reprinted from Spring 2011 InterCom

Tom Jones, who co-wrote the musical The Fantasticks in the late 1950s, grew ambivalent over a line late in the production when the formerly feuding families contemplate taking down the wall between their houses.

“Leave the wall. Remember — you must always leave the wall,” says the character El Gallo.

Jones felt the line had become the false message of the show, as Christin Siems reported in the Arena Stage Blog two years ago.

Thirty years after its debut, The Fantasticks was being staged in Russia for the first time, just eight months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Producers approached Jones with some temerity. “About this line—‘you must always leave the wall’—can we…take it out?” According to Siems, Jones grasped both the political significance and the opportunity: “Take it out! Please!”

I’ve been thinking a lot about walls, both real and imagined, over the course of this past year. In the fall issue of InterCom, I wrote about last summer’s fantastic trip through the formerly communist bloc of central Europe. We ended in Berlin where our students got to see remnants of the wall that was toppled about the time they were born. When the wall came down in 1989, Germans were so happy to be free of it that it was broken up and scattered. I recall buying a small piece — or what was purported to be a piece — in a department store in Washington. Berliners stopped the total dismantling, essentially saying, “You must always leave the wall.” Otherwise, we’d have had nothing standing to illustrate our lectures on the Cold War.

Walls define spaces, provide parameters, shape behaviors and activities. They serve as backdrops, bulletin boards and frames for our perspectives, particularly if they have windows. Some we construct. Some we confront. Some we need to tear down.

Curriculum review is a seeming constant in both of our schools — Library and Information Science and Journalism and Mass Communications—to ensure our programs are current and relevant. The journalism school faculty is engaged in its most far-reaching revision in well over a decade. Part of its aim is to eliminate those walls — we often call them silos — that keep us from preparing for the market place in which our graduates will find themselves. Multimedia, all-platform skills are now the norm in just about all our disciplines. I hear that consistently when I seek advice from alumni working in our fields. But we also have well-respected traditional programs focused on core capabilities whose long-standing benefits we don’t want to relinquish. If there are any walls left when we finish the process, they should be no more than knee walls that define the disciplines but do not obstruct our vision of the present and the future.

The Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications took note of our teaching strength when its team visited in February: Students remark that the courses they take in their sequences are rigorous and more demanding than many of the other courses they take in liberal arts and sciences. Courses in writing were especially noted for their rigor in demanding clarity and accuracy.

Accreditation takes place every six years. Our visiting team found the school in “compliance” on all nine ACEJMC standards. [See Will Hodges’ article on page 5.] That’s significant tribute to the work Dr. Carol Pardun, SJMC director and associate dean, and her faculty and staff are doing. In April, the council voted unanimously to reaccredit the program, a recognition it has held since the 1950s.

The accrediting team’s summary says:
Strong school leadership
A culture focused on teaching and student needs
A productive faculty in professional and scholarly works
Outstanding service to university and professional communities
Efficient budget management
A solid assessment plan

There is praise for our faculty: Since the last accreditation visit they have written 13 books, close to 83 refereed journal articles, more than 20 book chapters, more than 125 refereed research papers at academic conferences, more than 200 articles and essays in trade publications. Perhaps one of the greatest accomplishments is securing more than $1 million in grant money.

On the heels of ACEJMC came SACS — the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools — on its every-10-years accrediting visit of the entire university. SACS questioned the balance of journalism courses taught by faculty without terminal degrees; we missed SACS’ 25% threshold in some areas. However, SACS understands we’re a professional school, and we noted that our recent and current hires are Ph.D. faculty with strong research agendas. ACEJMC liked our academic/professional mix.

OK, we’re not perfect. ACEJMC notes: Continues to exist in a facility that is cramped and not ideal for needed upgrades.

At the end of its visit, the ACEJMC accrediting team met with Provost Michael Amiridis:

His enthusiasm for the (new) facility and its longer range impact on the mass communications program, its students and faculty should establish a new standard of excellence for a revised curriculum commensurate with a Research I University.

When he became provost, Dr. Amiridis told me he wanted the journalism school to move “on his watch.” We’re getting there. We’ve just been waiting for the public health folks to leave the Health Sciences building on their way to the Discovery building in Innovista.

These are some of the walls I’ve been thinking about. More than symbolically, the journalism school will be moving back within the historic wall surrounding USC’s Horseshoe. Our design carefully retains the Horseshoe wall that will wrap around the building at Sumter and Greene streets.

That’s one wall we’re not touching. We’ll also be doing construction work in Davis College this summer, preparing for a two-stage, nearly $2 million HVAC upgrade in the hundred-year-old home of our School of Library and Information Science. To minimize disruption to the always busy SLIS summer schedule, the structural and support work will be done this summer and the actual HVAC replacement in summer 2012. No walls will suffer in the updating of the much-loved SLIS home.

Despite the budget cuts of the past few years, we have been able to hire faculty — either for new positions or replacements — in every year. Two particularly exciting hires are on the horizon. We renewed the search for the initial holder of the Augusta Baker Chair in Childhood Literacy in SLIS and have high hopes the chair will be filled by the start of the fall semester. We have approval and funding from the provost’s office and have begun the search for a senior SJMC faculty member specializing in health communications. That position would add to our growing cohort of health information/ communication faculty in the college. While long-time SJMC professor Rick Stephens is retiring this summer, Brooke Weberling will trek from Chapel Hill to Columbia to join the public relations faculty.

Dr. Samantha Hastings has accepted a second term as SLIS director and associate dean. Sam’s five years as director have seen the implementation of the doctoral and undergraduate degrees in information science whose development began under her predecessor, Dr. Dan Barron. We expect to award the school’s first Ph.D. and BS degrees in the coming year. Those will be occasions for mounting the walls and celebrating.

Cocky’s Reading ExpressTM is scheduled to be featured on ESPNU this summer. The sports network — headed by SJMC alumna Rosalyn Durant—captured Cocky and cohort at a reading event at Columbia’s Carver-Lyon elementary school in April. The feature on SEC schools is set to air June 15 on ESPNU. We’ll post more info on our web site and via eNews.

The university will launch a major capital campaign this fall. A decade has passed since the Bicentennial Campaign. The timing is fortuitous for us, as we step up our efforts to bring the SJMC building to reality, enhance the SLIS literacy initiative and continue to provide resources to assist faculty development and student scholarship.

Development director Terry Dixon and I will be on the road increasingly as we seek to fund these improvements. A recent New York trip pointed us toward scholarship and internship assistance, technological expertise and a trove of journalistic artifacts that we’d like to display in the new building. The university is funding its basic renovation, but we want to ensure that it is outfitted on the communications cutting edge well into the 21st century. In that regard, we need to hear from you. We’ll come see you, if we can. Metaphorically, neither the walls of Jericho nor the Great Wall of China is beyond our reach.

As always, we welcome your thoughts, ideas and suggestions and hope this summer issue finds you in good health and high spirits.