The Dartmouth Public Voices Fellowship, launched in 2012 in partnership with The OpEd project, an organization dedicated to improving thought leadership’s accessibility through media, trains 20 Dartmouth faculty members each year to write op-ed articles and navigate TV and radio interviews.
The fellowship selects a new class each year from a pool of applicants nominated by College leadership. Those chosen attend a series of four training seminars on campus over a year-long period. This year’s fellows will be chosen on Feb. 24.
Both dean of faculty affairs at the Geisel School of Medicine Leslie Henderson and Geisel microbiology professor Timothy Lahey, current participants in the program, said that the program’s primary intention is to increase the diversity of thoughts represented in opinion pieces. According to Lahey, an overwhelming majority of opinion articles in prominent publications are authored by white men.
“White men like me have a pretty easy time getting published in news media,” Lahey said, adding that the lack of diversity erodes scholarship as not all points of view have equal representation.
Henderson said that having a diversity of opinions represented in major publications could help to tell a fuller story about the problems facing the world today. She added that the program aims to tackle this problem by using mentorship to encourage women and members of minority groups to publish their findings.
2015 program fellow and music professor William Cheng added that the program also has the benefit of improving Dartmouth’s visibility in both the public sphere and in academia. Cheng said that the program did not solely focus on teaching faculty to write effective op-ed articles — fellows are also coached on how to give effective interviews on television, radio and podcasts, he said.
Cheng said suggestions to improve fellows’ articles and interviews included writing on topics relating to their core expertise, finding hooks and tie-ins to current events and persevering in the event that a publication rejects a story. Cheng said that rejection is common with large newspapers.
Lahey described the “elevator pitch” training activity, where he had to condense and explain an idea within a limited time frame, as if he were trying to do so in an elevator ride.
Cheng said that the program broadens scholarship and makes it more accessible to certain audiences. He said that reaching a larger audience through an op-ed piece can advance scholarship just as effectively as writing an article in a peer-reviewed journal.
Scholarship expressed through mass media can affect a lot of people, Henderson said.
“Dissemination of scholarship can have a vastly bigger impact than a typical peer-reviewed journal,” Henderson said.
She said that one of her favorite parts of the program was that it facilitated interactions between faculty members of different disciplines. These connections might not have ever been made outside of the program, Henderson said, adding that these relationships often lead to faculty members from multiple fields collaborating on articles.
Henderson herself collaborated with classics professor Margaret Williamson. The pair wrote an article about potential solutions to opiate addiction and about the importance of women’s, gender and sexuality studies professor Pati Hernández’s “Telling My Story,” a program created to break down walls between socially isolated individuals and their communities. Lahey said that collaborations between faculty members of different disciplines were common among his class of fellows.
Lahey, Henderson and Cheng said that the program improved the quality of their writing. Lahey said that as a result of the program, he is more proud of the work that he has produced in the past year. Henderson said that because of its ability to increase the diversity of opinions expressed in major publications, the Public Voices Fellowship has been one of her favorite College-sponsored programs to date.
