Who do you trust, and why? A packed room at a recent Vanderbilt University-New York City event did not get an easy answer. Instead, it got a real-time argument-one that university leaders hope will define how Vanderbilt engages with the public for years to come.
The Sept. 10 occasion was part of Vanderbilt in the City, the public conversation series the university launched in Chelsea. It doubled as the public debut of the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Engagement, a new Discovery Vanderbilt center designed to connect university experts with the public. "Who Do You Trust and Why? Expertise in an Age of Algorithms" drew faculty, alumni, students and New York neighbors into a discussion of how knowledge travels-and stalls-in a media environment that's shaped by social platforms, artificial intelligence and eroding institutional trust.
Senior Associate Provost Kevin Stack and Assistant Vice Chancellor James Kellerhouse opened the evening, noting that Vanderbilt's Chelsea campus-opened just weeks earlier-has students, faculty and a full slate of public programming underway. Duane Watson, Mayborn Chair in Cognitive Sciences and vice provost for faculty affairs, framed the night's central question before turning the stage over to Jonathan M. Metzl, executive director of the Institute for Public Engagement and University Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Health and Society.
A NEW INSTITUTE COMES INTO THE FOLD
Metzl told the crowd that Vanderbilt in the City began as an experiment: Could a university host public conversations in New York that were substantive enough to matter and welcoming enough to draw a crowd? Consistently strong turnout, he said, pointed toward something bigger.
"The idea of the institute is to take this [community] energy and expand it," Metzl said. "How can we think about knowledge, trust, health-and how do we address these issues? Then, how can we have trustful conversations with communities and with community partners in ways where we respect from and learn from one another?" Part of that solution, and the impetus behind the institute, is to examine how Vanderbilt scholars can take part in those conversations without abandoning the rigor that makes their work valuable.
Metzl, working closely with Jad Abumrad, adviser for strategy and public engagement and Distinguished Research Professor of Communication of Science and Technology, described plans to train Public Engagement Fellows among Vanderbilt faculty and students, to conduct research on how information and trust spread, and to open the university's doors with more events like Vanderbilt in the City. The institute will announce its inaugural cohort of fellows in January 2027 and plans Rapid Response Labs that connect Vanderbilt experts with journalists and community organizations as news breaks.
The stakes, Metzl said, are not abstract. Universities are excellent at producing scholarship, he said, but that scholarship increasingly competes for attention with influencers and algorithm-driven platforms that operate by entirely different rules. "There's never been a harder time to figure out how to get that knowledge out there," he said.
FOUR PERSPECTIVES, ONE HARD QUESTION
Abumrad moderated a panel built to represent competing vantage points on trust: Kathleen Kingsbury, editor of the Opinion report for The New York Times; Sarah Norman, former head of strategy and analytics at TikTok and founder of Ambler Labs; and Steve Ertel, Vanderbilt University vice chancellor for communications and marketing and chief communications officer.
Kingsbury described how the Times Opinion section rebuilt reader trust by broadening its range of perspectives, investing in fact-checking and experimenting with video and dialogue-based columns-while staying recognizably itself. "We really are at our best and our most popular when we stick to our principles that we have held dear for 175 years as an institution," she said.
Norman offered a blunter view from inside the platforms that now shape public opinion. Credibility, she argued, does not automatically translate into algorithmic reach: "The algorithm does not care." Her advice to Vanderbilt's scholars was to abandon lecture-hall habits-the pause for effect, the credential-first introduction-in favor of a conversational, authentic voice that treats viewers like a trusted friend rather than an audience to be persuaded.
