Visual Communication Education: Cause for Concern or Bright Future?

Abstract

Proposed mergers. Mergers. Threatened layoffs. Closures. While this may describe what goes on in big business, it also describes rocky couple of years journalism and mass education has experienced in 1990s. Each semester seems to bring more news about programs under review, which often means they are being looked at for possible merger with another unit or even elimination.1 According to an annual enrollment survey in Autumn 1995 Journalism Educator. Becker and Kosicki indicate that in 1994 nearly 18 percent of 430 programs in sample reported that discussion of mergers on their campuses had occurred recently, while approximately 5 percent reported discussion to eliminate their units.2 A year earlier percentages were very similar,3 and an increasing number of administrators--12.4 percent versus 9.2 percent in 1993--said they already were reporting to department head.4 For more than a dozen years future of education in journalism and mass has been debated, beginning in 1980s with Planning for Curricular Change in Journalism Education (commonly referred to as Oregon Report).5 More recently, discussion has been extended by Blanchard and Christ in Media Education and Liberal Arts: A Blueprint for New Professionalism, who argue that the 40-year-long efforts of media study programs to offer varieties of subspecialities, in response to student and media practitioner demand, have been fragmenting and sapping limited resources.6 Since those limited resources have played a key role in many, if not all, of changes being considered at journalism and mass units, we were especially concerned about fate of a subspeciality within curriculum that can be quite expensive to maintain--photojournalism and courses. Additionally, if any area of curriculum seemed ripe for continuing change because of advances in computer technology, it was in photojournalism/visual communication, so updating developments in this area of curriculum seemed timely. Changes in programs Specifically intriguing to us was anecdotal evidence that some photography programs were being eliminated primarily because units were unwilling or unable to finance switch to digital technology. For example, School of Journalism and Mass Communication at University of Wisconsin-Madison phased out all of its photography courses during early 1990s, apparently because of a lack of student interest and high cost of operating a chemical darkroom for so few students. The College of Journalism and Mass Communications at University of South Carolina stopped offering a separate photojournalism major a few years ago as well. Photojournalism courses are still taught at South Carolina, but now they are electives to print journalism, advertising and public relations majors. We think it is important for students to have an understanding of importance of communication--not just photography--and are at moment working up a new required core course on digital that will include elements of photography, on-line and data-gathering and graphic design/layout, Turk said.7 Photojournalism courses also emerged as the most frequently mentioned vulnerable course, cited by nearly one in five administrators (18.3 %) as subject most likely to be eliminated, according to a 1994 survey by Professor Doug Birkhead of University of Utah.8 Birkhead's results, published in 1995, are based on 148 responses from administrators to his questionnaire on curriculum decision making which he sent on behalf of Education Committee of American Journalism Historians Association; respondents were asked to list three courses in their undergraduate program vulnerable to elimination. When administrators were asked to identify three broad curriculum areas (beyond journalism's traditional newspaper core) and of three most vulnerable course areas, visual communication came in third (21. …