Image: Andrew Cole
In a small liberal arts college like St. Norbert, where under 2,000 undergraduate students and staff share a close-knit community, change is swiftly noted through word of mouth. That’s “communio” in action.
A glance around campus reveals that old faces of the college’s community have disappeared, and unfamiliar faces have appeared in their absence. One of these new faces is Dr. Andrew Cole: a communication and media professor teaching two of my courses in the fall semester. Always prepared to talk about advancements in communication, Dr. Cole brings something new to campus in the vacancy of SNC’s former community members.
To learn more about this new face on campus, I sent Dr. Cole a short list of exploratory questions via email. He had just lectured on interviewing in my Writing for Media course a few days prior — I felt confident he would be a willing interviewee.
I received Dr. Cole’s written responses a day later. My questions and his unedited answers are pasted from the original document below.
The Q&A
Q: Can you briefly introduce yourself? (ex. What subjects do you teach? Where did you get your education? What are you interested in?)
A: I completed my MA and PhD at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I started and ended my graduate studies there focusing on topics related to communication, technology, and health. In the meanwhile, I also did a lot of study on apocalyptic rhetoric (I was a doctoral student in 2012, and that was a big thing at the time!). At SNC this fall I am teaching courses in communication and media studies (public relations and writing for media).
Q: What did you do prior to working at St. Norbert?
A: Well, I was in school for a long time and even went to, and dropped out of, law school at one point. I have taught communication courses at a lot of colleges throughout the state including a few technical colleges. At various other times I have substitute taught in K12, worked at a RadioShack, helped instructors move their face-to-face courses online, and coordinated/oversaw technology pilot programs.
Q: How did you end up teaching at SNC?
A: I’ve lived in the Green Bay area for the past five years but don’t think I ever actually stepped on campus before. I’ve always heard nice things about the college, students, and faculty/staff so when I heard that SNC was looking for someone to teach communication and media classes, I more-or-less jumped at the chance.
Q: You often tie artificial intelligence into your lectures. What are your thoughts on where AI is headed?
A: As a kid of the 1980s and 1990s, I’m familiar with the technological doomsday tropes that tend to pop up with new technologies (there once was a thing/panic called “Y2K” after all). At a strictly pragmatic level, what we call “AI” seems super helpful. A comparison I sometimes use is that once computers were able to calculate statistics, it did not make much sense in terms of efficiency for everyone to calculate them by hand anymore. These AI tools offer opportunities to do something similar in many different ways with lots and lots of textual data. By that process though, certainly we should be cautious about what the content of that output is since it is not really vetted or quality-checked in a systematic way (which the tools are typically quite upfront about). As far as where it is headed, that is really an interesting question. Every new technology seems to be somewhat viewed as different than those before. Certainly there are ones that were very different because they really added something new that subsequent innovations built from (i.e., printing press with the ability to permanently record and distribute writing; film or television with the combination of audio/visual content). I view this as somewhat different in essence too which, I think, makes it a bit difficult to predict. One thing that I do believe is that it will continue to become more enmeshed in our daily lives (just like audio/visual content has even for our phone calls, for example).
Q: What interests you most about teaching?
A: Ever since I was an undergraduate student taking communication classes, I loved the fact that you could instantly apply things that you learned about communication across multiple domains of life (e.g., personal relationships, professional and career, written work, presentations etc.). What interests me most about teaching is seeing/hearing about how students make those connections and the ways they apply what they have learned outside of the classroom.
Like Dr. Cole, St. Norbert’s unfamiliar faces are sure to be known around campus as the 2025/2026 school year progresses. Whether for better or for worse, opinions on professors' teaching styles, personalities and stances are sure to circulate among the student body. In the meantime, all additions to SNC staff are welcome as they familiarize themselves with our small, but greatly friendly, community.