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Two years ago my face was on the front page of the Guardian. It must have been a quiet news day, but as one of the 10 academics selected by the BBC and Arts and Humanities Research Council as 'New Generation Thinkers', it felt like the start of something exciting.
Recruited "to communicate our research to a wider audience", our faces were scrubbed and hopeful as a Guardian photographer prodded us into place at Broadcasting House. Three years later, as a new batch of NGTs are announced in what is now an annual 'academic talent contest', I wonder if they know quite what they're in for.
The scheme aims to cherry pick the 'brightest minds' and showcase their research in talks, debates and essays on BBC Radio 3. I wish the new kids luck. But how we square this growing trend for university public engagement with increasingly squeezed funding for scholarly research is now a serious question for all academics working with the media.
The BBC / AHRC partnership has benefited both parties, on the one hand replenishing the tired roster of academics who appear in arts programmes, while also building the public engagement and impact evidence that UK funding bodies demand from researchers.
For the academics involved, it has been, by turns, an exhausting and exhilarating experience.
It's a challenge balancing a research specialism with the friendly generalism required for radio punditry – all the more so as an early career academic in a sharp-elbowed job market. Hours spent preparing for an eight-minute panel discussion eat into time you might otherwise spend tidying up a funding application. And it's not remotely glamourous pitching to a yawning BBC commissioner, then rushing home to mountains of unmarked essays.
Laurence Scott, part of the original 2011 cohort and now a regular Radio 3 contributor, had from the beginning a whiff of confident mystery about him. On launch day, he wore a smart dusky-rose coloured shirt, rendered a lurid magenta in the following day's paper. "It just didn't translate", he shrugged philosophically as we gazed at the photographs.
Things not translating has been a key part of our learning experience. You file a report from a festival, confident that your commentary is hilarious, urbane and insightful, but somehow it's cut together and compressed into a stream of prattled non-sequiturs. Your heart sinks.
There have been glorious experiences too. It's been great poking at the wiring beneath the boards of the Beeb: discovering things like the shonky stove that sits in the corner of Studio 50G (for Women's Hour and The Food Programme); and how quickly the lovely Mark Lawson can strike fear into your heart when he pinches his fingers frantically at you as time runs out on Front Row.
Presenters and producers can be wonderful. The best of them are curious and speculative, combining technical skill with expert advice, allowing you to communicate the most important things in the best way you can. They recognise the joint project of academic broadcasting – at their best, these programmes can satisfy audiences and academics alike.
But to make them, we must dispense with 'accessibility'. Communicating in engaging ways is right and proper – and no academic seeks obscurity. Yet we all underestimate audiences and their appetite for learning and knowledge.
Difficulty is what academics deal in, and it has its place in public debate too. Being a New Generation Thinker helped me crystallise what's at stake in my research. I loved almost every moment of it. But I cannot defend how the growing push for impact and public engagement is influencing the research process.
There is no correlation between quality of research and its media friendliness. The best academics I know prefer the British Library to Broadcasting House. Our business is the production and curation of knowledge. The challenge is to find ways of preserving the idea of scholarship as something not just useful and accessible, but curious and complex too."
Shahidha Bari is a lecturer in romanticism at Queen Mary University, London – follow her on Twitter @ShahidhaBari
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