The Interfolio Blog

We've been reading a lot lately about budget cuts, job cuts, department budgets shrinking and the potential of reduced tenure-track appointments. It seems like universities and colleges nationwide are focused on streamlining as much as possible.

In the ensuing turmoil, are these same institutions thinking about how to attract and keep students by showcasing their best asset... their faculty? According to a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the answer is no. And the major source of downfall in publicity? Your college website! College public relations and media professionals have often ceded control of your college's most important portal to the outside world to a team trained to create the website itself, but not necessarily to determine what it should say, or how.

The frequent result is that tiny blurb on your department's section of the university site, stating merely your name, what your specialty is, perhaps where you earned your degrees. This text may or may not be accompanied by a small headshot, and its information can frequently be outdated as your site goes semester after semester without any significant update.

So what happens to your latest research project, the talk you just gave at a prestigious conference, the book you co-wrote, or the paper that was just published in an important journal? You and a small group of like-minded faculty will know, but the news of this accomplishment won't be showing up in any news feeds, and it certainly won't be online, where curious minds are looking for new research and ideas every day. Your work will be missed!

So what can you do? Discuss the importance of a dynamic website with your department, emphasize that most college students are researching their choice of school online, so it is vital that your school and your department showcase the talents of its faculty, the new and exciting classes they are teaching, and the prestige of these faculty in their respective fields of study!

And start thinking about doing some work on your own to showcase your work online, rather than relying on your department or university to do it for you. There are many options, including the Interfolio Portfolio, for creating profiles and pages online where you can update your work, showcase research, collect teaching examples and house a more extensive CV of your work. You'll be surprised how much more connected you and your school will become, and what a difference this can make for your academic reputation, the engagement of your students, and the dissemination of your work.