Journalism dean candidates narrowed to 2

The roster of potential replacements for School of Journalism Dean Trevor Brown has been narrowed to two. The journalism dean search committee voted to send the names of Bradley Hamm and Christine Martin to IU-Bloomington Interim Chancellor Ken Gros Louis Feb. 11. Gros Louis and IU President Adam Herbert will recommend the candidate of their choice to the IU Board of Trustees, who have the final decision on dean hiring. But, he said, it is highly unlikely the trustees will reject whomever the chancellor and president send them. Gros Louis said he will primarily be selecting the dean candidate who best matches the culture of the School of Journalism and the culture of the campus.\n"We'll be looking for the one that understands the school the best and has a sense of the school's policies and procedures and how they were arrived at," he said.\nHamm, the associate dean of the Elon University School of Communications in North Carolina, said a lot of habits at the Elon communications school match those here at IU.\n"I think one the things we've practiced at Elon is that we built a communications school based on quality, based on class, based on scholarship, based on strong professional skills," he said. "I think that the journalism program at Indiana has always been strong on scholarship, I think it's always been know for its graduates."\nMartin, currently the vice president for institutional advancement at West Virginia University and the former dean of the School of Journalism, said she began her career in academia at IU at a summer workshop to train professional journalists.\nShe said her experience as the dean of the School of Journalism at West Virginia, a freestanding school, will allow her to work well at IU's School of Journalism.\nThe Dean Search Committee chose the two candidates by three major standards, said Committee Chair and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies Dan Drew.\n"We were looking for professional experience, academic experience and administrative experience," he said. "We thought both of the candidates were strong in those areas."\nHamm said of these three areas, he feels he is strongest in the administration.\n"In four years, we built a communications school that now has 31 faculty and 850 majors and is one of the largest programs in the nation," he said. \nMartin said she has a hard time choosing which of the criteria in which she is strongest; she has spent nearly 10 years as a reporter, nine years as a professor and nearly six as an administrator.\n"I certainly have spent the last five years as an administrator, it is my most recent experience and I have reached a certain maturity in my career as an administrator," she said. "My career as an administrator has taken advantage of my experience as a reporter and as a teacher."\nGros Louis said the dean candidates will both be invited back to IU for another visit where they will meet with IU administrators and again with faculty. He said the decision will likely be announced shortly after spring break.\nDrew said the overriding strengths of Hamm and Martin were that they had backgrounds in both journalism as a craft and journalism research.\n"We really appreciate people who have balance," he said, "people who have respect for both practical experience and scholarship." \n-- Contact Staff Writer Michael Zennie at mzennie@indiana.edu.