Affected faculty advise on communications merger

Faculty from the departments of Communications and Culture, Telecommunications and the School of Journalism have been working since last October to combine as a new Media School in 2014.  

“In a sense we’re starting from scratch,” Walter Gantz, department chair of telecommunications, said.

The new Media School will be housed in Franklin Hall.

Five task forces have been formed to focus on the different aspects of forming the new school, Joshua Malitsky, associate professor in the department of Communications and Culture and chair of the faculty government task force, said.

The task forces are composed of faculty government, curriculum, faculty and graduate research, staffing, space and an umbrella committee which is the faculty advisory board.  

Each task force has representatives from the three different departments.  

“When the board of trustees approved it they basically said, ‘Fine, now go work with the faculty and create the school,’” Gantz said. “Even though there was a document that described it, it was more of an architectural plan rather than all of the bricks and
mortar.”

Some professors currently working in the individual departments will not make the transition to the new Media School.  

Professors have a deadline for sometime during the spring, Gantz said, to decide whether they will continue to work in the Media School or will transfer to a different department within IU.

“I think a lot of that is still to be decided,” Malitsky said. “What’s interesting is that in part, that depends upon how the school ends up being structured, and what the make up of these individual units are.”

Because of the nature of the Media School — the fact that it’s not going to be three separate entities under one roof, but a whole new school — Malitsky said some professors may be dispersed into different departments.

“We’re going to be the department that loses probably the most amount of faculty, in terms of coming into the new school,” Malitsky said of the Communications and Culture department.

The next phase in the planning of the new school will come after the committees have written up individual reports, Brownlee said.

“The committee reports will circulate to the extent that we want them to circulate before the FAB (Faculty Advisory Board) takes hold of them,” Bonnie Brownlee, senior associate dean of the School of Journalism, said. “Then the FAB is going to, as representatives of all three units, will prepare a plan that encompasses all of the elements that the task forces are looking at.”

Although Franklin Hall may not be open in time due to renovations, the new Media School is set to begin classes for fall 2014.

“We’re not taking the programs and just saying, ‘Here, we’re just doing what you did, but we’re calling it a school,’” Gantz said.  “We’re not doing that. It’s so much bigger, and that’s what makes it so exciting.”

Follow reporter Kathrine Schulze on Twitter @KathrineSchulze.