In the summer 2009 issue, I wrote about a proposed media-heavy curriculum and called how one would really blow up a J-school curriculum. I know anecdotally that at least a few JMC programs around the United States compared and contrasted the media skills they were teaching or were planning to teach with the ideal/idealistic curriculum that I wrote about here (but which I did not design).I'm back on the topic, but sharing with you an innovative curriculum that was designed from scratch, and already is in place - in a bilingual School of Communication in Spain, specifically at IE University, the university that has grown up from IE Business School (one of the five best in Europe and thus highly ranked worldwide) and was launched in autumn 2008.IE Business School itself is not only private, but privately owned; was founded by Diego del Alcazar (Tenth Marquis of la Romana), who in September 2007 was appointed chairman of Spain's largest media conglomerate, Vocento, which owns the ABC national newspaper, regional newspapers, online media, television, and radio operations. Despite the marquis's substantial wealth, the launching of IE University from IE Business School was still a huge risk and a huge investment for its owners - meaning that they had to do an awful lot right in terms of curriculum, hiring faculty, and marketing the university to potential students throughout Europe and the United States. And this was against a backdrop of the so-called Bologna Accords ( 1 999) to more or less standardize European higher education by 2010.Dr. Samuel Martin -Barbero, an IE Business School professor specializing in corporate communications, was appointed dean, and he and others (including significant advice from Penn's Annenberg School for Communication) conducted a comprehensive analysis of what other universities were doing and not doing, what was feasible, necessary, and ideal. Eight of the for (my paraphrasing here) were: fulfilling minimum local, national, and European recommendations is not enough to maximize quality; accreditation requirements are inadequate if they do not result in study abroad and fluency in a second language; all communication subdisciplines must obtain enough to pursue teaching excellence; ironclad defense of senior faculty and long-time courses is counterproductive when major change is needed; is necessary to implement policies and strategies to achieve excellence in faculty, students, and curriculum, collect empirical evidence ofthat excellence, and work toward employers recognizing such excellence with appropriate salaries; it is inappropriate to negotiate internship agreements, many of them unpaid positions, without first being able to influence the conditions and characteristics of the permanent positions and freelance opportunities offered by those same companies; expanding] multimedia infrastructures and resources should be dependent upon attempts to optimize, recycle, renew or eliminate existing media; a university should not obtain additional research funding unless faculty are finishing and publishing their studies, and also working with industry experts and international peers; and communication scholars should have an entrepreneurial spirit in the evolution of the area of communication knowledge.The ninth idea, which Martin-Barbero listed fourth, said in full:It is fruitless to continue a policy of hyperactive marketing of an ever-burgeoning portfolio of degrees with the objective of attracting more students, while remaining ignorant of the reality of the demand in the labour market and what the competition is doing, as well as when there is a transfer of recruitment and external prescriptor/advisor commitments to the faculty body itself.This list of nine provocative ideas led to nine recommendations/proposals for a School of Communication at IE University. They were that the school had to execute:* new concepts and actions such as 'internationalization,' 'excellence,' entrepreneurship,' 'competitiveness,' 'recruitment and retention of talent,' the figure of 'mentor,' 'professional opportunities,' and 'bonuses. …