Expand the Mills Public Radio Program

Proposal 

The Mills' public radio program is unique in American undergraduate education; students love it and cannot get it anywhere else. It is an excellent vehicle for connecting with Oakland and for garnering national visibility for Mills. In its first 6 years the program has been recognized with state and national awards. This is a proposal to build on its success.

Status Quo 

An introductory class is offered in the fall semester. This class has been compared to a boot camp: students learn by doing, doing things they have never done in academic career (attending a city council meeting, cold calling to interview someone, doing primary research, etc.). They learn the principals of public interest reporting, an organic method of community reporting, how to write lean and clear prose, and how to produce a radio story.

An intermediate course is offered in the spring semester. This class does graduate level work. Each class has a focus; past examples have been schools, redevelopment, returning veterans, and the recession. The class as editorial team fans out in part of Oakland and to document what is happening in an on-going blog, as they research radio stories that create a portrait of a place and help people understand a larger issue.

The program has collaborated with CUSP at the school of education, anthropology and sociology.

Because so many students want to continue with this work, the program creates opportunities to work on individual documentary projects, internships at KALW and other skill building opportunities. About 100 students have taken the classes over the past six years. One, Sarah Gonzales, won the extremely competitive Kroc Fellowship at NPR in 2010. She and others have gone on to work in public radio.

What We Could Be Doing 

An expanded program might include:

1. A Series of six broadcast lectures—high profile women in leadership, recorded for broadcast and distributed nationally through the Public Radio Exchange. Such a program might partner with organizations like the Commonwealth Club.
2. Create new class creative non-fiction for live story-telling in which students would come to the class with a story that could be turned into a live, multi-media presentation. The actual performance could become a Mills version of a “underground” event like pop up magazine.
3. Create advanced documentary course
4. Provide summer intensive reporting seminar
5. Create documentary unit that is producing work for national outlets such as NPR, Snap Judgment , This American Life, Radio Ambulante , etc. 

Resources Needed

To begin to move in the directions described above would require a single producer/reporter to expand the curriculum, produce the broadcast series and live events and handle the technical production. Including expenses for the current program the budget for the entire program would be about $100k annually.

Benefits and Possibilities

This program could involve 30-40 students per year and would provide opportunity for students to follow a cumulative curriculum over 2 or 3 years. A summer program might expand this further. The current program serves about 12 students per year. The program would strengthen the existing journalism minor and it resonates with programs in inter-media art and the social sciences. It could be a cornerstone component of a revived communications major.

The products of the program have a unique opportunity to expose the Mills name to a national audience. The various networks mentioned above are all already in place and are hungry for the kind of material Mills students could produce. The program would be a double-edged contribution to community outreach: students would be involved in community-based public interest journalism and the results of their work would be publicly visible and accessible.

This represents an opportunity to create a destination program as it is unlike anything offered to American undergraduates.

See Also 

• Sandhya Dirks(Mills alumna) “How Mills Public Radio Changed My Life” 
• "Mills College Students Win Documentary Awards From American Women in Radio and Television" 
• "Northern California Society of Professional Journalists Honors Students"  

Some Recent Stories by Mills Alums 

• "Vote While You Shop: 'Pop-Up' Poll Sites Sweep Iowa" by Sandhya Dirks October 24, 2012 
• "13th Grade: Why More Florida Students Than Ever Struggle With Math" by Sarah Gonzales December 10, 2012 

Outreach Programs to Boost Reputation and Enrollment

Colleges are often represented through their athletic department. However another way to represent the College is through a solid "outreach program" in the arts, sciences and humanities. This type of program targets high schools and/or other colleges as a tool for recruitment.

Examples

An outreach can take many forms and it can be organized departmentally or through a division. For example, the Dance Department went to Berkeley High, the Crowden School, Santa Rosa University and Hayward College and presented a "lecture demonstration," which is basically a mini concert with a presentation done by one Faculty member. It can include a discussion about artistic processes, a period of questions and answers, presentation of the curriculum and sometimes have activities that will involve students’ participation.

Science departments could develop a small repertoire of "road shows" that would be of interest to high schools in the Bay Area (or beyond). Social science departments, likewise, could offer talks and demonstrations. In both cases, some research would be necessary to determine just what topics and genres would work for different audiences and would play on the strengths of our faculty and students.

The Leverage

The Admission office also goes to various conferences and presentations and makes school visits, but sending faculty and students directly to schools and showing the actual work we do in person with some of our students can establish strong connections and enrich the visited school even as it benefits us visibility. Even if the students in these various schools do not end up applying to Mills, they might attend an event on campus, talk about Mills with parents or friends or simply take with them a positive Mills experience.

To make these “outreach programs” truly beneficial for the College, they would probably need to be organized in an "officially" with a vision behind them.  For example, they might be grouped by theme or by division. They would also need to be coordinated with the Admission Office; if the event takes place in high schools, someone from the undergraduate program should participate. If it’s another college, someone from the graduate admission should accompany the group etc.

What It Would Take

Transportation should also be considered as a part of the infrastructure necessary to make something like this work.  The PE department is able to go "on the road" because it does have its own vans.  A program like this would probably need to have a similar resource on hand to make it work.  And we would have to figure out how to fit this into our already busy schedules; no small thing, but do-able.

Having someone with vision and some modest resources in charge of such an “outreach program” could produce something that is a great recruitment tool as well as helping to spread the education and culture that Mills has to offer.

See Also: "Capitalize on Public Performance/Lecture Spaces"

Examples at Other Schools

"Fruitville Elementary Joins New College Archaeology Day"
Faculty and students host a Saturday event to introduce K12 students to "public archaeology" on the New College of Florida campus.

1000 Rolling Billboards

Traffic, Eyeballs, and Mills or “Why Be a Billboard for a Car Dealership?” 

A conservative estimate would have 1,000 automobiles being driven by persons with a close association with Mills (e.g., students, staff, faculty, administrators).

If each car is driven two hours per day and during an hour it is in front of 10 different other cars then we have 1,000 x 7 x 2 x 10 = 140,000 potential impressions per week. Or 7,280,000 per year.

But how many are we now taking advantage of? How many of the 1,000 potential roving advertisements convey a Mills message? A recent informal survey of the cars parked in front of Mills Hall found one – and this one was on the front, not the back of the car.  That's 1 of 43 cars; it implies we are taking advantage of maybe 3% of the opportunity, under 200,000 eyeballs instead of 7 million per year.

UNIQUE! Only one Mills license plate frame observed on the oval

By contrast, our survey found between 50 and 75% of the cars were advertising car dealerships or, occasionally, other colleges/universities.

 

A Project Idea

Suppose we got a Mills license plate frame on every car. What would it cost? How would we do it?

Cost. A quick look on the web yields costs ranging from less than one dollar (for plastic frames in quantities ~1000) to $11.00 (chromed metal in small quantities). Retail price at Mills bookstore was $8.95.

How. Key thing to wide participation would to be to minimize cost and – even more importantly – to completely remove the hassle of installation. Thus, we might

• distribute with parking tags or at registration. 
• or perhaps even better we simply go around one day and do each parking lot (we might ask people to leave a permission slip on their dashboard or something like that). 
• or just have someone there installing them during registration/orientation. 
• or we tie parking premiums to them – you get to park near your office if you display a Mills license plate frame. 
• or to encourage the practice we could have a bit of a lottery during first month of school. Each day we pick a random number and the Nth car through the gate with a Mills license plate frame that day wins an ____. 

Other Considerations. Should our plates say something other than “Established 1852”? We might get some kick on the campaign if there were some choices. Perhaps ranging from the very sober (see above) to “Not a girls school without men…” or whatever our latest tagline is?  Have enough variety that people in the Bay Area look forward to seeing the next one, collecting them all.  Or maybe a new branding motto that comes out of the strategic planning process?