by Brad Hall
Communication and Journalism Department chairman
Daily Lobo Guest Columnist
Reports of our death are greatly exaggerated.
I appreciate the passion and concern expressed in Monday's editorial by Angela Williams on the death of the Journalism/Mass Communication Program. However, it suggests things that simply are not true.
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I am writing to correct a few of these errors and invite anyone who is interested to attend a general meeting about the accreditation at 3 p.m. today, Tuesday, Nov. 5, in Room 212 of the Communication & Journalism Building.
The Journalism & Mass Communication Program is not dying and there are absolutely no plans to get rid of the program. In fact, we are in the process of hiring a new tenure-track professor in print/journalism. When this hire is complete nine of the last 13 full-time hires the department has been allowed to make will have been for faculty teaching in primarily the journalism and mass communication program.
At the time of the merger between the journalism and mass communication program and the communication program in 1992, there were six full-time faculty in journalism and mass communication and 12 in the communication program. Currently there are nine full-time faculty members in the journalism and mass communication program and 11 in the communication program.
I understand that some are concerned that one of the four tracks in the journalism and mass communication program, the print journalism track, is being short-changed. However, this is hard to explain based on the facts. Of the nine full-time faculty teaching in the overall program, three of them (Dennis Herrick, Mavis Richardson and Bob Gassaway) are primarily focused on the print track.
Last year, I had a year long study done in one of the courses required by all majors to determine the number of majors in each of the four tracks. The print journalism track only had 13 percent of the program's majors, yet it has 33 percent of the faculty. The growth of the overall program and the relative strength of the journalism track are hardly indications of an administration that does not care. As chairman of the department, I care very much about this program and the print journalism track.
The decision to withdraw from the accrediting process was actually not my decision. Last Tuesday I met with the seven faculty members on the journalism side of the program who were in town. I was there to give them information and my understanding of the situation based on my earlier discussions with members of the accrediting team. I explicitly told them that I felt this should be their call. The faculty agreed unanimously to withdraw from the process. I completely support their decision.
Not that having a program accredited by ACEJMC does not mean that a program is a bad program or that it is dying. Of the more that 300 journalism and mass communication programs in the United States, currently only 105 are accredited (this count includes us, since our accreditation lasts until next June). Many prestigious and successful programs are not accredited such as the University of Wisconsin, Cornell, Purdue, UCLA, Washington State, Notre Dame, UNLV, University of Michigan, North Carolina State and many more.
Beside ourselves, the most recent to join the expanding number of programs choosing to decline accreditation is Ohio State. The reasons behind this growing list of non-accredited programs have much more to due with politics and differences over what these programs should look like than with the quality of the program. Although our recent review was cut short, the accrediting team did review our program's curriculum. They judged the curriculum as completely up to ACEJMC standards.
However, the accreditation program has a single departmental model in mind and the review leader told me directly that this model was directed toward stand-alone programs rather than combined programs, such as ours. Issues of separate budgets and governance that are not realistic in our economic environment are key reasons why our own faculty and faculty in other departments are dropping out of the accreditation game.
Finally, I will note that I was disappointed, Ms. Williams, that as editor in chief of the Daily Lobo, you saw fit to write an editorial which included claims about things I had done, attitudes I have, and quotes I have made without ever bothering to actually visit with me. By the way, the quote you included in your editorial is at best a paraphrase, which is presented quite out of context and in a very misleading way.
