Faculty discuss Media School proposal changes

Changes might be made to the Media School proposal before trustees vote Friday, based on faculty recommendations.

At a Bloomington Faculty Council meeting Tuesday at the IMU, faculty shared complaints regarding short deadlines and word choice used in the proposal.

Provost Lauren Robel released the proposal to the public Sept. 23, and Oct. 7 was the deadline for comments to be submitted by faculty.

Some faculty members protested that the three weeks weren’t enough time to come up with an adequate response, BFC president Herb Terry said.

“We got one especially passionate response from the journalism school about the short deadline,” Terry said.

Fewer than 10 faculty submitted responses. Faculty from communications and culture as well as telecommunications responded quickly, but it seemed the School of Journalism needed more time, said Edward Hirt, a psychology professor on the College of Arts and Sciences committee for the merger.

He said the main complaint from CMCL was the new media school wouldn’t have enough room for its three defining areas of study: rhetoric and public culture, performance and ethnography and film and media.

One telecommunications staff comment expressed concern about whether the merger was “an artist’s rendering of the new school or an architect’s plan,” Hirt said.
Terry said he feels the merger has been, largely, a top-down process, and it needs to be bottom-up.

“Faculty will be, for the most part, who implement this,” Terry said.

The School of Informatics and Computing also raised a concern that IUPUI Media Arts and Sciences is too close a concept to the merger, and the similar names will be confusing, Hirt said.

Hirt said the informatics school aims to make sure language of the merger policy is well-defined.

Mike Conway, an associate professor on the School of Journalism committee, said the proposal treated the journalism school too much like a vocational lab.

“Scholarship needs to be emphasized in language of the document,” Conway said. “There was an undue emphasis on technology at expense of fundamentals.”

Robel gave the complaint a brief response.

“There does seem to be a disconnect between betrayal of the journalism school in the proposal and the wish that the school could be appreciated for what they are right now,” Robel said. “The nature of the document is looking around that, but each of these schools bring incredible scholarship and thinking that has to come together for us to build the best thing we can build.”

If the proposal is passed, the merger will take place July 1, 2014.

Robel said she knows the move will be hard.

“People will have to balance their interests and personal trajectories against those of the community at large,” she said.