THE URGE TO MERGE

 

THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO EXPERIENCE

 

            There were a lot of players who finally influenced the creation of the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada in 1996.  So, I would ask this audience to be patient while I spin a tale which includes all the academic “fun and frolic” ranging from determination, scholarly excellence and vision to the desire to murder, deal with personality conflicts and arguments that often pushed the boundaries of libel and slander laws.  Hopefully I now have your attention.

 

            Our story begins in the late 1940’s with some saying 1946, others 1947.  What matters not is the date.  What does matter is the activity, namely the founding of two journalism programs in two different post secondary institutions, one in the nation’s capital at Carleton College, the other in London, Ontario at the University of Western Ontario, one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious institutions.  Age and prestige not withstanding, both universities were some four decades behind their American colleagues in bringing journalism to the academy.  And in keeping with some American experience, journalism as a university discipline was not welcomed with open arms in Canada.    At the risk of being overly simple, I will claim that Canadian academics in many ways saw themselves as extensions of both the English speaking and French speaking European institutions and many still do.  Cambridge, Oxford and the Sorbonne provided inspiration and it wasn’t in journalism studies.  There professional schools focused on the study and research of medicine, law, engineering and the natural sciences.  Journalism, with its reputation as a heaven for wife beaters, alcoholics and unsuccessful gamblers hardly fit the mould.

 

            At both Carleton and Western, the early days of journalism education was typical of that of most American schools.  The emphasis was on teaching candidates how to practice the craft.  As a consequence, the faculty in both of these institutions were focused on “how to do” type courses and the thought of looking at journalism as a discipline was never openly discussed.  This is somewhat surprising since the professor who initiated journalism studies at Western was a historian with an interest in journalism history.  But when the plan to open a journalism program was laid before a very reluctant vice-president academic, it had all the hall marks of something which would be better off in a technical school.  There was only one problem.  At the time, Ontario had no technical colleges.  That would have to wait until 1952 with the founding of the Ryerson Institute of Technology  and later in the mid 60’s when the two year colleges of applied arts and technology began to spring up all over the province.  It was there, in both of these institutions that journalism finally found a compatible home.

 

            Following the events of the late 1940’s the two Canadian university journalism programs essentially took very different paths.  In the 1960’s Ottawa’s Carleton College evolved into a fully accredited university.  Its journalism program became a lynch pin in a much larger department of mass communications studies.  Once this turn of events took place, the role of the academic became implanted in the Carleton experience and the focus shifted to hiring more academics with advanced degrees who were commissioned to develop a research agenda.  Being situated in such a climate was of significant advantage to the Carleton journalism program.  While retaining its practical training sector, it was able to incorporate more traditionally based courses in its overall program.  Several faculty decided to continue to study at an advanced level with a fair number over the years acquiring doctoral degrees.  Then publications began to appear, many with a decided academic flair. The Carleton University Press published what was undoubtedly the most comprehensive history of journalism in Canada.   The program at Carleton was integrating itself well within the university culture.  Eventually, the department was able  to offer degrees from  a three year baccalaureate to a doctorate.

 

            Things were quite different over at the University of Western Ontario.  There was no expansion into a mass communications agenda.  The journalism program sat alone outside the university culture.  There was no research focus of any note.  Retired journalists were hired to teach the up and coming new crowd and did so quite successfully no matter what degrees and/or diplomas they personally held if any.  But there was one other major difference between the Carleton program and that at Western.  The University of Western Ontario prided itself on being one of the major research universities in Canada.  It had been founded by the Anglican Church in 1878 and developed among others, a large medical faculty, a world renowned business school, a notable law faculty along with core programs in the social sciences and humanities.  Somehow or other, journalism appeared to be the square peg trying to fit into the round hole.  Eventually its past would come to haunt it.

 

            The haunting began in 1968 although the events that took place that year were not intended to have a decided bearing on the future of journalism.  The Graduate School of Library and Information Science was founded on a model which would soon be duplicated by its brothers and sisters in journalism.  It was one of many small units which would pop up on the UWO campus in the years to come.  However, it was quite different administratively than other quasi independent units.  It was a school, not a faculty or department.  Administratively it sat between both, headed by a dean who reported to the Dean of Graduate Studies.  The school opened by offering a professional degree at the graduate level called a Master of Library and Information Science.  Within a short period it added a doctorate in information science which would prove to be a stimulus to faculty to establish a research agenda, and they did.

 

            Back on the other side of campus, concern was continuing to rise about the place that journalism was to occupy in the university environment.  The university commissioned an investigative study under the direction of a Mr. Arthur Porter.  His report was issued in 1970 and it recommended that a new faculty be created with the express purpose of establishing a media studies component at Western.  To get the new unit underway, Porter recommended merging the research oriented graduate program at the School of Library and Information Science with the three year undergraduate program in journalism.  The journalists who belonged to a craft never known for great teamwork panicked at the potential loss of their quasi independence as a unit in social sciences.  They convinced the university to seek advice outside the campus and the administration agreed.  In 1972 Professor Elie Abel then of Columbia University in New York and a former ABC television correspondent began the inquiry into the journalism program at Western.  In 1973, his report recommended that the undergraduate program be closed and that Western undertake to create a program based on the Columbia model.

 

            For those of you not familiar with the Columbia program, it is slightly less than one calendar year in length.  It is a graduate program that admits students with high standing in various forms of undergraduate training.  And more importantly, it is a purely professional program.  So, here is the contradiction.  Western was advised to close an undergraduate program based on professional training to open a graduate program to do the same thing at a considerably higher cost.  In 1974, the Graduate School of Journalism at Western based on the Columbia model opened its doors to 40 students.  As well, four undergraduate courses which had been offered in the now abandoned program were kept and offered as electives for social sciences.

 

            The transition to a graduate program would prove problematic for the next two decades.  Not one of the faculty which had been inherited from the undergraduate program possessed a graduate degree.  So the first order of business was to ship these faculty members to any institution which would offer them a master’s degree program.  Interestingly, the founding dean of the Graduate School of Journalism chose to take a Master’s degree through the Graduate School of Library and Information Science.  However, the lack of a faculty with graduate degrees was not the most difficult problem the school faced.  It had decided early in the transition period to offer a Master of Arts degree as opposed to a purely professional master’s degree such as a Master’s in Journalism, Master’s in Communications or any one of another set of variables that excluded the word “arts.”   The founding dean felt that offering a more prestigious degree would give the new program an edge on the competition.  The idea was great, the execution was not.  The granting of a Master of Arts degree committed the unit to developing a research agenda which must show up in course offerings, academic publications, peer reviewed journals and in conference presentations.  The old undergraduate faculty          was not equipped to meet these conditions.

 

            In Ontario, every graduate program undergoes a stringent, government sponsored review every seven years by the Ontario Council of Graduate Studies (OCGS).  The unit under investigation must provide documentation on its activities for the six years previous to submitting the report.  If there are any questions regarding the submissions, the Council can authorize a campus visit.  In 1980 it did just that.  The dean’s objective to hire Ph.D.’s and establish a research agenda had gone off the rails through no fault of his own.  One candidate came ABD and needed time to finish.  Another faculty member came with an M.A. only with no intentions of going further.  Another abandoned doctoral studies and returned to the industry and the only productive member of the academic part of the unit contracted cancer and died young with only a limited output.  The OCGS reviewers were not impressed.  In fact, they refused to grant the school status and put it on probation with a mandate to clean up its academic act.

 

            The founding dean left the administrative chair after his first term.  Following an interim period with an acting administrator, Peter Desbarats a well known Canadian journalist from a journalistic family that extended back two hundred years in Canada assumed the deanship.  His mandate was to maintain the quality of the professional program and develop an academic agenda.  However, all was not well at Western over his appointment.  Strong opposition came from the Faculty of Arts administration who noted that Desbarats did not have a graduate degree.  In fact, he had only one year of post secondary education.  His opponents wondered how he would be able to meet the academic objectives set out by OCGS when he was completely unfamiliar with the turf.  A good question which later had a troublesome answer.

 

            Dean Desbarats inherited the ABD who by this time had finished the Ph.D. program and the M.A. who showed no signs of going on.  To this collection, he added two more persons, both ABD.  In his defense, he was faced with an almost impossible task.  The university would not fund purely academic appointments since that usually meant hiring one person to do academic work, another to work with the professional side.  That meant that incoming candidates not only had to bring a Ph.D. or a nearly completed one accompanied by a significant amount of professional experience.  These people were virtually non existent in Canada so some compromises had to be made.    So before the second OCGS landing in 1986, the dean had four so called academics, only one of whom came with a doctorate.  The second OCGS review was just as troublesome as the first.  Once again, the program was placed on what was called a conditional acceptance with an obligation to report back in two years about how it planned to deal with an academic agenda.

 

            It is under this cloud that I entered the world at Western in 1987, coming, as others had before, ABD.  I finally completed the degree in 1990.  As an omen of things to come, one colleague who taught practical journalism came to pay me a visit soon after my arrival.  While chatting with me, he surveyed my book shelf and eventually sighted Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan.  His reaction surprised me and made me somewhat uncomfortable when he stated with conviction that no journalism instructor would keep that kind of “trash” on his bookshelf.  What I did not know until some time later that the appointment that I had been given had been previously held by an ABD candidate who had not completed his degree by the time he faced a tenure panel.  The result was predictable but in my mind, the two incidents clearly defined the culture in the journalism program at the time.

 

            Following my arrival, two other appointments were made.  Both candidates came armed with completed doctorates.  Another visiting faculty member from Carleton University came at the same time as I did.  He stayed until 1989 and would play a significant role in the events of 1993 which I still have to address.  During the mid 1980’s another ABD was hired but he left before the events of 1993 after completing a Ph.D.  He is now working in the United States.  So here is the status leading up to April, 1993.  The School had four Ph.D.’s and one M.A. all doing academic work.  The dean was set to retire in 1993 having spent twelve years in the post under very difficult conditions.  That same year, OCGS once again landed at Western.  And once again, the reviewers pointed to the relative weakness of the academic side of the program although the report was not as condemnatory as those in 1980 and 1987.

 

            It was a quiet spring day in April of 1993 when the faculty and staff were called together for an important meeting with the vice-president academic and provost.  It had been widely rumoured on campus that the Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism and the Provost had a tempestuous relationship so no faculty member surmised that this would be a pleasant meeting.  The School had been constantly ignored when surplus funds were handed out.  The Provost had revoked an appointment made by the School to occupy an endowed chair.  That very chair was the source of hard feelings between the two administrators.  A faculty member had written a grant application to the federal government to endow an academic chair in journalism studies in the early 1980’s and to everyone’s surprise, the grant was successful.  But it came with a significant rider.  The university was committed to matching the half million dollar gift.  No one in the senior administration ever once thought that the application would be successful and it when it was it created chaos in the front office.  Reluctantly, the central administration agreed to lend the money to the School which was then charged with a fund raising initiative to pay back the donation.  The only other choice would be to return the money to the federal government, an option Western was not about to take.  Our visiting professor from Carleton was the first chair of the newly created Center for Mass Media Studies, now the Rogers Chair for Studies in Journalism and New Technologies.

 

            No one was unduly shocked when the Provost told the gathering of journalism instructors and staff that when Peter Desbarats retired later that year that Western was getting out of the journalism business.  But then, not quite getting out of the journalism business.  The Provost had cooked a deal with the Director of the Journalism and Mass Communications program at Carleton, the same person who had occupied our endowed chair from 1987 to 1989.  All tenured and probationary faculty were to be transferred to the Ottawa campus where they would remain employees of the University of Western Ontario.  Those who chose not to accept this offer could opt to remain in London in the various faculties of arts and social sciences.  The Carleton faculty were about as impressed with this deal as those of us at Western.  In a faculty meeting, the Carleton professoriate voted to reject the deal.  We were now on our own, ten faculty members and five staff members.

 

            The debate raged throughout the summer months both on the campus and in the national media.  Journalists who had scorned the concept of journalism education were more offended by the Provost’s actions to kill the program.  As a consequence, the media rallied to the cause.  The tide was turning, but it was not enough.  Early in September of that year, the Senate Committee on University Planning was called to hear the administration’s motion to remove journalism from Western.  It passed by a vote of 6 to 5.  The debate then moved to Senate where the administration held all the cards.  All the deans who depended on the Provost’s generosity had enough votes to sway the balance and they did.  The motion passed by eleven votes.  It was on to the Board of Governors which had never interfered with a major administration initiative.  The journalism faculty and staff felt the war was over.  But it was not to be.

 

            The weeks leading up to the Board of Governors vote was filled with intense lobbying conducted by a graduate who was angered by the Provost’s move to cut the program.  By the night before the Board meeting, he advised us that if the votes held, we would win by one or possibly two votes.  He reported that a significant number of board members were troubled by the on going bashing in the media and felt in general that the issue had been badly mishandled.  Then came the thunderbolt.  The Provost chose to absent himself from the most important Board meeting of the year, the one which would hear his initiative to attend an Iron Man competition in Hawaii.  In his place the associate vice president was to take the lead in getting the motion through the Board.  But as one supporter of the journalism school pointed out, the Board’s constitution did not allow proxy votes.  The Provost had just lost one vote which would prove to be significant.

 

            The meeting was held on a Friday morning in November.  When the doors opened at 9:30, there were twenty four Board members on hand plus the chair who did not vote unless there was a tie.  At approximately 10:15 a late Board member entered the room resulting in twenty-five votes on the floor.  The chair had previously stated that in case of a tie, he would vote with the administration since that was the tradition at Western.  The debate dragged on into the early afternoon when it was suggested by one member that the question be called.  All there agreed that the end was in sight.  So the chair counted the votes which he announced as 12 in favour and 12 against.  Just as he was about to cast the tie breaking vote, one board member noted that there were 25 votes around the table and asked the chair to do a recount.  After asking if any one had abstained and discovering that no one did, he did a recount.  Again twelve members voted in favour of the administration’s motion but 13 voted against it.  Journalism would remain at Western.

 

            The next two years were anything but peaceful in the world of journalism at Western.  Requests to replace retiring members were refused.  The School was hit with a 23% budget cut.  We may have won the battle but were about to lose the war.  From a faculty of ten full time professors in 1987, we were reduced to four by 1994 supplemented by a literal horde of part timers.  However, things were happening behind the scenes.  The Board’s displeasure with the President resulted, if one believes the faculty union, in a golden handshake which included a sizeable cheque.  The Provost’s contract was not renewed.  By 1995, a new president and a new Provost were on their respective ways to UWO.  It would be misleading to argue that the overall bad publicity that the administration received over the journalism fiasco was solely responsible for driving the President and Provost out of town, but it played a role in an odd way.  The Board had long been upset by the fact that the senior administration did not believe in long range planning and that the journalism debacle pointed to the weakness of that position one more time.

 

            When the new president arrived in 1995, his first initiative was to constitute a series of meetings devoted to long range planning.  Not only did he include all the on campus constituencies, but he reached out to the community as well.  He took office in the first year of a provincial election mandate for the Progressive Conservative Party,  a group of neo cons who showed little faith in public institutions such as universities.  The resulting budget cuts reduced the staff by something like thirty percent and sixty three faculty positions were lost to early retirement incentive programs.  However, the new administration was determined to carry on and it did.  And, one of the groups who appeared before the various planning committees was a two member delegation from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science.  In their hands they carried a series of charts and graphs, all updated from the 1970 Porter Report.

 

            The proposal made by the two from GSLIS was simple.  The School should merge with the Graduate School of Journalism and the new unit created by this merger should be the framework within which the university could build a brand new faculty of media studies.  The proposal hit a nerve in a very positive way.   A series of meetings were scheduled between the remaining faculty in the two schools to sort out common ground.  In the main, faculty in both units began to come to grips with the knowledge that stand alone, small units were expensive to maintain and in a day and age of fiscally conservative politics, it was a recipe for disaster.  However, the concept of a merger was not always smooth sailing especially in the ranks of journalism.

 

            At that point in history, I had taken over the reins of the deanship on an interim basis.  Along with my colleagues in the library and information science program, we decided to constitute a founding  working unit called the Joint Transition Committee.  It was to be chaired by an Acting Dean appointed by the administration.  The other two deans were to appoint two faculty members to assist in the work.  Eventually the administration asked the Faculty of Continuing Studies to join the merger.  At that point, the concept of active, open learning though the Internet was being investigated and developed.  However, by the end of the second year of the merger, it became apparent that the idea was not working and Continuing Education left the merger to branch out once again on its own.

 

            Very early in the process, two critical decisions were made.  First, we agreed that the new unit should have a strong undergraduate program.  This we named, somewhat jokingly MIT, for Media, Information and Technoculture.  The founding deans created the first ever MIT course on the campus which we delivered to 23 enthusiastic students.  The second and more critical decision was the concept of eliminating departments.  All facets of the new faculty would surrender any previously held independence.  This was the most controversial decision made during the merger process.  We felt that the reason was justified.  We wanted a strong, research presence and that the former GSLIS colleagues could bring that focus to bear on the entire faculty.  We got it right.

 

            So, here we were in 1997 with approximately sixteen full time faculty drawn from the old journalism and library and information science schools.  We opened the first undergraduate program in media studies since the old journalism program of the 1940’s.  Our first group was less than fifty students.  We offered two Master’s degrees, one in journalism, the other in library and information science.  We also inherited the doctoral program in information science.  In all we had about one hundred graduate students when all three programs were added up.  So, what are we today?

 

            We have over eight hundred undergraduates in our four year honours program along with seventy-five who are in a combined degree – diploma program we offer with our local college of applied arts and technology.  Two years ago, we opened our first media studies M.A. program which now has twenty full time students.  This year, we are offering positions to the first six students who will enter our Ph.D. program in Media Studies.  We still admit forty five journalism students and approximately eighty-five library and information science students.

 

            The constitution of the faculty has changed as well.  From the founding sixteen, we have expanded to forty-two.  All new appointees must be able to offer courses in at least two of our programs, and hopefully in three.  I myself am accredited to journalism, library and information science and MIT and I actively offer courses in all these areas.  We have also conducted cross appointment contracts with Computer Science, Law (2), Music, Visual Arts, Sociology and soon Women’s Studies.  Last year we moved into a brand new building although a bit utilitarian, state of the art technically.  And for the good news, journalism received its first non-conditional appraisal and review in late 1997.   I would encourage anyone interested in pursing this story to take a look at our faculty web site at www.fims.uwo.ca.   It’s nice to be back on top.

 

Prepared by :

 

David Spencer  Ph.D

Professor

Rogers Chair for Studies in Journalism and New Technologies (until June 30)

 


"The Urge to Merge"
News Division Program, SLA 2005 Annual Conference

SLA News Division Home

To request updates or additions contact Professor David Spencer
Last updated 6/26/2005