Students air opinions about media school merger

Provost and Executive Vice President Lauren Robel has proposed the merger of the Department of the Communication and Culture, School of Journalism and Department of Telecommunications into one single unit.
 
Robel organized a committee to design a plan of action that will effectively combine the programs to create a single school.

School of Journalism Interim Dean Michael Evans said this isn’t about money.  
The school and two departments are all doing well on their own, he said, but together they could be much more notable. Other academics involved with the schools agreed.
“The units aren’t deficient or downsizing,” communication and culture professor Gregg Waller said. “They’re going to become more valuable.”

The committee members are Evans, Waller, telecommunications professor Julie Fox and Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities in the College of Arts and Science John Lucaites.

The four committee members are in charge of coming up with a plan that will be submitted to Robel later this year and ultimately decided upon by the Board of Trustees, Evans said. 

They have come up with two structures for merging the schools. The two existing plans exist simply to “generate discussion,” and aren’t official plans, Lucaites said.
The first structure consists of five parts, according to the plan released by the Committee on Communication, Media and Journalism. 

It would bring in professors from not only inside the existing programs, but other programs as well, such as from the School of Informatics and Computing.

The core departments would become more interconnected via a series of institutes designed to facilitate more research. Then, the new school would develop a series of new undergraduate degree programs to replace the current degrees that draw from all of the resources of the current units. 

The graduate education will continue to be based in departmental units. The new school will also call for relocation of all programs.

The second structure is called the “starfish,” and consists of undergraduate and graduate education following different paths through specific legs of the “starfish,” all connected by the “heart” that encourages an adaptive infrastructure to promote all items related to media. 

Although these structures have been presented at the meetings, the committee made clear they are not proposals.

This merger has become a debate between the committee and the students of all three programs. The final public meeting for undergraduate students took place Tuesday.

Undergraduate students expressed opinions and ask questions about the merger.  
Will Mruzek, a senior in the Department of Communications and Culture, made his own structure based off of the committee’s. His plan mirrored theirs, but instead made a more linear graph of how the majors could be structured. 

“I think we need to modernize the School of Journalism,” said Haley Nelson, a junior journalism major. “We can put a greater focus on a wider range of education, especially dealing with web skills.”

With the opinions of graduate and undergraduate students and faculty of the departments and school effected, the committee will create their plan and submit it by the end of the fall semester.