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Podcast Intellectuals Panel #3 with Joy Connolly, Barry Lam, and Aurora Hutchinson
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the new books network. Welcome to this special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities Vault Podcast. I'm Robert Boynton. On October 10, 2025, NYU's Journalism Institute hosted a day long conference titled Podcast Producing Original Scholarship with Audio. Over the course of three panels, scholars, podcasters and journalists discuss how academics might employ the technique of narrative audio as part of their research. In this third and final panel, Robert Boynton moderates a conversation which asks, can Podcasts save the University? In it, Joy Connolly, Barry Lamb and Dr. Aurora Hutchinson discuss what role podcasts might play in the university's system of hiring, promotion and tenure. This is our last panel. Can Podcasting Save the University? The idea behind this panel is that it's all very well and nice to talk about the content of podcasting. We've heard some really interesting stories from great scholars like Chenjerai and Barry and Dafani who are doing podcasting. And the whole question within the university about the reward system, about validation, accreditation, all those sorts of things, those are real important questions and they make the university the great institution that it is. But institutions change slowly and the question before us is how that might happen. One of the reasons I asked Joy Connolly to have this conversation is we had had a previous conversation where she was talking about her work at the American Council of Learned Societies. She had been working on various groups to think about beyond the monograph. I mean, monographs are essentially dead. No publishing house wants to publish, nor a few do. And monographs are the currency of really the essence of academia. What other forms of validation, forms of accreditation that can exist within the academy. And so I thought I would open up by asking Joy to talk about that question, about the work she's been doing, and about how audio and podcasting fits into it.
- [02:12]
B
Thanks, Robert, and thanks everyone for coming and spending your late Friday afternoon with us. As we think through these questions, I'm thinking so many thoughts, especially having listened to the last couple panels. But I want to start by saying I usually answer this kind of question in the context of my role at acls. Not the aclu, but the acls by going straight to faculty reward structure. Not a phrase that rolled off my tongue easily. Before I became Humanities Dean here at NYU a while back, I became the provost and then acting president of the Graduate center at CUNY before I moved to acls. And now we oversee a lot of work accelerating change in the academy. As I said, I never used to say faculty reward structure. Now I say it like every day. I think we'll talk about that. So let me just pull way back and up for a second and come at this a different angle, partly having heard the last couple panels, and this idea has come up and we've dug into it a bit already. When you think about how a scholar comes up with an idea, and I say scholar, any undergraduate student person inside or outside the academy, but especially inside a college or university, someone's already said it's a solitary occupation, typically in the humanities and social sciences and the kind of narrative epistemological context we're functioning in. And I'm thinking of a question that the German philosopher Fichte asked in the early 18th century, when he was really young, as a matter of fact, in a series of public lectures he gave about the emerging university because it was being invented at the time he was talking. And he asked this question which I keep asking myself. To whom do we owe as scholars? To whom do we owe? For whom is the knowledge being produced? To what end? And the academy, for a million reasons we don't have to go into today, has, I would say, at this point in my life, deformed the answer to that question. To create an internally oriented, professional world in which many wonderful, brilliant things happen. But. And you could hear where that was going. To talk about the walls that set scholars in the academy apart from the world outside is not even a metaphor that captures the reality. It's that the university, the college, academia, functions in an alternative economy. It's a world apart. And its brilliance and wonder, because it's a world apart, but also its tragedy, and what's destroying it now is the fact that every habit, every professional habit of idea cultivation and knowledge production is happening in that world apart from the world outside. Many, many scholars and many people in this room manage to build through intense effort and time. They cross over and they sometimes bring their students with them, they sometimes bring their colleagues with them. And it can actually feel, in the little ecosystem that they create, like those walls have disappeared. But they have not the walls. The different world, the different solar system or universe. The metaphors are hard to find that capture to the degree to which are functioning on a different level from what the world needs, the people to whom I would say they owe. And I'll just say one more thing before winding up, and that is, I don't mean to say by saying this, I mean, I'm a scholar myself. I'm actually working on a book. Nothing evil is happening here. And this isn't a critical negative comment. I'm just coming at this a different way. And bringing ethics and epistemology into the picture. To say, if we just talk about faculty reward structure and how we have to rewrite the faculty handbook and get things to count so that we recruit the right people to graduate school who don't just want to write books and articles, but who want to speak to a public. We have to change that. We have to change hiring committees, we have to change tenure and promotion and contract renewal committees and all the standards, rewrite the faculty handbook, rewrite the doctoral education handbook. We do need to do those things. But we also have much bigger and more fundamental questions to ask ourselves. And that's Fichte's question. It's just so core to the survival of the academy.
- [06:34]
A
Maybe give us a glimmer of what areas that you see progress in breaking through that wall and whether podcasting is part of that and if not, what it would take for podcasting to be part of that.
- [06:47]
B
So lots of progress. Happily, there's a lot of good news out there for me. The bad news is that there's no system wide change, because as we see so tragically with what's going on in Irad, this crazy compact that the Trump White House proposed to nine universities last year, why is this happening? It's because it's a fragmented, competitive system. So system wide change is really hard to bring about. System wide alliance, as we've seen, and this is what Trump has exploited so brilliantly, is really hard to create. But there are many, many, many individual bright spots and they have to do with the right conditions coming into place so that graduate students, and usually early career faculty, but not just them, I want to say, but the energy does tend to come from the young, which is great. A certain set of conditions have to be in place. A smart enterprising scholar, a sympathetic set of colleagues, dissertation committee or departmental colleagues, sympathetic administration, maybe not everybody, but a few people, access to a little bit of funding, maybe somebody in the president's or provost's office who wants to have cool alumni magazine cover. All these things help. And that can generate through a series of ripples, you know, one successful project, you don't really need many. One successful project in a school can have immense influence so that the faculty, the committees overseeing promotion and tenure start opening up to the idea that you put public scholarship, including podcasts, on the list of materials available for evaluation for hiring, promotion and tenure and contract renewals. I've seen it happen. Places like Minnesota, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, University of California, Santa Cruz. There are a number of schools where this has happened. And I will just give one shout out to my organization's member societies, the Modern Language association, the American Historical Association. They have extensive guidelines on public scholarship, including specifically on podcasts. So there's no excuse if your colleagues tell you, but how do I evaluate this? How can I possibly figure it out? Very smart people have already figured it out. It's just a matter of putting it into practice.
- [09:03]
A
So, Lauren and Barry, you come from very different institutions, Johns Hopkins and University of California, Riverside, within your own purviews. How do you see the world of academia, either confronting, rejecting, accepting podcasting in your own work there?
- [09:22]
C
I'm Lauren Aurora Hutchinson, and maybe I should explain a bit who I am, just so people have context. I'm the director of the ideas Lab, which sits within the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. I'm the inaugural director. So it was set up three years ago and it was really set up with this mission to figure out how to do creative storytelling around bioethics. We got to exist through a very generous donation, which makes a huge difference. It gave a five year Runway in order to do this work. So I feel like it's hopefully a more positive example of how things have worked within a university structure. It's quite a big opportunity to set up, but I knew I wanted to be ambitious because I said if I'm going to go back to academia, because I had been in academia, then I went into the podcasting immersive audio space. It has to be world class. I don't want us making anything that's not going to be as excellent as it can be. That meant giving our faculty collaborators resources to take the time to really workshop and develop with us. What could it be? I've worked with the people who decide how someone gets a promotion within our department. Obviously I'm biased. I want it to work for me, but also for the other faculty. If they're going to take their time to collaborate, it needs to be recognized. So if they're going to do a podcast film immersive project, that's got to be recognized in their career progression. I also tried to change the culture of even grant writing. So sometimes I'll co PI a grant with another faculty member. So we'll make sure from the outset that it's really thinking of the purpose of this research like you're talking about, why are we even doing this and who do we want to reach? Or otherwise they'll write their own grant, but we'll just help them think that through from the beginning and We've already had positive outcomes where faculty have said someone's come to a screening of their work or something and then just given them more money because of seeing that work. So that's felt quite positive. When you're really creative with how you can go about the process and keeping your standards really high, it doesn't always have to have a huge budget. But I think that in those collaborations, recognizing there's a faculty who's an expert in their field, but also the collaborator, the producer, whoever they're working with is also an expert in their field too. And that power dynamic has to be recognize.
- [11:48]
D
So I was hired at UCR from Vassar on the basis of the podcasting work. When I was hired, the dean instructed the department to revise their tenure and promotion guidelines so that when I came up for whatever else later, anything I did in that space would count, which didn't exist before. That is unique. This is not something you should expect. And it was the result of two things. One was maybe two people within the department who were fans, first of all. And the second was the brand new dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. His name is Darrell Williams. Darrell was a historian at the University of Maryland, College park, who got a grant to do a public history project which included a workshop at the National Humanities center for podcast production, of which I was the keynote. So he actually saw my keynote speech. So when they presented to him, this was the target of opportunity hire. Not like a line. You don't put out a line. Philosophy podcaster wanted. It was a tenured position for an epistemologist, which I am. And it was me and this other person who I knew and was a really productive researcher in that other space. And Darrell said, well, no, not the traditional person. This other person, which I think is more interesting. And so it was the combination of two people who were fans in the department and an enterprising dean. The other variable was there was a young assistant professor at the time who was kind of like me. She has a podcast and she had trade books. So this is Maisha Cherry, who's a philosopher of the emotions. And they knew they wanted to keep her, but it was going to be a little bit harder if they just used traditional metrics. So this is another interesting thing that I've discovered that's generalizable. Otherwise, it's not a generalizable story, unless you think there are this combination, which I think there's more of, by the way. It didn't exist in 2017 when I started the show. It Definitely exists more of now as a result of leadership from the ACLs, from the Mellon foundation, funding organizations and the professional societies. One of the ways that it's been driven from below is that it turns out that their younger scholars are more interesting in that they do things like in the alternative forms of media and institutions want to keep them. But the existing metrics were not working. So what they did was change the metrics, which is something that is very valuable to do. There are conservative ways of doing it, and then there are radical ways of doing it. UCR was very conservative in that they just used the existing categories of which faculty are evaluated, research, teaching and service. And then they say, allow your faculty to make a case that their audio work fits into one of these and they can fit in different ways. There are ways of you making podcasts which are very student focused, and then that would count as excellence in teaching. And there are ways in which it's highly researched, like the kind that Ben was talking about, that is a contribution to scholarship. And then you can make the case that it's research. And then there are people who are like the craft of writing in academia and it's not really about their research, but it's kind of popular. And then they might make the case that it's service. And then there are radical ways that people have changed it. So Michigan State, I love telling the story. Michigan State decided that their young scholars, particularly their scholars of color, were doing all these things that were really interesting in audio and magazines, community facing things. And they were not doing as much as other people in the peer reviewed space. And so they decided, let's just get rid of the categories research, teaching and service. Let's just have brand new categories. And the brand new categories were look us up, I might be getting this wrong. Spreading knowledge, creating new knowledge and opening doors for the next generation or something to that effect. And so teaching is like, want some of them, but like maybe it counts in this as another one of them. But if you can see, like the spreading knowledge is now a category and that makes room for a lot of audio work and some of it counts as creating new knowledge. But now people who are creating peer reviewed research had to make the case as to which category things were in. Everybody had to make the case that what they do fell into one of these categories. So that kind of leveled the playing field a little bit. These are the kind of things that are happening. So in my own case was a bit of an outlier now that I can actually do audio and it counts as My scholarship, basically, if you make the case to a dean or a provost and they change things, you can change things at a local level. If you make the case at a professional organization that might put out a directive, if you make a case through a funding agency, then you have a financial incentive because now you have on your CV a grant, and then that has to count. So anything that's part of that will contribute very positively.
- [16:48]
A
So it seems like there are all these different avenues for potential change, and the entire structure of professional affirmation seems to be up for grabs in some way. Lauren, you were describing how a number of scholars, when you did a multimedia project with them, would get more money later on. Another valuable metric at the university. What are ways that scholars, institutions like your own can operationalize some of these ideas?
- [17:14]
C
It's a really good point about the future and the younger scholars. And something that's been noticed at our institution is nearly every master's student that applies to come mention in the ideas lab as why they're picking that place. So that's a big plus plus for the university. So then I designed a course as part of the master's course on bioethics, new narratives and storytelling. And that feels really exciting because whether they go on to be storytellers or not, they're becoming new kinds of bioethicists. So it's helping to shape the field. And they'll hopefully think, even if it's just about communicating with patients, if they're a medical provider or whatever they go on to be, or how to have collaborations in the future. Also, I do workshops with the postdocs so then they can think about how to think about their work in a new way as people are shaping their future careers.
- [18:07]
A
Barry, how do you push the ball to keep this thing going?
- [18:10]
D
Real strong opinions about this. So here's one. The currency of academia is not like the monograph. That's a product. The currency is letters of recommendation. These are the things that get passed around. What we're really trading on in academia is replaced and prestige. The thing most departments hire and promote for is like, this increases our reputation. We can't not get this person or tenure this person. All the dispute itself reduces to that kind of stuff. If there's literally a ranking somewhere, like a law School Ranking or U.S. news World Report, this is the thing they put at right. And what gets us up there, we're all having a top something. And if it's a scholar, it could be a top scholar in Parmenides, but nobody else cares about it. But look at the letters. Look at the person in Oxford who wrote for this person over the top. So how do we change that? If audio is a very valuable thing, there should be a community of people within academia that'll write a letter that you know who's the best person in audio and academic journal? It's Chenjerai Kumanyika. That person will write five letters for your tenure file. You're set. It's impossible for a dean when presented with all this stuff, high reputable people at highly reputable places with these letters commenting about the audio to go. I don't think that counts because it's not on Oxford University Press. So what we need a community of people with that rep that is going to like, if you don't want to change, like structures and you want to work within academia, that's like one thing. Another thing is you create the equivalent of the journal Nature, where the journal or like, oh, it appeared their Radiolab, right? They're like, oh, that person got a piece on radio. I don't know if Radiolab's like that for academics. I think of it that way. But if you got a piece there or if you had like in the audio space, the equivalent of that, then other people. Well, I heard of that. That's kind of cool. Whatever it is that makes you trade the prestige. And I don't know what that is. So one of the things I think is if you're a rich, already highly reputable place, if you start doing something, then the other people will copy. So I've seen that here at NYU in the 90s, NYU put in millions of dollars towards philosophy. So there was a time where if you wanted to be a prestigious university, you hired philosophers. Why? Because they were cheap. They didn't need labs. No, I'm totally serious. They need labs. They didn't need like archives or whatever. It was just the salary. And it was like, holy crap. You are paying six figures to, like, philosophers. It was the first time we ever heard of that. We were making like 50,000 a year. And all of a sudden NYU was paying these six figures. Everybody was, look, ooh. And then all of a sudden, every institution 100 steps down was like, we gotta do that. It all came from a ranking and it's kind of disgusting, but that's what happened. If there was a that in audio, even if there were 30 listeners for it, but the rest of academics went, woo. You know, it's in that you'd get it.
- [21:04]
A
Can you speak to that in terms of the acls? You have these organizations, mla, they're incredibly powerful. Would they be able to push this?
- [21:13]
B
Yeah, and they have to, because institutions alone are so afraid to jump. You know, they. Nobody wants to be the first institution to say we won't necessarily require a book for tenure because they'll look unrigorous. We have a research university consortium at ACLs of about 45 of the institutions that produce the most PhDs in the humanities and social sciences in the country. And on 2021, we had a similar kind of conversation. We were talking about how the statistics on reading books are going down, the statistics of university presses successfully selling books are going way down, library funding is going way down. So there are all these pressures pushing people away from reading monographs, and yet academics tend to, as a rule, cling to the monograph as the gold standard. So we were talking about this as a problem in this meeting and I at a certain point looked out at the. And they're mostly humanities deans and deans of arts and science. And I said, okay, so how many of you would champion a tenure file that didn't have a monograph at the core? And two of them raised their hands and they're not wrong either. Like, some deans will say, it's the provost and the president. They don't want our Arwen ranking to fall. And other people say, well, the president wants this, but the faculty are too conservative. And they're like senior people in every department who say we are the only preservers of long form journalism and therefore sophisticated thought in the universe, and therefore we have to preserve it. I mean, this is a tough one because we recruit students. That moment when we look out at the undergrad class and we say, ooh, you look like you're going to be successful in academia. I'm going to talk to you after class. Have you thought about graduate school? And who do we ask? We still ask the students who write good papers because we're already thinking they have to do the tenure file and they can write a good chapter that will be the base of a good monograph. I still remember as it happened here 20 years ago, but I still remember a student who asked to do a YouTube video instead of. And he was a really good student. He was in my Introduction to Ancient Political Thought class. I laughed, not meanly. I hope he didn't hate me afterwards. But I was like, no. And he said, oh. And he said, well, because this class is about public speaking and rhetoric and oratory and its influence on political thought. So I thought you might like it, but it's okay, I'll write a paper. And I was like, of course you're gonna write a paper. And it wasn't until years later I thought, not only should I have said to that kid, that is awesome, but I should have changed my syllabus forever and I should have said that to that student, apply to graduate school. But everything in me and I thought I was kind of progressive and creative,
- [23:50]
D
but now is the best time to make the change. They're not writing that shit anyways.
- [23:54]
B
No, exactly.
- [23:55]
D
And I reading it, it's all generated crap.
- [23:58]
B
We have to exploit the opportunity of the exogenous shocks that are now rippling through the institution.
- [24:04]
A
I've tried in my classes, which are not as academic as the things you're talking about, tried to give people alternative forms of audio responses. There's a certain reluctance and conservatism in them too, because they don't really think that's what I want. Perhaps there's all this talk about digital humanities and outreach and public humanities. What would it take to plant the seeds for these sorts of changes? Saying yes to the guy who wants to do YouTube might be one of them.
- [24:30]
B
Are there others? I asked a question in an earlier panel about storage and access, and that's partly. My organization did a two years long commission and then a report about digital scholarship funded by the Mellon foundation and the neh. In better days. The tragedy of lost podcasts and websites of people building complicated and wonderful things that then the server is no longer maintained or they leave their job and then they find out the webpage went down and they have no ib. So I think working with librarians and university presses, kind of forging relationships across the walls that have grown up within the academic ecosystem is not actually that hard to do. And there are many receptive voices in all these sectors. So you're always going to find librarians who are worried that they're not capturing excellent work, publishers who are saying, why can't we publish multimodal work? Well, it's because you guys are telling us that you won't reward it. And I can't incentivize work if it's not going to get you guys hired and tenured again. And everyone's pointing in other directions, but I think coalitional conversations are really important in this.
- [25:40]
A
You brought up university presses and this woman who works for Random House, who's working on podcasts at Random House, which I was really intrigued by. I know places like Princeton University Press has an entire podcast unit that works on their books. Maybe universities aren't the place to look as much as university presses. Not that they're so well funded. They're in touch with the market. Maybe that's a better coalition for, say, trying to get audio recognized within scholarly communities.
- [26:07]
D
Well, Princeton's got a lot of money, like Princeton University Press does, probably not a lot of other ones. I agree that archiving is a problem, but it's actually a solvable problem. It doesn't take that big of an endowment to create a place where audio scholarship or video scholarship is permanently archived. And rich people like to put their names on things, and it's not that much money. You're absolutely right that print bias in academia is connected to archivability. You write a monograph, every library is going to buy it. That's what funds monographs. It's not beaters who are purchasing it.
- [26:42]
C
New York Public Library is doing really interesting work on podcast preservation, and they've even been training people on how to maintain archiving their podcasts. So there's interesting work happening in that space.
- [26:54]
A
Let's have some questions.
- [26:56]
B
The name of this panel is can
- [26:58]
E
podcasts save the University? And I'm unclear what it's supposed to save the university from and if they can save it from the thing that it needs to be saved from. So I'm.
- [27:07]
B
So I'm kind of curious what you
- [27:08]
E
all think of what it can save the university.
- [27:11]
A
Fraud. It was a cheeky title, was Benjamin's idea, but it was really saved the university from itself, from the insularity and the walls that Joy was describing. That was the idea that maybe podcasting, for all of its problems, will be a bridge to other worlds, other people, as well as enriching what's going on within the academy. That was some of the idea.
- [27:33]
B
And just add that. In the humanities and social sciences, with the exception of economics and linguistics, enrollments in majors have fallen overall by about 50% over the last 15 years. And that's not changing. And that's the lifeblood of faculty lines and graduate fellowships. The emphasis on scholarly, peer reviewed, pdfable publication begins around 1980 and just goes up. That emphasis only gets up and it starts spreading as far into the system as community colleges, where still you don't have to publish to get tenure. But it used to be off the radar, and now it's on the radar. So that that goes up and enrollments in the humanities and social sciences go conversely down. It's not rocket science, so that's the saving. Hopefully.
- [28:18]
C
I said it to Ben at the time, but I would kind of reverse it. Maybe and be like, can universities say podcasts? But I think it's just that working together, the closer collaboration, but especially with the financial issues around podcasts now. I think the really rich work that's going on at universities that, like Joy is saying, is not getting out there and the ability to do kind of testimonies with people, as has come up in earlier conversations. I just think the two can be so enriched.
- [28:45]
D
I think there are two different problems. One is the problem of specialists talking to specialists. The assumption is that podcasting is more of a generalist medium, and that's going to help with the specialist talking to specialist problem. And then the other one is audio versus print. Kids aren't reading as they're not as good readers. They don't like writing, so they're generating stuff. And maybe audio is a savior to that. I would imagine those are the questions. The role of audio as opposed to print, and the role specialist versus generalists. But I'd like to say that it's just one medium that we're talking about as an alternative to print and writing. There's video also, and then there's other kinds of print. So the bigger issue is about specialists talking to specialists and more inclusive forms of media generally that's being produced within the academy, and Academy, say, podcasting, 100%. I actually think this is absolutely central. Whatever the problems of academia are, it's still relatively well endowed, especially in the elite places. And of the places that aren't particularly well endowed, there's still bigger infrastructure. When I thought I was leaving academia, I took a step into media, and I said, this sucks even worse than I thought academia sucked. In fact, there's a really funny story that I can tell right now because she's in the room. I wanted to leave, and I was like, oh, you know what? If I can get picked up by a really good network, I'll just leave Vassar. And then I get this email, and it's from Mia Lobel, who is the executive director of content at Pushkin. I was like, ooh, maybe Pushkin wants to acquire hi Fi Nation. And then I could be on my way. And I get on the phone with Mia, and Mia says to me, so what would it take to teach at Vassar? We had a good conversation. I said to my wife, Shannon, guess what? She goes, are they going to try to query? No, Mia's thinking about becoming ambassador and teaching here. So we have advantages. Academia, for whatever you want to say. It has a lot of advantages to the media space.
- [30:50]
A
When we talk about Saving the university and podcasting. I want to ask about the role of thinking about podcasting as not just the output of the podcast, but a set of processes, a way of relating to each other and things like archiving.
- [31:05]
D
And the reason why I'm saying that
- [31:07]
A
is because AI basically, you know, I think there was a moment, there's some people still kind of trying to die on the hill, like, AI will never
- [31:15]
D
do what humans do. I'm like, have you heard Notebook lm?
- [31:18]
A
That's the infant version. I'm sorry, but there already are companies
- [31:21]
D
making podcasts with AI, so if it's
- [31:24]
A
simply about the output, I think we're definitely losing on that front. But I wonder if you think the university is a place to talk about podcasting as something that is more valuable in other ways.
- [31:36]
D
Relationships, processes, skills.
- [31:38]
F
Exactly.
- [31:39]
C
Definitely. I think about testimonies and your relationship with who you're working with. Also the question, like a voice, which came up earlier, but some of the things that I find most exciting when I'm collaborating with faculty. Some people say, I don't want to do a podcast. I don't have a good voice, I don't want to be in it. And I explain to them, like, their voice doesn't have to be any part of it at all. It's their research and their years and years they've spent and often relationships they have with people who've got firsthand experience, the lived experience. It's a really rich place to work on that more slowly with people. And then the kind of voices and stories that you get are not a narcissistic voice. Sorry to say it, but, like, that has taken over so much of the podcast industry and you get these lesser heard voices. We're doing really interesting work with people with disabilities, and you can really take the time and space to think how can they record themselves in a way that they feel comfortable. So I think in that kind of way, there's a lot of scope to have the space to do that in a university.
- [32:40]
A
One more answer to that is that podcasting helps teach collaboration, and collaboration is a skill that the humanities are terrible at. I think it's going to be one of those skills that isn't going to be undercut by AI and we have to figure out how to teach it better.
- [32:56]
F
Two words and the kind of cri de coeur. One of the words that's been for good or for bad, really popular in Europe in the last 15 years has been practice and practice based research. It expands the kinds of people who go into Universities who are creative practitioners, they can have more say about what they produce. They create new horizons and flexibilities for people around them. And there's a productive ambiguity. So moving away from the kind of implicit monographic fundamentalism to give us the opportunity or making a demand on us who want to work in academia to think about practice. I wonder how good that would be again to go back to video as much as listening. My colleagues in cinema studies, they say all their students, even those who want to watch films, watch them at four times the speed. So I've been struck by a number of organizations, including para academic organizations here in New York, who now are obsessed with attention. And there's a book coming up in January, Attensity and thinking about being and place and time and sort of thinking about the phenomenology, the weirdness, the mysticism, the possibilities of that. That strikes me as a kind of transdisciplinary sort of focus that some of us need to work on better. My final question would be. I always have some kind of nervousness when we talk about podcasts in terms of numbers. I understand some of us feel that we're in a very endogamous world in academia, very incestuous, and that if we could latch onto other spheres, there would be bigger, broader conversations. But I feel that gloms onto a weird sort of numbers logic as well. And you know, there's other mantras these days. Community engagement, impact, versions of scaling up. Just as some of the best books that I've read of, the most important books of me have ones that sold almost no copies that maybe nobody else wants to read. I want to fly a flag for podcasts that nobody wants to listen to. That podcasts might be regarded as a new merit or commercial level, as failure, but actually if we take them seriously as an art form, they're still really, really important.
- [35:07]
D
That's 100%, and I have to say it counts as a commercial failure is a huge success in numbers compared to the people who read your peer reviewed article. I run this workshop for philosophers who want to create this stuff. And Mia comes to it and you were asking these people what were their ambitions? How many people would listen for you to keep making it? And they had these grand ambitions of 200 listeners. And I said, you can do that 200, if that's your ambition. It's like if 200 people listen to me every week, I would make that's great. And that's not anywhere near commercially success. But if you were happy with that, that's completely Doable. It's doable very quickly.
- [35:47]
B
Yeah.
- [35:47]
C
I mean, breaking away from numbers can be really liberating. And one of the projects that we're really proud of that we did was working with a pediatrician, working with parents with babies in the nicu, and we made a kind of podcast, but it was actually a web based audio tool. It was for parents to prepare for communicating with doctors. We made sure we worked with someone who'd gone through that experience, was the narrator. There's ways you can bring podcasting skills in, but to make something for a really specific audience for really important reasons. Also embodiment, I think is really important as well. And I'm really into doing interaction of an immersive audio. And that also you might not have a big numbered audience, but having someone be really moved and have to interact with the experience to hear more can be really powerful as well.
- [36:35]
B
I think the word that comes to mind is plurality. For me, that my bafflement at how slow change in academic culture is comes down to my own lack of understanding of why brilliant people have created and continue to collude, including me. I'm not. I'm not that I'm brilliant, but I'm continuing to collude in creating such narrow gateways at crucial moments of people's career or life development. So that's really my credo. Core is it isn't that we need. And I've learned to say this at acls because I pissed so many people off my first year there by talking about change, like moving from A to B. I learned to say, no, no, no, it's expanding what counts. It's becoming more plural and recognizing the amazing, wondrous, to use a word somebody used before, diversity of the kinds of knowledge that people want to produce and accepting more forms of it. And going back to your question about process, really valuing the process and understanding that that is so invisible in academic work. So that's part of a plurality too. So that we don't focus on the measurable things. Because in a very weird way, it's a kind of neoliberal turn to the ways in which your average hiring or promotion, tenure, or graduate admissions committee works. We look for a very, very small of things. So open it up. One more question.
- [38:01]
E
Thank you so much. This is really, really helpful. Rich, thank you for opening and framing it around 50. And who are we doing this for?
- [38:10]
B
Thank you for thanking me for that because I was a little worried about going there, but.
- [38:13]
D
No, no, no, you went there.
- [38:15]
E
And now I want to return to that question of our constituency, because I guess one way to think about what the wonderful things that are happening here is that maybe the university is actually doing better than you're saying, what was the job of the early 18th century German University but to serve the sons of the ruling class? And the narrative we have is that we have sort of ourselves into this little incestuous and self defeating mafia. But really, I think the elephant in the quad is the hostility to public institutions, hostility to institutions of education K through 16. The brief is to educate the children of everyone in an economy that is hostile to the political and social and economic ambitions of those people's children. I guess I sound offensive for academics and universities, but I feel like we've never been more committed to making that wall more porous. But the narrative is how insular, how inaccessible, how narrow, how static we are. And I guess maybe in the service of ending on a happier note, we might think instead that we're doing a lot of really inventive things are happening in a period of intense contradiction in our mission.
- [39:58]
B
I just want to say there's an idea floating around that universities should respond to the pressures from the Trump administration by apologizing and saying, you know, we are too woke. We are sensors of speech. We will do better, we promise. And I have come out in a number of ways saying what a hopelessly horrible approach to this that would be because what we have to do is come out swinging, saying, we do great good. And let us tell you our story because there are a lot of barriers to none of our own making, but also speaking within on a campus, and I don't want to let us off the hook either, because there's a lot of comfort in the money and the resources that is easy to sink into. And it's so hard to get in places, whether undergrad, grad, academic, job, process, that once you're in, I think there is a kind of, ah, how do I get into Vassar? How do I teach at Vassar? So I'm in that uncomfortable liberal position of saying, we do great things and we need to do better. And I share your desire. I'm not a faculty blamer or demonizer by any means, but we have some work to do.
- [41:07]
A
On that note, we're going to end this. Thank you all for coming.
- [41:32]
D
Sam.