Wonderful Colleagues,
Apologies for cross-posting, but Marcus Meade and I are putting together an edited collection tentatively titled WID Goes Public: Communicating Disciplinary Knowledge and the Value of Higher Education. The CFP is pasted below and is also included as an attachment.
Please consider forwarding this call to colleagues across the disciplines who might be interested in contributing, and don’t hesitate to reach out to us at widgoespublic if you have any questions.
Best,
Zach and Marcus
Tl;dr: Higher education is failing to effectively communicate with the public, including communicating disciplinary knowledge and the value of higher education. We’re looking for ways it can do both more effectively.
WID Goes Public: Communicating Disciplinary Knowledge and the Value of Higher Education
Zachary Beare, North Carolina State University
Marcus Meade, University of Missouri-Kansas City
Recent Gallup survey data reveals a remarkable shift in public attitudes toward higher education. Between 2015 and 2024, public confidence in higher education fell by 21%, reaching an all-time low (Jones, 2024). Put simply, higher education has an image problem. Perhaps this is understandable given the rhetoric of the political right, which often positions higher education faculty as out-of-touch kooks at best and agents of indoctrination at worst. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Vice President J.D. Vance stated, "we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country” and has several times echoed the infamous quote from Richard Nixon that “the professors are the enemy.”
And while it is important to connect this shift to the rhetoric and actions of a political party steeped in anti-intellectualism (as Green, Johnson, & Mendoza [2026] have shown), it is important to resist the temptation to entirely blame the shift on such forces and to recognize the ways that the logics and cultures of the academy contribute to this problem. Promotion and tenure guidelines still often only privilege academic work composed for scholarly audiences and fail to incentivize engagement with the public. Graduate program curricula often focus intently on preparing students to produce academic content while failing to present popular media production as a legitimate mode of sharing knowledge and communicating the value of academic work to communities.
This failure to incentivize public scholarship has also impacted the way that disciplinary-specific communication is taught to undergraduate and graduate students. Most writing in the disciplines (WID) curricula have focused on the teaching of academic genres for academic audiences (Bargo, 2014; Kennedy & Kennedy, 2012; Stamper, Cochran, & Miller Cochran, 2022; Thaiss, 2006). Such texts do occasionally gesture towards rhetorical strategies for accommodating, remediating, or translating academic research for popular audiences. This has long been especially true for WID approaches to writing in the natural sciences (see, for instance, Fahnestock’s 1986 "Accommodating Science: The Rhetorical Life of Scientific Facts" as a historic example of this). But most WID curricula have failed to articulate a large-scale vision for how disciplines across the university might strategically design communication to speak to public audiences. And while edited collections like Academics Going Public: How to Write and Speak Beyond Academe (Gasman, 2016) have attempted to highlight ways that academics might more effectively share their disciplinary knowledge, the pieces in that collection largely imagine scholars writing fairly traditional print-based genres (long-form opinion pieces, mass-market books, press releases, among others). While we see such genres as an important part of the public scholarly writing ecosystem, the readership of such genres is in decline (Bhuller et al., 2024) and may be pre-disposed to view higher education in a positive light (Anderson, 2018; Randolph & Lipka, 2025). Additionally, the media landscape has changed dramatically in the last 10 years with public opinion increasingly formed through the consumption of social media content, podcasts, short-form video, and graphics.
Within the field of writing studies, there have long been calls for more public writing (from scholars such as Paula Mathieu, Steve Parks, Nancy Welch, Susan Wells, among others). In 2017, there was a special issue of Composition Forum edited by Christopher Minnix that offered several entries focused on teaching and valuing public writing. The special issue also featured an interview with Susan Wells that aptly described the issues hampering higher education’s engagement with the public. While the articles from the issue offer useful pedagogical strategies, few address the central challenge Wells aptly articulates. Wells points out that academics struggle to engage the public on grounds they were never taught to traverse using tools they do not possess. In the interview, Wells states, "We’ve all seen a lot of forms of persuasion that everything would tell us should not have worked, and we’ve seen them work. We’ve also seen forms of persuasion that everything in our discipline tells us should have worked, and they did nothing." And while some fields have begun theorizing and testing forms of persuasion that may be more effective at communicating their own disciplinary knowledge—most prominently in the sciences—none offer a connection to the value of higher education as a whole.
Scholars inside and outside of writing studies often describe the importance of—or need for—engaging in public writing without answering the question of how such work might be done or fostered, what that work might look like, and what channels of distribution might be utilized to effectively communicate with public audiences. This edited collection seeks to address that disconnect and argues that if higher education hopes to turn the tide of public opinion back in its favor, it must develop a comprehensive strategy to effectively explain its value and the value of disciplinary knowledge. The goal of this edited collection is to identify and imagine ways in which members of higher education might more effectively engage the public and perhaps regain standing with the American people. The editors see this collection as an initial step to both theorize strategies and gather examples of effective public writing from academics. The editors plan to follow this collection with a digital project aggregating effective public communication projects from across the disciplines.
We invite proposals for the following types of contributions:
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Case Studies of specific projects or scholars who are successfully communicating research to popular audiences and/or advocating for the value of higher education.
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Curricular Designs that showcase or theorize pedagogical strategies for preparing individuals, from undergraduate students to senior scholars, to compose effective public-facing projects.
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Communication Strategy Plans theorizing rhetorical approaches for reaching specific public audiences and communicating the value of higher education and the particulars of scholarly research.
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Professional Recommendations theorizing structural or programmatic revisions that could foster or better incentivize public scholarship (e.g. promotion and tenure guidelines, extension opportunities, community-engaged learning communities, partnerships with communications departments, cross-institutional or cross-organizational advocacy and lobbying).
Timeline
- Monday, August 31st, 2026: 300-500 word proposals due
- Wednesday, September 30th, 2026: decisions on proposals back to authors
- Monday, March 15th, 2027: 5,000-6,000 word manuscript drafts due.
- Monday, May 31st, 2027: feedback sent to authors
- Monday, August 2nd, 2027: 5,000-6,000 word revised manuscripts back to editors
Submissions and author queries should be directed to widgoespublic
Zachary Beare, Ph.D. | he/him/his
Director, First Year Writing Program
Associate Professor, Department of English
North Carolina State University
zbeare
http://www.zacharybeare.com/
Co-Editor, Composition Studies
https://compstudiesjournal.com/