Larry D. Lauer

This week I was on two panels at the Worldviews Conference on Higher Education and Media in Toronto. One of them was on branding, and I previewed it in last weeks’ post. The other one was titled: “National Security, Social Media and the Publicity of Academic Findings.”  This one could be addressed from many vantage points, and frankly I struggled with how to approach it.

We were told our topic was inspired by news media coverage of instances of the Canadian government censuring academics, raising academic freedom and transparency questions about accessing sponsored research findings. Of course, social media played a complicating role in these situations, and also raises additional complicated  security and privacy issues in general. To be sure, academic freedom, privacy and transparency questions abound today as universities become more global and find themselves operating in multiple cultures and dealing with multiple government policies.

I have been both a practitioner and an academic who has been teaching strategic and international communication in a journalism school. So fundamentally I believe in as much transparency as is possible. But as a practical matter, in my work I have come to accept the proprietary nature of commissioned research. And so these days I make the assumption that researchers who take commissions to do government studies understand that up front.

Now you might argue that governments are public not private entities and as such should be completely transparent, except possibly for a few national security activities. But it’s simply a fact that elected administrations will always be advancing their ideology related policies, and that information they gather will often be proprietary. This is a reality, even though they may have campaigned on a platform of more transparency!

So in today’s world it is the job of the news media to find out as much as possible about what governments are doing, especially  their wrong-doings. Reporters will therefore continue to try to uncover the findings of proprietary research, as they should. This is a critically important form of checks and balances, and I believe its in this ongoing process that gradual social progress can be made.

All this is to say that proprietary agreements must always be clearly understood upfront, be they with governments or with universities housing government projects. That means that even inside today’s universities, researchers must be clear about  when and if their findings can be published. For true academics, research projects with no strings will always be preferred, but that will not always be the case.

Just how much social media complicates these proprietary issues and raises additional issues about government intrusions into our personal lives, will confuse matters for a long time. Most of us still want to draw a privacy line that can’t be crossed. But today that line always wiggles a bit every time government intrusion charges, terrorists threats, or even exciting new internet opportunities, appear.

One of my students responded to all this by blurting, “There is no such thing as privacy any more. Get used to it!”  For some people this may sound simplistic and naive. Nonetheless, it’s probably true.