Wilson School lectures go online

Featuring content from youtube.com and podcasts, the UChannel is hosted at uc.princeton.edu and now documents more than 1,000 hours of material. Acting Dean of the Wilson School Nolan McCarty said that the goal of the UChannel is to “get the public programming of the school and the University out to a broad set of people who are interested in public affairs.”

“We obviously spend a lot of money and resources at the University,” he said. “And I think it’s great that we’re able to disseminate these events to a wider public.”

Featured topics span late Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto’s views on defeating terrorism in her country to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s keynote address at a Wilson School conference on government service.

Though on sabbatical in China, Wilson School Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter ’80 said in an e-mail that starting the UChannel is “one of the things I am proudest of helping to create since becoming dean.”

Slaughter said that she has met people from around the world who have benefitted from the UChannel’s offerings. “That kind of public affairs education is an important part of our overall mission,” she said.

Donna Liu, the Wilson School’s director for strategic initiatives, spearheaded the UChannel project in an effort to harness the power of digital media.

“A couple of years ago, we came up with the idea of contributing these public lectures that happen ... in all academia to the public domain,” she said. “With all the new media options, there was no reason that they were not being seen by a wider audience.”

The UChannel site now receives 1.5 million hits every month and has recorded visitors from more than 130 countries, Liu said.

“It’s a good way to get the expertise of the Princeton faculty out to a wider public,” said sociology and Wilson School professor Douglas Massey, whose lecture “Fences, Amnesty, or the Status Quo?” is one of the videos the UChannel has posted on YouTube.

“Hopefully it will lead to a more informed public,” he said. “But one has to realize that the subset of people that takes the time to go on the web and look at these issues is not a broad cross section [of the public].” He added, though, that the more people the Channel reaches, the better.

Liu said that other university professors are using the UChannel’s content to teach. For instance, a University of Hawaii professor used a podcast by Princeton economics professor Paul Krugman to augment his treatment of globalization. Liu noted, however, that only 15 percent of traffic to the site comes from .edu domains.

In addition to the Wilson School, the UChannel’s charter members included the public policy schools at Columbia, Middlebury and the University of Texas at Austin. Additional content from the Council on Foreign Relations, Oxford and Peking universities, and several other schools in the United States is hosted by the UChannel.