I’ve been listening to The Now Show on BBC Radio 4 since it began, which happened to be the first autumn I lived in England. Devoted readers of this blog will remember the time Mitch Benn showed up here, much to my delight.
So it was with mixed feelings I discovered that this week was the first time UC Davis cleared the Now Show threshold (in Josie Long’s bit, starting at 21:21).
To be honest, not so mixed: mostly deep unhappiness; this is also the first week I’ve seen UC Davis show up in a BBC headline. After all this time, with so many people working so hard to get UC Davis identified with serious research, this is what puts the campus on the international radar.
2 comments
November 27, 2011 at 6:50 am
dave
Pepper-spray aside, you should try working in a former polytechnic [a university since 1992] in this country, and see how hard it is to get anyone to notice absolutely any goddam thing that we do… Honestly, the way the media treat the HE sector in the UK, you’d think half the students go to Oxford, and the other half are doing media studies and would be better off working in McDonalds.
November 27, 2011 at 8:19 am
TF Smith
I’ve noticed that given the recession, local media are interested in economic stories, and given the economic engine, both in terms of research product and simply service industry needed to support an institution that moves x-however many consumers in and out of a given community on a daily basis that a university provides, they tend to show up more.
Plus, Directionally Challenged Liberal Hotbed Generic Suburb State has the benefit of being the only game in (this) part of town, and having a pretty active media office – although it takes forever to get anything approved, unfortunately. Setting up a Facebook page for a single college, for example, was very much a “ask forgiveness” type situation – we just went ahead and did it, and because of various relationships, no one objected too much. Definitely a generational sort of thing.