Catching Flack

It's official. At the University of Houston's School of Communication, the flack-led forces are in. And the advocates for hands-on, hard news training are on the outs.

The influences are apparent in the school's 21-page blueprint called "Plan 2000: Redesigning the School of Communication." News-based academics say the plan will cripple traditional journalism courses at the expense of a public relations-focused curriculum.

Those concerns are dismissed by a primary architect of the plan, W. Andrew Achenbaum, the new dean of the College of Humanities, Fine Arts and Communication. He says the opposition merely refuses to embrace a dynamic new vision. Achenbaum argues that the grounding in news will still be there, meshed in with a modern emphasis on new technology. He says faculty endorsed the plan -- while he admits that their options were to either approve the plan or face the possible dissolution of the school itself.

"Anyone reading this plan would realize that it's one-sided," says James Russell, a School of Communication Alumni Board member. "It's self-serving to the faculty in Public Relations. The skirmish between people in public relations and journalism is not something new. It's been going on in the School of Communication for years."

While the document is vague on specifics, overall plans appear to signal a major change in priorities for the 22-year-old communication school. The University of Houston's journalism department has historically lagged behind its counterparts at major Texas colleges, but it has the biggest communications/journalism operation in the area. Alumni and others have lobbied for upgrades rather than further erosion of the journalism-regimen at UH.

Professor Robert Musburger remembers that there were 800 communication majors and a faculty of 30 when he arrived 1983. Now there are about 1,300 students in the school and only 14 full-time faculty members, he says.

The orders for changes in the communication school are believed to flow from far higher positions in the administration than the college dean. Achenbaum was a history professor, researcher at the University of Michigan's gerontology institute and chairman of the National Council on Aging when he was named to the UH post about a year ago.

Last August, journalism-oriented faculty members applauded Achenbaum for appointing a news-based professor, veteran Ted Stanton, to the position of temporary director of the Communication School. That confidence in the new dean collapsed in an abrupt about-face by Achenbaum early this month.

Shortly before Stanton was to host his annual alumni reunion for the school, he was notified that the dean no longer wanted him in as director. A faculty steering committee had voted 8-7 to make him permanent director, but Achenbaum exercised his authority to call for another vote. Professor Garth Jowett -- he teaches classes on popular culture, film and propaganda -- got the director's position in a 10-3 ballot. He'd also served as director of the school from 1980 to 1986.

Stanton was stoic, saying his faculty backing was "hardly an overwhelming mandate." Musburger was blunt: "It's a crime that Ted was treated the way he was."

Achenbaum declined to detail his concerns, only citing the narrow margin of the vote on Stanton and that "we talked about my need to have a different sort of director than this school normally had."

For a school dedicated to communicating, the dean's comments and his plan are also couched in generalities. It talks of a "convergence" of modern communications and disciplines and the creation of centers of national and international excellence to encompass changes in digital technology. Achenbaum says the school has been marked by "at least a decade of paralysis caused by internal disputes and fundamental disagreements," and the plan is needed to move it in the right direction.

The plan retains courses such as media writing and photojournalism, but it will eliminate classes in news editing, feature writing, urban reporting and investigative reporting.

"The idea is to revise or do away with courses with antiquated titles, and to incorporate the skills aspects of the courses into new courses," says Jowett. "In other words, there's no loss of skills here. It's merely a nomenclature state of change."

Five of the six courses taught by Musburger are scheduled for elimination under the plan. He says he's concerned about the cancellation of media production classes and worries that news gathering will be watered down. "Students still have to learn how to interview, gather news and turn that into reasonable written material in some reasonable journalistic form."

Musburger says his vote of approval came only after threats from Achenbaum to dismantle the entire school if it was rejected. Achenbaum says, "Now you can argue that I was outrageous in doing thatŠ I also said my options were receivership, 'starving' you, picking an outside consultant, and dissolution."

While the debate continues among the faculty and administration, the fallout will be felt by another segment -- the students.

"It seems like a big mistake," says Jim Parsons, senior copy editor at the Daily Cougar student newspaper. "Taking out any courses that teach them (students) how to write and report is not a real wise move, because they don't give them enough background in that to begin with.

"You have to learn the fundamentalsŠ," Parsons says. "If they do away with that, how are we going to have any journalist who can go out into the field and practice it?