Toward Making Changes in Mass Communication Research and Doctoral Education Happen

Abstract

Report of Task Force on Status and Future of Doctoral Education in Journalism and Mass released on Sept. 11, 2006, and available on AEJMC Web site, should be required reading for all of us who care about future of mass communication education and research. A lot is there-fifty-nine pages-and all of that will take some digesting. But it also is what is not there, and pointing out that Task Force Report in many ways asks more questions than it answers is no criticism, which will require most thought. first substantive section, The Changing Landscape of Doctoral Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, goes on for six-and-a-half pages, almost entirely single-spaced, on general trends in higher education, trends in communication, and implications for doctoral students. points are sharp, while not being worded so as to be offensive to any person or school of thought, or being clearly defeatist. section's author, Charles T. Salmon, points out that university administrators are directing considerable effort and attention to promoting interdisciplinary scholarship; never before have [JMC] faculty members had more opportunities for collaborative research; and our faculty of future will need to provide intellectual infrastructure for many applications of communications technologies in other disciplines. He makes double-sided observation that much of groundbreaking work occurring in 'communications' education is happening at margins of these emerging pockets of interdisciplinary activity rather than in center of traditional communications programs, and it is clear that he is more concerned with of groundbreaking work in latter than excited about former. For Salmon says here that ours is a field that is largely oriented to comfortable and familiar theories of past or to theories that have arisen in allied (and that poaching of other fields' theories while not exporting own is, as prolific author/researcher Charles Berger put it, the 'intellectual trade deficit' that has for so long plagued field) and a lack of theoretical innovation and leadership that unfortunately has come to characterize discipline. A second substantive section of report, What Do Doctoral Education Programs Need to Do?, written by Hazel Dicken-Garcia and colleagues at University of Minnesota, includes ten recommendations, each with an explanation. eighth is, not surprisingly given Salmon's section, Assure Interdisciplinary. Let's briefly and bluntly consider issue of interdisciplinary research involving mass communication. One problem is that many scholars in other disciplines still think of departments and schools of journalism and mass communication as little better than trade schools and are surprised to find out that JMC even has scholarly journals, let alone a lot of them, a significant body of social scientific theory, and an even larger body of data gathered by social scientific methods. One could complain that, for example, a sociologist writing about mass media would be amazingly oblivious not to stumble across Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly and one would be correct as far as that goes, but one also must realize that discipline, both department by department and discipline-wide, is still throwing off trade school vibes: as JMCQ Editor Dan Riffe and others have noted, mean average number of journal articles written by JMC professors in United States is less than one. (The mean average number of books written or edited by U.S. JMC professors also is less than one.) Even in 2007, number of JMC professors who do not hold a doctorate is substantial, and lest one attribute that only to rising academic standards over a period of decades, number of JMC professors still hired each year without a doctorate is significant. As I have written about before in other venues, number of JMC professors working as paid consultants, paid media critics, paid expert witnesses, paid government advisors, and so on-let alone thrusting themselves into important debates as public intellectuals-is also minimal. …