J-School dean to be named soon

With only three candidates remaining, the dean search for the IU School of Journalism is nearing its conclusion. \nThe decision is in the hands of IU-Bloomington Interim Chancellor Ken Gros Louis, who will be meeting with the School of Journalism faculty soon, so they can recommend one of the three candidates to Gros Louis.\nThe three remaining candidates, Lori Bergen, Ted Gup and Stephen Reese come from different professional and academic backgrounds. Gros Louis said this diversity in candidates is typical of a dean search.\n"In such a search, the finalists always have unique strengths," Gros Louis said. "It would not be good, in fact, if the finalists looked exactly alike."\nReese is currently the department chair for the journalism department at the University of Texas at Austin. Reese has authored several books including "Mediating the Message: Theories of Influence on Mass Media Content," which was named by Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly as one of the most "significant journalism and communications books" of the 20th century.\nGup is a journalism professor at Case Western University and author of "The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA" which is about the lives of CIA operatives who have died in action. Among other publications, Gup writes articles for Newsweek, The Washington Post, and The Chronicle for Higher Education. Gup taught journalism at Georgetown University for 18 years.\nBergen received her Ph.D. from IU in 1991, and is currently associate director of the A.Q. School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Kansas State University. At Kansas State, Bergen was the head of an undergraduate grievance board and a committee on assessment while holding an advisory position to the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.\nDavid Nord, chair of the search committee, said an ideal candidate will have a good sense of the broad range of things the School of Journalism does.\n"We teach traditional journalism, of course, but we also teach public relations, advertising, graphics, Web design, many liberal-arts-type courses, and, at the graduate level, mass communication research," Nord said.\nNord said the school also has a wide variety of constituencies, including students, faculty, other students and professors around the IU campus, and thousands of alumni in various communication fields.\nNord said the professional, as well as academic experiences of the candidates are important in choosing the dean.\n"More than most of the departments of the College of Arts and Sciences, we each have a close link to a profession in the field as well as to the academic mission of the university," Nord said. "Thus, when we hire a dean, we need someone who can reach out to both professionals and academics and can help to keep the dual mission of the professional school in creative balance."\nGros Louis said he will be meeting with the faculty soon and coming to a resolution. He will make the final decision in consultation with President Herbert. If the right person is identified, he or she would be expected to start in July.\n-- Contact Senior Writer Alli Stolper at astolper@indiana.edu.