D.J. Hopkins is currently the co-director for the Center for Teaching and Learning and the co-host of the Faculty Futures Lab podcast. Last fall, he sat with down with Programs Assistant Kasside Sahagun-Escalante to discuss the evolution of the podcast across five seasons.

Interview with D.J. Hopkins:

What was the drive to start the Faculty Futures Lab podcast?

Hopkins: I didn't start it, Joanna Brooks, who's currently the Associate Vice President for faculty advancement and student success, she launched it during the pandemic. Seemed like a way for folks to asynchronously gather, and I was invited to be a commentator. She was talking to a faculty member in psychology, who specializes in thinking about mental health in the workplace and managing stress under multiple conditions, seemed relevant early in the pandemic. And Mike Borgstrom, he and I were like a Greek chorus and occasionally [Brooks] would just toss to us for color commentary. I was recording on an incredibly lousy microphone in my garage and I kind of got the bug of podcasting. I hadn't even really listened to many podcasts, and I'm there recording one. I ended up hosting one episode that was still under the umbrella of other people, multiple hosts, and then Joanna asked me to host a season of the podcast. I did that, and I've just kept coming back. 

What is the intention or effect you're hoping to have on listeners?

Hopkins: It's a podcast about being a faculty member in higher ed, and the assumption is most of the people listening are faculty members in higher ed. One of the things that I really want to achieve is elevating the excellence of my colleagues here at San Diego State, initially for other people at San Diego State, but we always want to imagine that we're going to be listened to by a broader audience of faculty, beyond just faculty here at San Diego State. I also try to bring in faculty from other universities occasionally, just to be able to expand the network. In fact, the last time I did that was still one of our most popular episodes. The two guests were a professor from UC San Diego and a professor from Brown across the country in Providence, and they had collaborated on an article, and the episode was about writing and the importance of writing to the two of them, and that's become our most popular episode.

How does creating this podcast work with no set aside budget for both hosts and guests? Is it all volunteer based? 

Hopkins: It is volunteer based, [for the guests] it's somewhere between 30 and 90 minutes of their time. On my side, it's part of what I'm doing as co-director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, so that's kind of worked into my job description and that's great. But between planning the episode and then recording the episode and then editing the episode, which is really time consuming on the back end, each episode for me takes at least 10 hours. Patrick [Flanigan] is of the opinion that fewer edits is better. Patrick edits very little, he's just recording and he'll have a couple of cuts, and then that's the podcast. I do not take that approach. I take out as many "ums" as I can, I sometimes condense, I'll often stop in the middle of an episode. I'll call a pause and will talk about, "okay, what are we doing next? Okay, great." and we'll restart. So I have to edit all that out.

How has your creative process changed over the course of five seasons? Do you feel more familiar with the technical side of podcasting?

Hopkins: I feel a lot more familiar. I mean, the first time I edited an episode, I'm watching videos on YouTube to figure out how to edit a podcast. I had no idea what I was doing. I recorded the episode and I kind of thought somebody else was gonna edit it. The first episode I edited was during the pandemic; I was staying in Colorado, way up in the mountains, did not have good WiFi. Then, there was a forest fire, and the whole town had to evacuate. I evacuated with my whole family to some relatives about an hour and a half away. It was 11 people and five dogs in one house fleeing a forest fire, immediately followed by a blizzard that dropped 18 inches of snow. So we were snowed in for three days, and then we were allowed to go back to the town, and the temperature immediately went back up. I have pictures of my child, who's now 12 but was 7 at the time, in a T-shirt and snow boots and gloves making a snowman next to a huge pile of snow. And so I was watching YouTube episodes in the basement of a relative's house during multiple overlapping crises, not to mention a global pandemic. Yeah.

Do you find these technical skills helpful in other areas? 

Hopkins: It's weird to think, but this is a golden age for radio if you expand the idea of radio to include streaming content like podcasts. I mean, even National Public Radio on their app refers to their radio programming now as podcasts. I think podcasting is everywhere, and it's useful, I find, in my position as co-director of the Center for Teaching and Learning; It's a great opportunity for me to get a couple of people together in a room, the three of us to talk for 30 to 90 minutes, and then I can reach dozens, sometimes hundreds of people. The opportunity to have this kind of asynchronous programming that people can listen to while they're folding their laundry or driving to work is a great way to reach a broader audience.

Would you agree that podcasting is a form of archival work, in your case recording how faculty are feeling, especially during the pandemic?

Hopkins: Yes, yes. Another one of the most popular episodes, it was like the fifth semester impacted by the pandemic, and I said into the microphone, "and I'm super over it!" That became the title of the episode. We had two of those episodes in which I interviewed different faculty basically about, "are you super over it too? How super over it are you? In what ways are you super over it?" Those got a lot of clicks, because we were all really over it, and in many ways, so were our students too.

Is there any specific theme you keep to for each episode or season?

Hopkins: Season 4 was very uniform, the whole season, five episodes, were about generative AI, and each episode took a different slice of the topic. We had specialized guests, each of whom talked about different aspects of the way generative AI had impacted higher-ed. This year we're going back to a more eclectic programming, but I do have a theme: "Moving Theory Into Practice." Pam [Lach] and I are interviewing faculty whose professional activity and teaching really explicitly moves between theory and practice, between things that happen in a classroom and things that go off campus and involve actively making things and having an impact in the world. All faculty do that, I'm absolutely allergic to the idea that "the university is the university" and then people will say, "but in the real world–" no, no, no. Universities are definitely part of the real world. I'm part of the real world, even though I'm a very "in my own research", a very theory focused faculty member and writer. I think that we're all doing things, this division between the "ivory tower" and the "real world" is, in fact, rather more permeable than some people make it out to be.

Other than that, we're having very different conversations. Talked with an engineer, talked with somebody in the marketing program in the College of Business, who is a sustainability activist. Although she's absolutely aligned with the curriculum in the College of Business, in many ways, what she's teaching upends a lot of stereotypical expectations of capitalist business models. And so now we're looking ahead to the spring semester, and we're bringing in some more exciting voices.

Collaboration and the rejection of these departmental divisions, especially in relation to Digital Humanities, is something that is often emphasized. Do you feel you are doing the same and bridging this gap between different faculty? 

Hopkins: Yes, absolutely. That's one of the things that I love about my current gig with the Center for Teaching and Learning. I get to talk with people all across campus and share my perspectives and kind of create an interdisciplinary community through that center.  It's one of the things that brings me back to [the Digital Humanities Center] all the time. Pam is really committed to digital humanities and networked knowledge. You look around here and there's all these monitors and places to plug in your computer gear. But also it's tables and chairs, it's whiteboards, it's tables you can write on–it's all about convening, which I think is wonderfully representative of Pam's vision for the digital humanities as not necessarily digital, but focused on the human and collaborative. 

What are your thoughts on SDSU's recent push for AI and AI initiatives?

Hopkins: I talk a lot about AI and Pam and I have settled on the word "decelerators." We are not AI cheerleaders, we are not accelerationists, we're decelerators. We recognize that AI is having an impact, and that that impact can be good, and it can have a negative impact on educational outcomes. It is having a negative impact on the environment. It's had a negative impact in terms of labor, on many people who've worked in the development of the large language models. There's definitely pros and cons, and because there's so much we don't know, I'm interested in tapping the break on adoption of AI. I do recognize that it's impact on higher-ed is so significant that even if we're not enthusiastic about adopting it for every use case, faculty do need to adapt to the changing landscape of higher education. And that includes learning more about generative AI, how it works, and teaching our students AI literacy, rather than simply avoiding talking about it as much as possible, which some faculty really want to do.

The Faculty Futures Lab is a faculty-led podcast series that considers the challenges facing institutions of higher education in complex and uncertain times. All guests speak from their own expertise and experience. Produced by the SDSU Center for Teaching and Learning.

Episodes of Faculty Futures Lab can be found on SoundCloud and Apple Podcasts.