Indiana Public Media | Save Ernie Pyle Hall
In her “State of the Campus” address, Lauren Robel said bringing four schools under one roof makes sense, Stan Jastrzebski reports: “I have concluded that the programs have a bright future and will best serve students if they are combined into a single School,” she said in the speech. The proposal calls for combining the schools of journalism, communications, telecommunications and film studies.
The study of journalism on this campus is 100 years old, and the practice of journalism is critical to a working democracy. But the field of journalism, in particular, has been the subject of numerous recent calls for renewal, from a major Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education to an Open Letter to America’s University Presidents from the leaders of six major foundations supporting journalism education, insisting that journalism education needs reform.
Robel said she’s “making available Franklin Hall, at the gateway to the campus, to house this combined school.” The j-school is currently housed in Ernie Pyle Hall, and a Facebook campaign aims to save it from becoming “a visitor’s center, a bookstore or a burger palace.”
Interim Indiana j-school dean Michael Evans is a candidate to lead the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication; at a meeting there last week he told the audience his “administration would be an open one, promising to be fair, accessible and transparent.” Brad Hamm, a former member of Poynter’s National Advisory Board, left his post as dean of the IU j-school last year to lead Medill’s program, which in 2011 renamed itself The Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications.
Previously: Indiana University may combine journalism, communications studies
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