THE URGE TO MERGE
THE
There were
a lot of players who finally influenced the creation of the Faculty of
Information and Media Studies at the
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
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,
Following
the events of the late 1940’s the two Canadian university journalism programs
essentially took very different paths.
In the 1960’s
Things were
quite different over at the
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
For those
of you not familiar with the
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Prepared by :
David Spencer Ph.D
Professor
"The Urge to Merge"
News
Division Program, SLA 2005 Annual
Conference
To request updates or additions contact Professor David Spencer
Last updated 6/26/2005