The transformation of academic PR
Minh Tran, Head of the Department of Computer Science Communications Group, gave a talk at IBM Research Zurich about how the academic quest for objective knowledge can be reconciled with the increasing dominance of market values in education.
On 1 April 2015, Minh Tran, Head of the Department of Computer Science Communications Group, gave a talk at IBM Research Zurich in Rüschlikon about "The transformation of academic PR: how to cope with the market of ideas and corporate citizenship".
Tran’s talk focused on the following issues:
The 19th-century university was a sort of village with its priests, the early 20th-century university a town with its intellectual oligarchy, and the postwar university a bustling intellectual metropolis with infinite variety, a brave, new ‘multiversity’. Of university science though, the purpose remains to maximize impact on the world, discovering true knowledge and putting it into practice.
The pressure is on to produce and reproduce the highest quality. Nowadays, the practice of academic public relations (PR) is rather unacademic: academia is about pure objectivity while PR is about overt and covert persuasion; academia is about meritocratic knowledge dissemination while PR is about strategic knowledge dissemination; academia is about research and reporting while PR is about pragmatic, purpose-driven human connections.
For more details read her full Downloadpresentation (PDF, 14 MB).
Updated on 2 April 2015.
