The Missions and Purposes of Journalism and Mass Communication Education

Abstract

In 1994, the incoming presidents of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) and the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication (ASJMC) appointed a joint committee to review the missions and purposes of journalism and mass (JMC) education. In their charge to the joint members, AEJMC President Judy Van Slyke Turk and ASJMC President Wick Rowland asked the committee to examine the actual and appropriate missions and purposes of JMC education as well as the specific activities which programs undertake to implement their missions and accomplish their goals. Creation of the committee was a response to several developments, including specific difficulties experienced by some departments in persuading university administrators of the centrality of JMC programs to their universities and the consolidation of various programs titled communication as some universities' response to the economic recession of the early 1990s. These developments, and particularly the viability of JMC education, also were the focus of the AEJMC Vision 2000 Task Force, which presented its report at the Atlanta Convention in 1994 (AEJMC, 1994). The Vision 2000 Report was controversial for a number of reasons, one of which was that it was perceived to be prescriptive about what should and should not be the mission and direction of journalism and mass educational programs. In focusing its work and refining its charge to make it manageable, the AEJMCASJMC Joint Committee on Missions and Purposes decided that its role should be more descriptive than prescriptive. The committee decided that a benchmark study was needed to demonstrate how programs saw their missions. Thus, the committee set out to collect and analyze the mission statements from all ASJMC member programs. As far as we know, this is the first systematic compilation, analysis and publication of mission statements from a large selection of JMC programs. We see this report being used in a variety of ways. First, as a benchmark, it can be used in future years to map the rhetorical change in programs' missions and purposes. Second, faculty who are reviewing their own missions might use this document as a resource as they investigate similar programs in terms of size, location, organizational structure and/or philosophy. Third, the statements provide an opportunity to develop exemplars that not only fit the philosophical needs of a variety of programs, but also might help define JMC programs to outside constituents. Fourth, educational researchers who argue the commonality or diversity of JMC programs will find the mission statements a good place to start their research. Fifth, these statements provide a useful starting point in the continuing dialogue about who we are, what we want to do, where different educational experiments are taking place, and why we do what we do. And sixth, as the assessment movement or more generic calls for accountability pick up steam in universities and in JMC programs in the United States, we will be asked to go back to our missions, goals and objectives to determine assessment strategies (See Christ, 1994; 1997). Thus, it would be helpful to see how different programs have framed their missions and purposes statements. Introduction All JMC units have missions. Some missions are explicit, visionary and useful; some are implicit, unclear and fractured. Mission statements are political documents that can be used to clarify or obfuscate a unit's reality (see Christ,1995; Christ & Blanchard,1994). They can accurately mirror a vision or simply reflect a pipe dream. Departments might argue that they have implicit mission statements or that no matter what the mission statement says, it is the faculty, courses and facilities that define a program. Though there is merit in this argument, Blanchard and Christ (1993) argue that explicit mission statements should be at the center of curricular discussion (p. …