(upbeat music) - Hi everyone, Steve Adubato.

We kick off the program with Dr. David Birdsell, who's Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at Kean University, one of our higher ed partners.

Dr. Birdsell, good to see you.

- It's great to be here.

Thanks for having me.

- Let's jump into this.

We are doing a series called Media Leadership.

The graphic will come up right now.

You understand media, you understand the role of media in a small D democratic society.

As a scholar, as an expert on media, and also you've done a lot of commentary on ABC 7 in New York, Fox 5 in New York, other places.

Where do you see the media, particularly mainstream media in 2025, in terms of what we should be doing to support and protect our representative democracy?

Loaded to question, I know.

- Media has a challenge before it at this point in time, like none other that has occurred in my lifetime, and that has to do with restoring credibility.

It has to do with dealing with the systematic attack on democratic norms in a way that sounds even handed to people who may support some of the politicians who are launching that assault, but do not believe that that's the ultimate impact.

It's a question about being able to provide people with a factual basis for making decisions at a time when the facts themselves are often contested.

So trying to find stories and people to speak with who are relatable to different aspects of an audience, recognizing that almost anything that is said can be taken out of context.

And so always thinking about how that specific sentence, that specific image, that line potentially feeds narratives that may be very different from the one that's intended by the people producing that particular media segment.

- Well said.

And I also wanna follow up on this, Kean University is part of something called the New Jersey Civic Consortium.

Let's put up the website team so people can find out more.

This consortium involves six public institutions of higher ed, including Kean University, my Alma Mater, Montclair State, whole range of others.

What is this civic leadership consortium and why does it relate to what you were just talking about, David?

- Well, this is a terrific program that does several things.

It provides grants to community-based organizations that are trying to cover the news often in different ways from the way that legacy media organs would do so.

And I hasten to add, sometimes that's because those legacy media have had to trim their sales for budgetary reasons.

So just to take one example, it used to be the case that the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, all the major national newspapers would have a dedicated nonprofit beat reporter.

And although David Fahrenthold does that for the New York Times right now, he's also split with all kinds of deep dives into financial issues that have nothing to do with nonprofits directly.

So we've lost that lens into an extraordinarily important part of our civil society fabric.

And one of the things that this project does, the consortium funds organizations on a competitive basis that present a compelling rationale for how they want to cover the news.

And many of them are finding different ways to involve non-traditional actors, very young people, very old people who haven't worked in media during the course of their careers.

People who are deeply engaged in topics that matter to members of the community, such as the Chalk Beat group covering education with a single focus.

So there are lots of good things to support in the community.

The consortium also works, as you pointed out, it's six public universities and those universities work with their students to place them in internships, to develop coursework that acquaints them with the dearth of local media that we have today.

It does great, great work and I hope that it continues to be funded.

Right now we're looking at a zeroed out budget.

- Let me also clarify the College of New Jersey, Montclair State University, Kean University, Rutgers, New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rowan University, all part of the consortium, lemme lemme try this.

Kean University, the role of a public university, particularly at Kean University.

In fact, your university has been designated as the Urban Research Institute, excuse me, the Urban Research entity in higher education in New Jersey, at a time where so many are attacking the world of higher education for not for whatever, doesn't matter the reasons.

What do you see the role of the public higher ed university looking to have a positive impact in the community?

- I'm so glad that you asked this question, Steve, because I think there is nothing more important.

There is nothing that I believe to be more directly existential to the future of public higher education than the answer to this question.

And I believe what public institutions should be doing at this point is reaffirming the multiple value propositions that we offer to the taxpayers of the state, to the residents who are adjacent to our universities physically, to the industries that are adjacent to our universities conceptually.

We traditionally are known for educating students and that's obviously job one.

People come to our doorstep, they're seeking a leg up through polishing their skills with education, developing new attitudes and aptitudes.

And we're gonna continue to do that.

But we need to do more.

We need to reach out to employers to make sure that they have the right experiential component to their education, good internships and other forms of engagement with organizations so that they have a clearer pathway to a job.

We need to help them understand and adapt to new technologies such as artificial intelligence.

So critical right now for students graduating into a job market where AI has become a huge issue for people seeking particularly entry level positions in knowledge work jobs.

We need too, to help people understand that the research work that universities like ours do.

I'm proud to say that Kean was designated in February as an R2 research institution.

- R2, explain for us what that means, Dr. - Sure.

So there are about 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States and they're classed based on what they do.

Community colleges, four year baccalaureate colleges, graduate programs.

And within that there is a small number of colleges, about 8% of them overall that are classed as R1 or R2 institutions, which means that they are highly research intensive.

R1s are the biggest.

Think your Harvards, your Johns Hopkins, your Stanfords, the R2s are a level down from that in terms of spending, but critical because they're closer to communities.

And that gets me to this point that I think is so important for people to understand and for universities to embrace that the research work that we do provides direct value to businesses, to government, to nonprofits, to community members themselves in the areas of healthcare and service delivery, in the areas of business development and economic opportunity.

In the areas of finding out which new technologies are going to be most impactful for a region and how they can be developed in ways that benefit the people who live there.

This is the value proposition that universities in many cases are embracing, need to embrace and the R2s as institutions close to community and with an institution such as Kean, with that urban research commitment, this is a natural component of what we offer to the people in New Jersey.

And I think people are beginning to see that under the leadership of Dr. Repollet and the dynamic work that we're doing throughout the state.

- Lemme also clarify.

You mentioned Dr. Lamont Repollet, the president of Kean University, who will be joining us in a future program.

He's also the former head of the Department of Education in the state of New Jersey.

He'll be talking about a whole range of issues, higher education as well as education on the local level as well.

Before I let you go real quick, gimme a minute on your, when you were in college, you did an internship, where was it and what impact did it have on your life David?

- I did an internship with a daycare center in the city of Charlottesville where I went to school that actually turned into a job running volunteer services for 18 daycare centers throughout that city.

And it was eyeopening to me to see the different economic circumstances, to understand that as a university we had this terrific asset to offer, in this case thousands and thousands of student labor hours offered for free to our community partners, but that the university had just as much to learn about how we could be most effective, how we could engage respectfully.

And that lesson, that set of lessons for me negotiated among these 18 institutions and hundreds and hundreds of volunteers over the time that I was doing that work.

Taught me a lot about politics, a lot about social organization, and a lot at a very early age about what a university could do for its community, for people who would never enroll in that university.

That's a commitment that has lived lifelong for me.

- Higher ed, more important than ever before.

Even while some folks questioned the value of it.

You just listened to Dr. David Birdsell talk about the impact of a college internship he had that changed the course of his professional and personal life.

Dr. David Birdsell is Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at Kean University, one of our higher ed partners.

David, great to have you with us.

We appreciate it.

- Steve, thanks so much for having me.

- You got it, stay with us, we'll be right back.

- [Narrator] One-On-One with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by The Russell Berrie Foundation.

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Eastern Atlantic States Regional Council of Carpenters.

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New Jersey Sharing Network.

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And by EJI, Excellence in Medicine Awards.

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