nearly forces me to that conclusion. Since sports is such a central feature of popular culture, then it is logical that my feelings about sports would change too.

Born on March 18, 1932, in Reading, Pennsylvania, John Updike would have been 78 years-old today. Below, I present “Conclusion — Evolution of a Literary Lion” from my recent dissertation: “Racing Toward the Apocalypse: John Updike’s New America.” The study examines Updike as a writer, particularly in the last years of his life, using ideas from symbolic interactionism and reception studies to open new interpretations of his work. I focus much of the dissertation on Updike’s controversial novel Terrorist (2006).

Conclusion – Evolution of a Literary Lion

I set up shop rather innocently, naively, as a professional writer…I don’t really do much else but write. And I write every morning and the books, the manuscript pages, do pile up.

—From a 2006 interview with John Updike, (“Bartos Forum”)

Updike’s public persona and self-identity merge in the epigraph above, which makes it appropriate that he delivered it at a forum sponsored by the New York Public Library. The first part of the quote puts the reader (listener) in familiar Updike territory – that he embarked on his career seemingly by accident, as if he stumbled upon the idea one day walking home from the grocery store.

The second sentence accounts for Updike’s self-image of writer as professional craftsman, in his mind, not much different than anyone else who plies a trade and then realizes the results of the effort. This Updike takes the reader back to his early career, typing away in a dingy office above the Dolphin Restaurant in tiny Ipswich, Massachusetts. The final piece addresses Updike’s prodigious output by placing it in modest terms, which implies that through consistent, hard work, the pages materialize or mystically accumulate.

 What one realizes when attempting to methodically unravel Updike is that finding out who he is at his core is impossible. There is too much intertwined, from his discussion of celebrity as a mask that eats at the face to the different roles he admits playing in an effort to cope with internal demons and public demands. While these layers confound the researcher attempting to get at the heart of an author, perhaps the inability to do so contains a large part of the magic of literary studies. We can infer, interrogate, analyze, and examine, but in the end, all roads must lead back to what the author has written.

 Maybe the closest we can get to a writer is to simply identify them as “storyteller” and proceed as if the entire life is one of creating narratives. Updike would be the first to tell the enterprising scholar that writers are professional liars. In that case, can anything be known about them, but what they have written? While some scholars view fame as a negative aspect of popular culture, creating a public identity does not automatically determine that a celebrity is nefarious. Perhaps, if one believes Updike and Mailer, it is closer to erecting a brick wall around the perceived notion of inner-self as the fountain for authorial material that he must draw upon. In this case, then, inventing a public persona is a necessity, because without access to the inner source of experience or the well running dry, the writer is left without a narrative.

* * *

My dissertation explores two critical points in understanding John Updike’s recent career. First, I examine him from a perspective outside the heavily-studied Rabbit teratology. Focusing on Updike’s novel Terrorist, I attempt to counter the common misperception that he has little of to offer beyond the chronicling of middle-class, suburban America. Instead, this work digs for a deeper understanding of Updike as a writer.

            Next, I consider Updike’s role as an artist, professional writer, and celebrity to draw out a sense of the writer’s life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Using him as a case study enables the analysis to include his changing role as a literary writer who also had major bestsellers, as well as his standing as a celebrity and public intellectual. Rather than dismiss these cultural influences, I explore how they intersect with audiences, readers, and critics. For example, it seems naïve to believe that Updike’s role as a public figure did not play a part in how critics and scholars assess his work. A rising star among journalistic critics could gain a reputation for toughness by attacking an author with Updike’s prominence. Likewise, anyone looking into the publishing industry aspect of being an author (appearances, marketing, etc.) would be remiss in not assessing Updike’s role in building up his particular public persona. Piecing together his commentary regarding fame and celebrity creates a model of the public Updike that scholars can examine.

             The central task of this dissertation is a close examination of Terrorist, including the themes Updike addressed and literary techniques he employed to promulgate those ideas. From this textual analysis, Updike’s vision of America and the world in the twenty first century emerges.

             By reassessing Updike’s evolution as a writer, both in subject matter and literary technique, one realizes how his work reflects an increasing preoccupation with global issues, from American imperialism to terrorism. This study broadens the general conceptualization critics and scholars hold regarding Updike’s work by exploring the themes and literary techniques he used to portray the broader world.

             Focusing on Updike the writer and his final standalone novel, this dissertation helps Updike scholars and critics address a central point that very well may define his historical reputation: Is there an Updike beyond the Rabbit novels and is there an Updike beyond suburban nostalgia? I argue that Terrorist reveals a great American writer at his full powers, as the world around him undergoes a watershed moment.

* * *

Let’s return to the initial thesis – Updike matters. What follows (and will continue to appear from my sweat-sopped brow for the next couple of decades) is an attempt to prove this declaration. Within the endeavor, though, is also a more encompassing aspiration: to prove that writing and reading still matter in an “Age of Technology” dominated by Google, television (reality and scripted), and film. As outdated a notion as it may be, I remain committed to the idea that reading is important, even as college students sell back textbooks still in the original shrink wrap, instead choosing to obsess about Facebook status updates and text messaging.

 Updike too – looking like an antiquarian fuddy-duddy – fought this battle over the last decade of his life. As a professional writer, he criticized the potential demise of publishing at the hands of Google’s desire to create a digital version of every book ever written and e-book publishing, wondering where the writer-as-creator fit into the picture when a reader no longer needed to purchase the product. In other words, who pays for the content in a world where content is free?

 Updike the lover of words found an easy mark in the Internet, blasting it for turning books into “something impalpable and instantaneous.” As one who cares about culture, he worried:

The Web is conjured like the genie of legend wit a few strokes of the fingers, opening, with a phrase or two, a labyrinth littered with trash and pitted with chat rooms, wherein communication is antiseptically cleansed of all the germs and awkwardness of even the most mannerly transaction with another flesh-and-blood human being” (Due Considerations 73)

 You see, Updike willingly took the highly-publicized flack from journalists and the technology intelligentsia because he believed in the power of books.

 Obviously, Updike had a chit in the game, as it were. His livelihood depended on selling books and magazines. Yet, we as proponents of the written word have no less stake in its propagation. As such, do we furrow our brows at the latest Dan Brown thriller selling 1 million copies on its release day or the publishing empire of J.K. Rowling, now one of the richest women in the world?

 My goal is to advocate for literature and settle for reading. As a teacher, that means exploring (great) written words (and worlds) for the lessons they dispense and to continue interrogating authors and texts to reveal what might be learned. As a writer, this effort entails writing books, essays, and articles that engender critical thinking on the part of readers, asking them to create new ideas from the material as it interweaves with their own knowledge, lives, and experiences. Part of this task is to explore the work of writers like Updike in hopes that the scrutiny will appeal to future readers and, just maybe, instigate them reading either more of his work or researching themes, eras, and topics themselves.

 Updike’s death in January 2009 resulted in renewed interest in his work. Knopf published a posthumous collection of short stories, My Father’s Tears and Other Stories that received widespread critical appreciation. His passing caused others to reexamine the several books published in the last year of his life, including the nonfiction anthology Due Considerations and novel The Widows of Eastwick. Even his final posthumous poetry collection, Endpoint and Other Poems, gained wider readership and more mainstream reviews than his earlier poetry books. In this regard, Updike carries on the popular culture tradition of a celebrity or artist gaining broader appeal after death. That he left behind enough work to sustain this initial push was most likely a mix of Updike’s realization that he faced death, thus producing more at the end, and Knopf’s desire to meet the uptick in demand for his work.

 Most interesting for those hoping to keep Updike’s legacy alive, a core group of scholars (spearheaded by James Plath, Marshall Boswell, Lawrence Broer, Jack De Bellis, and James Schiff) launched The John Updike Society on May 24, 2009. The society plans to publish The John Updike Review, with Schiff as editor. Included in its mission statement is the goal of “awakening and sustaining reader interest in the literature and life of John Updike, promoting literature written by Updike, and fostering and encouraging critical responses to Updike’s literary works” (“History/Mission”). While one wonders why it took so long for such a group to organize, the society’s advent signals a positive for Updike’s enduring legacy. As of mid-September 2009, The John Updike Society membership nears 100 and its founders are planning its first national meeting in Pennsylvania scheduled for October 2010.

* * *

Of course, the nation changed dramatically over Updike’s long career. In contrast to other artists, writers, actors, and musicians who could not adapt across the span, however, Updike remained one of the nation’s foremost writers. It is in the guise of America’s storyteller that Updike excels. And, one must admit, Updike’s own story is part of that effort.

 At the end of the day, I argue, readers can still learn much from his work, even as today’s Internet-based society seems like it could pass him by. Although it is difficult to quantify the notion that books simply do not matter as much as they used to, one can find evidence supporting this idea by looking at the drop in book sales, particularly in “literary” fiction, or by talking about reading habits with young people.

 Perhaps more troubling, when considering Updike’s long-term reputation, is that the focus among scholars and critics is onto other topics and new impulses, such as multiculturalism, gender studies, the “other,” and those privileged and unprivileged by literature. It is this negative, rather narrow view of Updike that raises the hackles of those, such as David Foster Wallace and others, who denounce him and his contemporaries as “phallocrats” or relics of a male-dominated canon. For them, Updike exists primarily as a stand-in for Rabbit, an American “everyman” easy to pick apart for his shortcomings.

 While the stakes in Updike’s historical reputation are only really important among a relatively small group of literary scholars, one can imagine Updike falling into the second tier of American writers, mimicking, for instance, the status of a Sinclair Lewis or William Dean Howells. However, he could be elevated in the manner of F. Scott Fitzgerald to stand among the nation’s greats.

 This dissertation advocates a broader examination of Updike, encompassing his complete catalog. I argue that those who invest the effort will find the author offers a forceful critique of the United States, particularly evident in Terrorist. As a result, the reader will confront racism, the role of individuals in a consumer-based society, faith, commitment, authority, and the pitfalls of popular culture. This is Updike full steam ahead.

 Yes: matters. Matters.

Photo courtesy of flickr: emme-dk/Katrine Thielke

The good: Melanie Formentin, a gifted former student and friend, received a fully-funded TA spot in the strategic communications management doctoral program at Penn State.

The bad: She also received the dreaded thin-envelope rejection letter from Ohio State.

I advised her to jump for joy over the former and forget the latter, but in the back of my mind, I cannot get the “rejection” out of my thoughts. Clearly, there is something amiss. I could spend this whole post chatting about Melanie’s strong points, ranging from her excellent work as a student and teacher to her clipbook (as thick as the NYC phone book) and the published article that we co-authored for Public Relations Review. She is simply a star performer and has the CV to prove it.

The broader issue that needs addressed, however, is the treatment people receive when they make these kinds of major life decisions, such as choosing a college or graduate school or applying for internships and jobs. Despite all the whiz-bang technology and talk about social media improving audience-organization relations, when it comes down to it, there is a communications breakdown between applicants and institutions. The situation is — in a word — reprehensible.

For many people, life can seem like a long series of formulaic rejection letters. Why, Melanie might ask herself, did she not get into a school that she invested a great deal of time and money applying to? The application process is literally and emotionally expensive. Yet, in so many cases, the thin letter is a mass-produced template. Even the signature is usually stamped. One pours heart and soul into the effort and in return gets a flaccid, shabby, and inhumane reply, utterly devoid of empathy. Writers and other creative individuals are also familiar with the form letter rejection.

The situation is even worse when one considers the employment game. We all have personal tales (maybe even dozens or hundreds) of applying for a position that seems as if it were written directly from our resumes, to then hear nothing from the organization regarding the application or its fate. Often, we do not even know if the position got filled, let alone the qualifications of the person who won it.

The easy answer is that organizations are inundated with resumes and that a personal reply is simply not feasible. Doesn’t this excuse ring a little hollow? I know that it does for the many people waiting to hear something (anything!) from the organization. Disappointingly, many of us have even heard stories of people who made it to the interview stage who never received a follow-up call, letter, or e-mail.

The sad aspect of this situation is that it constitutes a communications breakdown. Organizations fail themselves by taking the path of least resistance, which is basically opting to not be truthful with applicants, whether it is college admission officers or human resources directors. Furthermore, we fail ourselves by accepting this treatment. There are a myriad of convenient rationales for not informing people of why they did not get a particular job, scholarship, internship, or whatever the case may be. I assume that the underlying reason is the threat of potential lawsuits. Most organizations are much better at “CYA” management than treating people like human beings.

An article in The New York Times last summer confirms that the lack of response is on the rise. The piece correctly pins some of the blame for the gaping electronic hole on candidates who scattershot their resumes all over the Web, as if they are qualified for every job that appears. Still, is it too much to ask for some clarification? It would be difficult to quantify the cost of an angry applicant, but there certainly is a financial impact, particularly in an age in which companies seem willing to fight for the business of every individual they can get.

Returning to Melanie’s case for a moment, how difficult could it have been for someone on the search committee or an administrator to provide her with some feedback? College search committees are notorious for this kind of behavior, but Fortune 500 companies cannot claim the higher ground either. Laura Marcus suggests that job applicants request feedback, which can certainly do damage to one’s mental state, but at least (if truthful) would help the candidate prepare for the future.

Perhaps the larger issue at hand is that there is no clear distinction in today’s society between reality and unreality. The two are so intertwined that there is no hope for “the truth” to be revealed. Rather than provide honest evaluations, we hide behind form letters. Instead of thoughtful critique, one gets legalese — or worse — hears nothing at all.

What I have a difficult time delineating is whether most people would even want the truth. Americans are really good at evading the truth by wrapping themselves up in whatever popular culture impulse occurs at any given moment, so perhaps the truth would be considered in some way un-American. For example, as if telling a person why he didn’t get into the college of his choice would be keeping him from achieving his dreams.

I like to think that we are a bit tougher than that. And, we would be, if we lived in a culture that valued the kind of dispassionate evaluation that would be necessitated by such an environment.

Image courtesy of dbking at Flickr.com

Rather than cover the intense fighting in southern Afghanistan, which took the lives of four NATO servicemen yesterday, or focus on President Obama’s speech later today in Las Vegas, where he will launch a $1.5 billion plan to help the states most hit by the housing crunch, the media storm hovers over Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, waiting with bated breath for Tiger Woods to break his self-imposed vow of silence.

Yawn!

I cannot decide if the saddest aspect of this whole pseudo-press conference is that it makes (yet again) a mockery of the press or that people seem to care at all. Let’s just all take a collective deep breath and admit that there are about a million more important, pressing events and issues that need attention.

Yawn!

Given the rules that Tiger and his camp have imposed on today’s “event,” let’s drop the “press” from “press conference” and just refer to it as a conference. Outraged, the national golf press corps responded by voting to boycot the event — as if they were invited anyway. But, all this boo-hooing from golf experts and other media talking heads is just too much to take.

Yawn!

All of the sudden, golf writers (don’t forget…covering golf) are indignant because they cannot ask Tiger Woods questions about his private life? Where were these junior league Woodward and Bernsteins the last decade? Please let me know if you can remember a golf journalist ever asking Tiger a difficult question. Can’t do that…might get one exiled to the outer reaches, covering the lesser lights outside Tiger’s universe.

Yawn!

Remember, though, this public falling on the sword is media-driven. Countless men and women around the world have affairs and get divorced. I usually fall into the “you wanted to be a celebrity, so deal with the consequences” camp, yet this circus (after a lifetime of watching “public apologies,” from Magic Johnson to Bill Clinton) is just too much.

Yawn!

Without Woods’ star power, many golf writers might be out of work, which adds another dimension to the story. Hardcore journalist types often lament (or even hate) public relations, marketing, advertising, and other organizational communications as evil or somehow impure compared to their chosen trade. Perhaps a little self-reflection is in order today…as all those boycotting golf writers try to figure out a way to continue talking about Tiger Woods, long after he finishes, or until his next appearance.

Image by striatic/hobvias sudoneighm

I am a college teacher. I write books. Keeping up with the Chronicle of Higher Education is an occupational necessity. Usually, I read the online version, which is easier to access, in addition to the daily and weekly e-mails that alert me to the contents. I also enjoy commenting on articles, such as Jere P. Surber’s controversial essay this week, attempting to explain why liberal arts professors are liberal (look for user name “Batchro”). What I enjoy most is that the Chronicle covers topics and issues that are pertinent to professors and others around college campuses.

Occasionally, though, an essay so daft slips into the mix, that I feel compelled to critique it. Elif Batuman wrote such a piece this week, “Confessions of an Accidental Literary Scholar.” What is even more agonizing is that the essay is drawn from a book to be published in a week or so by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This piece is bad on so many levels, I can’t even begin to place them all under a microscope, from the ridiculous title to the blazing sense of entitlement Batuman reeks.

I feel so strongly that I have to repost what I said on the comment section:

“The primary challenge in today’s confessional, peek-into-the-medicine-cabinet society is that this kind of drivel is viewed as an affirmation. Are Chronicle readers supposed to emulate Batuman here or gain inspiration from her story? Or, is Batuman’s story one of poor work ethic and entitlement?

Let’s take a closer look at what she outlines. First, imagine the angst of the teen Batuman so “oppressed” by “the tyranny of leisure” that she can’t do anything more than spend weeks “flopped on my grandmother’s super-bourgeois rose-colored velvet sofa, consuming massive quantities of grapes, reading obsessively.” This incident, though, stands counter to her teenage determination that she should not “read too many novels.” She also admits that she not intellectually curious, and “uninterested by what I knew of literary theory and history… I didn’t care about truth; I cared about beauty.” Here “beauty” is jargon used to elevate privilege over critical thinking or the hard work required to gain knowledge.

Next, Batuman is uninterested (perhaps the theme of her young life), in linguistics because her professor required her to think. Her sense of entitlement leads her to believe that she knows more than the professor with the typical millennial excuse: “I could not imagine a more objectless, melancholy project.” Instead, she focuses on the professor’s looks, another indicator in our celebrity-obsessed world. She takes the easy route, rather than working to understand the subject, “I couldn’t face linguistics again—it had let me down, failed to reveal anything about language and what it meant.” College instructors will certainly recognize this trait – it’s the teacher’s fault, not the student that did not actively work to learn. In response, Batuman takes the easiest path, a degree in literature, “the major with the fewest requirements” and only reading 7-8 novels.

Then, Batuman decides to write a novel (again, from a person who has not read widely or shown the ability to work hard), but does not want to go to an M.F.A. program that would actually require her to read deeply or demean herself by paying tuition, attending classes, or (gasp) “analyzing the writings of a bunch of kids like me.” Being too privileged for this, she decides an artists’ colony is the answer, but later backs out of that too when the amenities are not up to her standards.

Batuman hits the lottery when Stanford accepts her and gives her financial support, though in the essay she writes this in passive voice, probably an attempt at modesty: “I had been offered five years of financial support.” Realizing that being a grad student at Stanford requires all the messy things grad school entails (“classes, conferences, teaching, and endless lunches…[and] term papers”), she drops out to write a novel, which she also cannot accomplish.

Somehow a magazine editor gave her an assignment to write about short stories. Rather than learn from the experience, she blasts the writers in the Best American Short Stories anthologies (edited by writers you might have hear of: Lorrie Moore and Michael Chabon) because they think of writing as a “craft,” as if the choice between it and thinking of writing as art is an all-or-nothing decision. In response, she labels the work in the anthology, “a nearly unreadable core of brisk verbs and vivid nouns.” Let’s review some of the writers Batuman places in this category: John Updike, Alice Munro, Edward P. Jones, T.C. Boyle, and Joyce Carol Oates.

Then, in the tradition of Lifetime movies and confessional bloggers, Chronicle readers are given the payoff, the big “a-ha” moment, after Batuman falls while jogging and breaks her elbow: She loves literary theory after all! Ohh, the humanity! Seeing the reality in a $1,700 hospital bill, she takes “a cold, hard look at the direction my life was headed.” Luckily, Stanford threw her a lifeline.

So, I return to my original question: are we supposed to admire Batuman or gain some kind of special insight from her story? I shudder to think about what her tale says about Stanford, entitlement, or millennial navel-gazing fueled by self-absorbed blogging and Facebook. The outcome of celebrity-obsession as manifested in today’s society is that everyone now believes that their story is meaningful. The entitlement of thinking one deserves Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame is rampant. Batuman is a case book example.”

Please, tell me I am crazy for being so harsh or pointing out these egregious statements. Or, am I on the mark?

Bill Sledzik is a thoughtful guy. Like many other communications professionals around the world, I find myself thinking about a topic or big picture issue in the field, and sure enough, Bill has blogged about it at ToughSledding. His most recent post centers on critical thinking, which over the years has developed into one of the central issues in my life. But, that obsession is part of the “challenge,” because I am always aware of critical thinking in a world that rarely values or supports the idea.

The devaluing of critical thinking starts early in the United States. For example, our K-12 teachers are hamstrung by focusing on standardized tests, rather than providing students with a broad, liberal education that forces them to reexamine their developing world views. Critics lament the notion that educators have to “teach to the test,” but do not attempt to change the system. As a matter of fact, I would estimate that most intelligent people realize that standardized testing has hurt the American education system, yet it remains the central focus of the public education system.

In the work world, one is constantly confronting the lack of critical thinking. In communications, that often means relying on what worked in the past, rather than do the necessary hard work required to analyze, assess, evaluate, and create. Often, the conservative notion of doing what worked last month, year, or decade is built on a tower of ignorance — the executive does not really understand the communications function or the sales force does not really appreciate the IT staff, and the list goes on and on. The results of “silo-ed” thinking is dysfunctional organizations that have too many leaders protecting their turf, rather than doing what is best for the entity as a whole.

Teaching college students about critical thinking — whether new freshmen or graduate students — is arguably the most important task of faculty members. Particularly when dealing with undergrads one must realize that long after they have left the classroom and forgotten much of the material we yearn to get in their heads, they will retain the basic tenets of critical thinking if the concepts have been presented, discussed, and modeled.

Last evening, Kent State University hosted Ken Bain, the renowned teacher and author of What the Best College Teachers Do. He outlined the categories college students often lump into as learners. Surface learners are motivated by fear and resort to memorization and other basic tactics to get through material. Strategic learners are motivated by recognition (most often grades) and learn to provide the “correct” answers. Deep learners are motivated by meaning and a need to know the answers to questions that intrigue them.

As educators, we want classrooms filled with deep learners, unfortunately, many of the best students are strategic learners — over their time in the school system they learned to map out a strategy for getting good grades, but often at the expense of conceptual learning. One does not need to look back very far into their pasts to see how the emphasis on standardized testing and grade fear played a role in this development.

The post-college outcome, however, is shocking. Everyone has met a strategic learner-turned-organization-leader who assumes that they know everything based on their successes in college and the outside world that equates good grades with wisdom. So, the high-flying attorney thinks they know how to write because they got an “A” in English Comp and know how to write contracts, or the business executive who thinks they have insight into employees because they minored in Psychology.

The challenge is in the assumption that people make about what they think they know. Success has caused people to cement their world views into place because achievement fueled the idea. The basic deficiency, however, is that people are not willing to question their own thinking. Society rewards and celebrates people who make decisions, right or wrong, when the reward should go to people who make thoughtful decisions after consideration of evidence, etc.

Their is a glaring disparity between critical thinkers and non-critical thinkers, yet we are surrounded by a system that rewards the “gut” reaction and decision, good grades over deep learning, and speed over meaning. This leaves college professors in a difficult situation: Does one help students become the kind of future leader who reacts or thinks? Clearly, the former is valued more in the work world than the latter.

The easy answer is to say “both,” yet in practicality there must be a core belief that guides one’s teaching and there may simply not be enough room for pursuing both paths. My decision to this point in my teaching career is to create a learning environment that fosters critical thinking using the concepts of the class as tools in building those skills. As a result, sometimes my students react negatively to my charge of “be creative,” when they would prefer to have the instructions laid out piece-by-piece, as if learning were simply gluing together a model airplane.

But, I’m still learning…

The disparity between what communications students and business students learn in the classroom is immense, though there are some critical overlaps, at least from the communications side of the fence. Basically, mass communications students are required to take some introductory-level business classes, while business students are often shut out of our classes due to the entrance requirements in many journalism and mass comm departments.

Despite that business students often take no formal communications classes, they still somewhere in their curriculum pick up enough to assume that they understand public relations, advertising, etc. While it may seem insignificant for 22-year olds marching across a stage to pick up their diplomas, the lack of actual training versus the opposite notion leads to ramifications that are negative for budding executives and communicators.

Assessing the “challenges” in overcoming this issue, the best option seems to be beefing up the business-side of the communications curriculum, primarily due to the silo nature of higher education. My experience is that business school faculty and their colleagues from mass communications and communications rarely work together for the good of the whole. [Though I am hoping I find a different situation here at Kent State] Creating future public relations professionals who have a greater understanding of business management (beyond the basic introductory classes, which are often large lectures) will enable those new communicators to prove that they can “talk the talk” with their business colleagues.

My own experiment with infusing my courses with more business management perspective has been ongoing for the five years I taught at the University of South Florida and continues now as I transition to teaching graduate classes in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Kent State. My self-assessment is that the effort at USF lead to some better basic understanding of business, particularly when it came to introducing my students to integrated marketing communications.

At Kent State, I am upping the ante significantly in a graduate-level class this semester: “Public Relations Management.” Traditionally, the class is taught as a glorified case study-centered course, focusing on having the students create a strategic plan for a local nonprofit organization. While I do not denigrate those that follow this format — there is certainly value in it for PR grad students who have little practical knowledge — where is the “management” aspect in that scenario?

Instead, I ask the students to actually engage with strategic management thinkers and to look at the business environment from an executive position. As I set up the course, I found it shockingly easy to find material that provided accessible executive viewpoints. Using the Harvard Business Review, I have them read Peter F. Drucker, arguably the greatest management mind in recent history, and other pieces that address how c-level businesspeople think, feel, and make decisions.

In both my professional and academic careers, one recurring criticism of public relations and communicators I hear (particularly from executives) is that the agency, company communicators, etc., “don’t understand my business.” Though I personally see this as a challenge on the part of the executive as much as the communicators, it is my hope that introducing my students to some innovative business thinking and theory will help them look at business challenges as business challenges and not just communications challenges.

In discussions with educators, I often use the analogy that we are all some version of Johnny Appleseed, spreading seeds of knowledge that our students will go out and grow. My march continues…in a future post I’ll share the sproutlings.