Podcast Intellectuals Panel #3 with Joy Connolly, Barry Lam, and Aurora Hutchinson

·44 min·4 clips

Joy Connolly asks: to whom do scholars owe their knowledge, revealing academia's deformed, walled-off world.

The episode is the third panel from a conference titled 'Podcast Intellectuals, Producing Original Scholarship with Audio,' hosted by NYU's Journalism Institute on October 10, 2025. Moderator Robert Boynton introduces the theme 'Can Podcasting Save the University?' focusing on how audio might influence hiring, promotion, and tenure systems. Joy Connolly, president of the American Council of Learned Societies, opens by critiquing academia's insularity, referencing 18th-century philosopher Fichte to question whom scholars serve. She argues that universities operate in a 'world apart' from public needs, with monographs as a declining but clung-to currency. Connolly notes progress in places like the University of Minnesota and UC Santa Cruz, where public scholarship guidelines include podcasts, but system-wide change remains elusive due to fragmentation. Aurora Hutchinson, director of the Ideas Lab at Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, describes her role in creating a storytelling initiative funded by a donor, ensuring faculty podcast collaborations count for career advancement. She mentions designing a master's course on bioethics narratives to shape future practitioners. Barry Lam, a philosopher and podcaster hired at UC Riverside, explains how his tenure case led to revised promotion guidelines, driven by a dean who saw his keynote and departmental fans. He contrasts conservative approaches, like fitting audio into existing research/teaching/service categories, with radical ones, like Michigan State's new categories such as 'spreading knowledge.' Lam emphasizes that academia's real currency is reputation via letters of recommendation, suggesting that prestigious audio outlets could shift prestige economies. Connolly reveals that in a meeting of 45 humanities deans, only two would champion tenure without a monograph, illustrating deep institutional resistance. The panel discusses coalition-building with librarians, university presses, and organizations like the Modern Language Association to archive and validate multimodal work. Questions from the audience probe what podcasting might save universities from, with answers pointing to insularity, enrollment declines, and the need for pluralistic knowledge forms. Hutchinson and Lam highlight podcasting's potential for collaboration, embodiment, and reaching niche audiences, with Lam sharing an anecdote about Pushkin's executive director wanting to teach at Vassar, underscoring academia's advantages. The discussion concludes with reflections on hostility to public education and the need for universities to both defend their value and improve inclusivity.

As heard by us

A careful panel on how audio work starts to count inside academic life.

This conversation centers on a practical academic question: when does audio work, or a multimedia project, become scholarship? It moves through categories, deans, provosts, professional organizations, and funding agencies, showing how a grant or a course can shift a project from…

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Why you'd press play

If you want the bureaucracy behind scholarship, this panel keeps the receipts.

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