CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - There is a future for the College of Communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - and potentially a very bright one, according to its interim dean, Ron Yates.
After more than a year of uncertainty and examination - during which disbanding the college and other severe options were discussed by two committees - the college officially has been told by the campus administration that it will proceed intact, Yates said.
"The college is not only here as it was before, it's going to be bigger," Yates said. One major initiative will be the creation and development of a broad and strong media studies program, building on existing college and campus strengths in that area. One emphasis of the program would be to offer courses on the media available to undergraduates throughout the campus, and to establish a strong media studies major.
The college comprises the departments of journalism and advertising, the Institute of Communications Research and the Division of Broadcasting, including WILL radio and TV stations. All of its academic units have continued to be ranked among the best in the nation, Yates said.
His comments came in the aftermath of a meeting last Friday with tenured faculty in the college, during which campus Provost and Interim Chancellor Richard Herman discussed steps the college should take in moving forward. Herman also announced that he was appointing Yates as the permanent dean, pending approval from the university's board of trustees.
Herman's recommendations came in a four-page letter to Yates that was written in response to the report from a 19-member college task force, chaired by journalism professor Walter Harrington, who recently was appointed interim head of his department.
The task force, which met throughout the fall semester and reported in February, had been asked by Yates to address concerns raised last summer by an ad hoc campus committee.
That committee cited what it saw as serious communication and budgetary problems. Among its recommendations were that the provost consider disbanding the college, establishing a separate school of journalism, and disbanding the department of advertising in favor of a possible advertising track in the new school.
In response to the college's task force report, however, Herman recommended mending the college rather than ending it. "The chancellor has basically accepted the meat of our report," Harrington said. "We're going to be moving ahead here doing the things that we promised and forging even better programs."
"There's still a lot of water to be carried" in addressing some problems and issues, Yates said. But he called Herman's response to the task force report a positive outcome. "It validates the college and its academic role on this campus," he said, and the task force process "helped us understand ourselves more than we possibly could have otherwise."
A key point for Harrington was that Herman "was convinced that we did belong together (as a college) - that there was an educational and philosophical rationale."
Herman did accept almost all of the task force's recommendations, though not without qualifications in some areas. "I recognize there is desire in your college to bring this process to a speedy end," he wrote in his letter, "but we both appreciate that some matters need to be more fully understood before sound decisions can be made concerning them."
Among other immediate steps recommended by Herman, largely in concert with recommendations from Yates and the task force:
• Work toward resolving leadership and communication problems within the department of advertising under an interim head, waiting perhaps two years before launching a search for a permanent head "of the caliber the department will need for the long term." Yates recently appointed Steve Helle, a former head of the department of journalism, as the interim head of the department of advertising. Helle also holds a faculty appointment in advertising.
• Expand immediately the undergraduate courses offered by the Institute of Communications Research, in part as a means for making the institute more financially viable.
• Produce a report by this fall that explores the possibilities for a broader media studies program, involving connections between the Institute of Communications Research and units outside the college, most prominently in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
• Explore a move toward reconfiguring the faculty of ICR as a department, perhaps with the title of media studies, while still continuing a unit called the Institute of Communications Research.
• Produce a plan by June 1 for allowing "more meaningful and extensive student experiences for academic credit" at the WILL stations.
• Address needs for better advising for "pre-journalism" students in LAS. (The College of Communications currently is a two-year college that students enter in their junior year.) Herman wrote that "I understand and appreciate some of your arguments for a four-year college," but also noted it was "a complex issue with implications that need careful consideration and discussion."
• Proceed with a thorough examination of development efforts within the college.
Both Yates and Harrington credited the thorough work of the task force in making the case for the value of the units within the college, for the value of keeping those units together and for seeing new possibilities that might build on college strengths. They both also commented on what they thought was a surprising lack of rancor and dissension in a difficult process.
"I said it early on that I looked at this whole thing as an opportunity," Yates said, though not discounting the extreme discomfort in such a thorough self-examination.
"I wouldn't wish this on anybody," Harrington said. "This is a matter, though, where the gain will be worth the pain."