UNC's social science faculty ranked last in media engagement

A study released last week that measured university social science faculty’s engagement with the media ranked UNC last out of the 94 research universities surveyed.

The Faculty Media Impact Project ranked schools based on the number of times social sciences faculty members were cited in news media from 2006 to 2011, divided by the percentage of public funding the university receives.

Rob Borofsky, the study’s author and an anthropology professor at Hawaii Pacific University, said he began the project in hopes of encouraging more faculty to speak to media.

He said researchers should give back to the community in exchange for the billions of dollars they receive in funding by explaining to the public what they are working on and where their tax money is going.

UNC should highlight all of the good research faculty are conducting, Borofsky said.

“If the media do not come to you, then you should go to the media,” he said.

Borofsky said he acknowledges that no ranking is perfect — citation scores were obtained by running searches of the Google News archive, which might not have gotten every citation. The National Science Foundation, which has a limited database, was used to obtain information about school funding.

Patrick Conway, chairman of UNC’s economics department, said counting the number of citations might not be the best measure of civic engagement.

“I applaud the effort that the researcher is doing to get to the question of whether the material that’s being supported by public funds is being reported to the public,” he said. “But I think it’s a very simplistic way to do it.”

Economics was ranked highest in the study among UNC’s social science departments, which Conway said likely resulted from the department’s low public funding.

Andrew Perrin , a UNC sociology professor, said the public funding factor distorted the rankings and discounts the University’s high quality in social science and psychology research.

Conway said UNC faculty do make an effort to reach out to N.C. citizens — for example, researchers in the School of Public Health quickly publicize their studies on obesity in the state, a topic they consider important to the public.

He added that UNC’s research faculty typically promote their findings through published works and scholarly journals — which he said is just as important as media citations because it advances knowledge on the topic.

He also proposed a different way to determine how engaged faculty members are with the public.

“Another indicator that I would use, which isn’t quite as inflexible as the one that the study’s author used, would be the number of times that the faculty member writes about public interest topics in a scholarly publication,” he said.

Borofsky said he hopes the study will at least generate discussion about faculty’s media engagement, and he will continue refining ways to measure it.

“It’s only the first step, but I can’t make (the study) better without putting it out there and getting people’s comments,” he said.

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