Welcome to Podcast or Perish!

Cameron Graham is Professor of Accounting at the Schulich School of Business, York University. He is the host of Podcast or Perish.

Transcript

This is Podcast or Perish, a new podcast about academic research and why it matters. I’m Cameron Graham, Professor of Accounting at the Schulich School of Business, at York University in Toronto. I entered academia after a long previous career, and a lot of what goes on in universities remains new to me. I’m fascinated by the huge variety in how professors approach their research and teaching, and by how universities are governed collegially. It’s a world unlike any other.

And it’s changing rapidly, especially when it comes to expectations for professors. Newly minted academics have always been told one thing: publish or perish! This means that in order to get tenure you needed to publish in the leading academic journals. While the actual journals you need to hit vary from field to field, the imperative to publish has remained constant.

But the stakes are even higher today. Universities face something of a crisis of legitimacy. Learning for the sake of learning is out, training students for specific jobs is in. And job training can be done cheaper at a teaching-oriented college than at a research university.

To help show that universities are still relevant, we professors are expected to show that our research matters. We are supposed to demonstrate has an “impact” on wider society. But does anyone know what this even means? For a medical researcher, whose work can save lives, this might be relatively straightforward. But for a historian or a sociologist, what does “impact” look like?

As a professor myself, I can assure you, nobody ever taught me how to have an “impact" on society. I was taught to just do my research and publish it in academic journals, for an academic audience. I had no idea what else I was supposed to do to connect with wider society, so I started talking to my university colleagues.

I found that some professors rise eagerly to the challenge of conveying their research to the wider world. They do research in the most highly specialized fields of inquiry, yet they’re somehow able to make their results intelligible to the average person. These are the professors who are comfortable talking about their work on the radio, or being quoted in the newspaper, or connecting with thousands of followers on Twitter. They are smart. They are dedicated. They are passionate. They are teachers in the most fundamental sense.

Talking to them is a joy, and my conversations with them have led to this podcast. In each episode of Podcast or Perish, I interview a different academic. They come from every field imaginable. They might be a kinesiologist studying concussions in contact sports, or an ecologist studying penguins in the Antarctic. The format is simple: I prepare by reading their papers carefully, and when I talk with them, I ask about how they do their work, how they interpret their results, and why their results should matter to us. Together, we cover some provocative topics and some uncomfortable truths.

You can subscribe to Podcast or Perish using your favourite podcatcher. You can find out more about each of our guests on our website, podcastorperish.ca, where you will find photos, video clips, transcripts of the interviews, and links to the research that we talk about.

Episode 1 will launch in September 2019. Listen in, and tell your friends and colleagues all about it.

This is Podcast or Perish. Our website is podcastorperish.ca. Subscribe now, while quantities last!

Resources

Cameron’s research website, Fearful Asymmetry

Credits

Host: Cameron Graham
Recording engineer: Cameron Graham
Producer: Bertland Imai
Photo: Andrew Fletcher, University of Canterbury
Recorded: July 27, 2019
Location: Fenelon Falls