Public Relations in Service to Society

Since I started monitoring blogs a little over a year ago, I’ve been surprised and disappointed at the level of criticism aimed at public relations education. I was well aware of the public beating PR as a profession takes, but I didn’t understand the degree to which practitioners feel our students are unprepared for, or even incapable of, participation in the work world. This realization has forced me to reconsider what I do, and why.

In evaluating this criticism, I have come to realize that it is often based on a false premise, one most obvious in Bill Huey's recent attack on PR education but apparent in other places, too. I do not share these critics' assumption that public relations research and education should work solely in service to the profession.

I approach public relations education with the idea that while in school and after graduation, my students should first serve society. Whether they go to work at an agency, corporation, nonprofit, or government agency, whether they go to law school or graduate school, whether they never "work" a day in their lives, my goal is to teach them to think critically, being mindful of their impact on society. I’m not the only one who feels this way. One of my colleagues, Betty Jones, tells her students that they’re public servants.

The concept of service plays out in a number of ways in PR education. The most obvious is service learning. In many of our classes, students are asked to work for actual clients, putting their talents and skills to use for the benefit of an organization. Over the past few years, I have learned to choose clients, especially for the Campaigns class, with great care. I began this semester’s Campaigns class with a lecture on corporate social responsibility and how its aims can be applied to all clients--even the volunteer organization (see this post on responsible advocacy). Again, I’m not the only Grady PR faculty member who uses this approach. Carolina Acosta-Alzuru's students have done wonderful things for our campus and community, especially relating to diversity, but encompassing even an anti-littering campaign for football fans. Lynne Sallot wanted to promote university energy conservation last semester so she found the right department to help launch a campaign, and another of her classes helped to develop Partners for a Prosperous Athens, a volunteer organization that has identified major poverty-related issues and is now working on solutions. Essentially, rather than serving clients, she’s creating clients to fit the needs she sees in our community. (Update--April 30, 2007: here's a story on Lynne's energy conservation project.)

I don’t mean to suggest that we don’t have any obligation to the profession. Several Grady PR faculty members regularly conduct research that advances public relations practice. Bryan Reber’s work on practitioners’ influence and activism within organizations stands as a model of how research can benefit the practice. Jeff Springston is part of a research team that’s working to overcome barriers that prevent people from getting the medical help they need--it's not an exaggeration to say that his work has saved lives. Ruthann Lariscy’s research on political advertising and Kaye Trammell’s on political blogs can inform political candidates as well as creating a deeper understanding of the democratic process.

But PR research is not and should not be based solely on advancing the profession. Our scholarship serves the academy by contributing to theory buildin--about how public opinion is constructed, for example, or why people don’t seek medical attention--and we also have an obligation to look at public relations practice with a critical eye. I did research on the history of tobacco industry, for example, not to help today’s manufacturers figure out better ways to manage their PR, but to analyze its impact on society. (Watching the recent battle among scientists regarding global warming is in many ways like seeing a rerun of the fight over tobacco in the 1950s.) Practitioners can learn from this research, too, but its primary purpose is to serve the academy and society, not to help PR people do their jobs better.

At Grady, and presumably many other schools, we teach that good public relations serves society in the firm belief that doing so benefits our students, other scholars, and the public... as well as potential employers.

Labels: corporate social responsibility, education, service

Comments

[Bill Huey]

My article was not an attack on PR education, but a critique of a very flawed report (which I doubt you’ve read) from the PRSA Commission on PR Education, which concluded that no one without a doctorate should be teaching public relations. That is not only absurd, it is intellectually dishonest, because it relies on the claim that universities are being pressured by accrediting agencies to hire only Ph.D. candidates.You are misrepresenting the tone and tenor as well as the substance of my article, and I challenge you to prove that any of its statements are untrue.