Early life
Born in Hastings, Nebraska in 1941, I was the first child of Edwin August Friedrich, a Missouri Synod Lutheran minister, and his talented, accomplished wife, Ellen Meyer Friedrich. Despite their late start at parenting (they were both 28), six daughters followed. All their names started with M: Miriam, Margaret, Mary, Muriel, Marilyn, and Martha. My mother used to tell people that she had wanted six boys, had me, changed her mind and had six girls instead.
My father graduated from Concordia in St. Paul with his twin brother Carl in 1933. I went to Concordia in 1954 and had the same teacher for biology that he did, Professor Paul Stor. While at Concordia my father played baseball, football, basketball, tennis, and lettered in track. He also played clarinet in two bands. After Concordia he went to the Seminary in St. Louis; he graduated in 1937. Because of the Depression, there were only two ministerial positions for a class of 115 students graduating that year. He spent 1937–1938 teaching. In 1938 he accepted a ministerial position at St. John’s in Doniphan, Nebraska. For economic reasons, the congregation specifically requested a bachelor and offered $30 per month plus some food. When he and my mother married in 1940 the salary was raised to $50 per month. His second congregation was in Pleasant Dale, Nebraska. All his remaining parishes were in Minnesota: sequentially, Friberg/East Friberg, Brewster, Hart/Rushford, Goodhue, Winstead, Red Wing, and Hollandale/Blooming Prairie. Following his retirement to Albert Lea in 1977, he was a visitation pastor and preached at neighboring churches and former congregations.
The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod is fundamentalist/conservative. Growing up I couldn’t go to dances or join the Boy Scouts (that would have had me praying with non-Lutherans!). I was reminded frequently that as a Preacher’s Kid the way I acted reflected on the minister. My father was at the liberal end of Lutheran ministers. He believed in evolution, for example, but he did not share such beliefs with his congregation. He loved religious music and John Phillip Sousa marches, which he played frequently on the radio or phonograph. A student of history, he delighted in taking us to museums and historic sites. He created and kept scrapbooks in a filing cabinet that documented our adventures. It was my father who taught me how to ski, swim, fish, and hunt. He was considerably more introverted than my mother.
Ellen Belle Stevens, my mother, was born in Iowa in 1912. Her birth parents died when she was very young, her father of tuberculosis when she was two and her mother of pneumonia when she was four. She, her sister, Mamie, and her brother, Scottie, lived in an orphanage for a brief time. She and Mamie were adopted, separating them from Scottie, but the orphanage reclaimed them when they discovered the parents to be abusive. They were soon adopted again by the Reverend Gustav Meyer, a Lutheran minister who for 36 years led a rural Merrill, Iowa, parish, and his second wife Meta, the only Meyer grandmother I ever knew. The second time was the charm. These parents valued education and loved their daughters dearly. My mother’s name was changed to Ellen Marie Margaret Meyer.
Both my mother and Mamie were educated at Westmar College, a private religious teacher education institution in LeMars, Iowa, where they received BA and BMusic degrees. My mother was the youngest person to become a “normal training teacher.” She and her sister, unlike most women of their time, completed Master of Music degrees at the University of Nebraska. My mother had been teaching for seven years when she married my father. She continued to teach after marriage. She also supplemented my father’s salary by, among other things, selling World Book and Britannica encyclopedias and by working in nursing homes. She also helped me sell Minneapolis Tribune newspaper subscriptions that I delivered on my paper route in Brewster, Minnesota. When shopping, she always asked: “I assume you give a ministerial discount?” Mother, in short, managed the financial and organizational affairs of the family. Gifted in music and an excellent violinist, she was the church organist, choir director, and Sunday school and Bible class teacher. She was an active, energetic, and effective advocate for my father in the life of the churches he served. Accomplished at embroidery and crocheting, she left a legacy of art for family and friends. This amazing woman managed to do all of this while simultaneously juggling the lives of seven very active, young children. She also taught me how to make my bed, do dishes in rotation with my sisters, and help with all family tasks. Despite the advantages of musically talented parents and sisters and piano and clarinet lessons, I didn’t acquire musical talent.
In summary, I grew up in Minnesota, a state enshrined in the nostalgic mist of small-town life, of Lake Woebegon, “the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve … where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” I spent my early years as a minister’s son, living in multiple small rural communities where I learned how to enjoy the outdoors. I spent summers working on farms where I learned how to milk cows, take milk to the local creamery in a Ford truck, shock grain, cultivate corn, clean out pig and chicken pens, work on a trashing crew. Diversity in this environment meant Catholics. These roots had much influence on who I am.
Early education
It was assumed growing up that I, like my father, would be a minister, as were his four brothers and their sons. The first two grades of my education occurred in a one-room school in rural Friberg Township, Minnesota, with my mother as my teacher. The only other person in my class was Jimmy Thompson. Grades 3, 4, 5, and 6 were in a small school in Brewster, Minnesota. I returned to another one-room school in Hart, Minnesota, for grades 7 and 8 where Mrs. Ronnenberg taught me and the other two students in my grade, Mary Wolfram and Diane Erdmann. Since teachers taught eight grades in one-room schools I overheard all classroom instruction while having lots of time to read books in the library corner.
For high school, I went to the all-male Concordia Academy in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the focus was pre-ministerial training This was my father’s and his father’s school. There I concentrated on athletics rather than academics. Football in the fall, wrestling in the winter, baseball and track in the spring. I was a good athlete, lettering in all of them. I was especially good at wrestling; each year I placed first or second in the MSIL Conference. I also found time for speech and debate activities with my Latin teacher, Mr. Middendorf, as my coach. After graduating from the academy, toward my goal of becoming a minister, I enrolled in Concordia Junior College for pre-ministerial and teacher training on the same campus. It was co-ed and I met a fellow student, Erena Rae Bakeberg, there during fall orientation. She was the roommate of the girlfriend of my roommate and the four of us went on a double date. We were a very odd match. She was city; I was country. She was fashion conscious; I was not. She had dated extensively in high school; I had never gone on a date. She loved dancing; I had never danced. We ended up “going steady” in a matter of months and three years later got married. Rena died of lung cancer in May of 2006. We were married for 44 years.
After completing an AA degree at Concordia, the normal course of events for future Lutheran Church Missouri Synod ministers would be to go to Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. I wasn’t ready for that though. It would have limited my time with Rena. Concordia arranged a year of teaching for me at a parochial school in Young America, Minnesota. For a year I taught seventh graders all their classes from math to English to Minnesota History. I also served as the school’s athletic coach/director and supervised the production of the school’s yearbook. With the coaching assistance of students' parents, my boys’ basketball team went undefeated; my girls’ team was not far behind. I got very interested in the game and got credentialed as an official Minnesota high school basketball referee. Over this school year I lived and worked in Young America during the week and spent most of my weekends visiting Rena at her home in Hopkins. I loved my seventh graders and thoroughly enjoyed the year!
University education
University of Minnesota (1962–1964)
The following year I entered the University of Minnesota. Because I was a transfer student, I went to the Department of Speech office to find out whether my Concordia speech and debate classes would transfer. I ended up meeting Robert Scott and Donn Parson and becoming a member of the Minnesota debate team. My debate partner was Barbara Berg. We had a very successful two years together. After exploring other options (psychology, history), I ended up as a speech major and took courses with Bob Scott, Ernie Bormann, D. K. Smith, George Shapiro, Vernon Jensen, and others. I especially enjoyed the classical rhetoric courses with Bob Scott and the public address courses with Ernie Bormann. Outside the department I took courses with world class scholars including Harold Deutsch, Elliott Aronson, Marvin Dunnette, and E. Paul Torrance. In my classes I discovered a new world of ideas that were not part of my Lutheran education. It became clear to me after my two years at Minnesota that I no longer wanted to be a Lutheran minister. Rena’s father was a lawyer and in looking for an alternative I decided on law and applied to the University of Minnesota Law School. I did, by the way, graduate summa cum laude from Minnesota only because they had a policy of not counting transfer credit grades. My grades at Concordia were less than stellar.
University of Kansas (1964–1968)
Donn Parson, who under Bob Scott was my debate coach at Minnesota, was finishing his PhD and on the job market. He received an offer from the University of Kansas (KU) to be their debate coach and accepted it. He invited me to come with him and be an assistant debate coach, telling me that it would only delay my law career by a year, I would be paid for that year, and I would leave KU with an MA degree. In the late summer of 1964, Rena and I and Donn and Andy Parson drove two cars and a U-Haul truck to Lawrence, Kansas.
When I entered the graduate program at KU, I continued to take public address courses with Wil Linkugel and rhetorical theory courses with Donn Parson. I also headed over to the philosophy department and took early-Greek philosophy courses there. But reality soon struck. Despite taking Greek and Latin courses as a pre-ministerial student at Concordia, my language skills were not good enough to be a scholar in classical rhetoric. At the same time, I was exploring the world of social science with Kim Giffin and Bill Conboy in the department, visiting scholars like Ted Clevenger, Bob Goyer, and Jack Douglas, and folks in the Psychology Department (e.g., Tony Smith, a student of Fritz Heider’s) and the Sociology Department where I encountered the scholarship of Neil Smelser. I was also discovering a new tool for research. At KU, PhD students were required to take two research tools. Prior to my arrival both needed to be foreign languages. As I arrived, though, the requirement changed, and one of the two tools could be statistics. My two tools became French and statistics. As I was mastering statistics with incredible guides, I also discovered a target: attitude and attitude change. When I headed to my first job at Purdue, I intended my scholarly interests to be focused on a social scientific study of attitude and attitude change (persuasion).
I was at KU for four years—three for the MA (1967) and one for the PhD (1968). I funded my education with a teaching assistantship, which involved teaching two sections of the basic course and assisting Donn Parson with the Debate Team. I also took out an NDEA loan which had a 50% forgiveness clause for teaching post PhD. During my first semester I said I was willing to teach early classes and was surprised to find myself assigned two 7:30am sections, one MWF and the other TTHS. I received my first award for teaching at KU, the Margaret Anderson Award for Excellence in Teaching. My thesis for the MA on cross-examination debating wasn’t completed until I had also completed the coursework for the PhD. I passed my comps in the fall of 1967 and my dissertation in the spring of 1968, graduating with Honors. My dissertation was an empirical study of the measurement of communication apprehension.
University homes
Purdue (1968–1977)
1968 was a wonderful year to be on the job market. I had many offers including a full professorship at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania. I wanted to be a debate coach, but I didn’t find an attractive position available, so I focused on offers from the University of Washington, Michigan State, Purdue, and others. As I did so, I received a letter from Ray Nadeau at Purdue telling me that while they considered my credentials outstanding, they had offered their position to Art Smith (now Molefi Asante), who would be the only minority member in their department. My letter in response said that while I was disappointed for myself, were I making the decision I would have followed the same course. A short time later I received a letter from Ray Nadeau offering me a position at Purdue where I would assist Bruce Kendall in directing the basic course. I accepted the offer and celebrated.
I was at Purdue for nine years from 1968 to 1977. While there my son Bruce was born. We and our parents celebrated! My first year at Purdue was to be one of transition as I apprenticed with Bruce Kendall on directing the basic course. I went to what is now NCA in New York City in November of that year. Bruce died of a heart attack while I was away. When I got back one of my first tasks was to grade the multiple-choice exam for students who wanted to test out of the required basic course. I couldn’t find Bruce’s scoring key and had to create a new one. When I eventually found his I discovered that mine was less than a perfect match. Over that first year, with minimal preparation, I was directing a basic communication course that offered over 100 sections per semester to students throughout the university who were required to take it. The course was taught by 50+ graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) and instructors. Without much assistance, I oversaw the course, tweaked what and how it was offered, and chose the textbook. How would you have chosen between a textbook authored by my department chair Ray Nadeau and one authored by my close colleague Bill Brooks? This was my introduction to departmental politics! I chose Nadeau’s. I assigned sections to GTAs and instructors and trained them in a required seminar. A good deal of my time was spent developing policies and content for the course as well as providing pre-service and in-service training, evaluation, and supervision. I developed a wide variety of materials, including a handbook for teachers of the course that covered teaching methods as well as specific units of the course and set up a resource center. I also worked with Jim Ascough in the Psychology Department to create a program using Systematic Desensitization to help students cope with Communication Apprehension. Weekly, I required a one-page reaction sheet from students to a question I posed and then read, edited, and commented on. The task was a challenging one that I thoroughly enjoyed!
My only preparation for this assignment was serving as a GTA myself for four years at the University of Kansas with Wil Linkugel as my guide plus teaching seventh grade for one year in Minnesota. I looked for help, starting with colleagues in the department, most notably Bob Kibler, Bill Brooks, Alice Donaldson, and Ralph Webb. I branched out to the Educational Psychology Department and spent lots of time with its chair John Feldhusen and other faculty there. I was also handed a wonderful gift by Carl E. Dallinger, a professor at Northern State University in DeKalb, Illinois, who invited me to be part of a group, Directors of the Basic Speech Course in Midwestern Universities that met annually to discuss our shared challenges. This group was a lifeline for me and introduced me to lifelong friends, including Jim McCroskey. I didn’t miss any of its annual meetings.
Directing the basic course was only part of my teaching assignment. Two additional classes were part of my schedule each semester. I started with Advanced Public Speaking and Principles of Persuasion. Persuasion was replaced by Interviewing: Principles and Practice. At the undergraduate level I also occasionally taught Freshman Perspectives and Fundamentals of Communication. But most of my courses were at the graduate level. I taught two required courses in research methodology, Introduction to Empirical Inquiry in the fall and Research Methods in Communication: Measurement and Experimental Design in the spring. Teaching them resulted in serving on a very large number of graduate student Advisory Committees. Additional graduate courses that I taught were Speech Communication for the Classroom Teacher, Trends and Issues in Communication Education, Development and Direction of Forensics Programs, Advanced Interviewing and Conference Methods, Independent Study in Communication, and Communication in Educational Settings. I talked to the Purdue debate coach and offered to assist with the debate program in any way that I could but was never invited to do so.
In addition to directing the basic course I helped Bill Brooks with his task of preparing and supervising secondary school student teachers by visiting and observing them in their schools. Bill and I also developed an internship program whereby secondary school teachers in training were paired with basic course instructors to provide early teaching experience.
Outside the department I was active in the Senates of both the University and the School of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education (HSSE). I was University Senate Parliamentarian and on the University Senate Steering Committee. I also served as Vice-Chair of the HSSE Curriculum Committee and Chair of the HSSE Educational Policies Committee, the two major committees of the school.
I was appointed to a tenure-track position when I arrived in 1968. My department put me up for tenure and promotion after four years. The University Promotion and Tenure Committee declined my promotion saying it was too early. I was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure the following year.
When I arrived at Purdue there were very few young faculty members in the department. That changed a few years later with the arrival of Rod Hart and Mark Knapp. In the early years, though, the social life for Rena and me was primarily with graduate students rather than colleagues. We went to parties with students and invited them to parties in our home. We considered them friends. When Rena and I left for a position at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, the graduate students gave us a parting gift of a church pew with a plaque that read “From Your Congregation.”
We had four homes while living in Indiana, three of them rentals in West Lafayette. We hosted parties in all of them. By far the most impressive setting was the first house Rena and I owned, 603 Kossuth Street in the Highland Park subdivision of Lafayette. It was built in 1893 as a home for one of the owners of the Thieme & Wagner Brewing Company. It was 4,000 square feet, with four bedrooms and four bathrooms, in three stories and a basement, located on a hill overlooking Lafayette. After we left Indiana, the house was chosen as one of five architectural gems for the Lafayette Historic Home Tour. We bought the home from a Sociology faculty member at Purdue who was in the process of a divorce and moving to another position. He gave us a bargain. Rena’s parents loaned us money for the purchase. The third floor in the home had been renovated by Andy as his office. It was over 1,000 square feet in four wings. It became my office. One wing contained a pool table surrounded by built-in bookcases. Another, with a wonderful view of the city, was my primary office. It accommodated a rolltop desk and multiple chairs. The third was a workspace where I had two tables on which I laid out materials for writing projects that I was working on. The fourth was my seminar room, with a leather-topped table surrounded by chairs that I inherited from Andy. I used this seminar room rather than a campus classroom for my small seminars. The first floor and the third floor of 603 Kossuth also became the setting for lots of departmental parties that brought faculty, students, and others together.
Quickly at Purdue I was viewed as part of the “speech education” faculty. While at the time I didn’t consider speech education my specialty, I found myself heavily involved in its development not only within the department but also within the profession. As I became more intrigued with the area, I learned that Speech Education in the discipline has a long and distinguished history. The first speech course for teachers was offered in 1892 at Indiana, followed by West Virginia and Missouri. Between 1910 and 1920 they were offered at Cornell, Northwestern, Iowa, Michigan, Southern California, Wisconsin, and Teachers College of Columbia. Speech Education involves both preparing teachers to teach communication and teaching teachers more broadly how to communicate with leaners. It is an important area that I believed at the time to be undervalued by the discipline. I think this was, at least partially, because it had not built an independent body of research comparable to other areas of the discipline. Scholars of which I was one made it our mission to remedy this. We founded Division 7 of the International Communication Association in 1972, the Instructional and Developmental Division. I became a leader of a movement that turned Speech Education into Communication Education and was asked to present keynote addresses at conferences focusing on communication education. I was proud of the fact that instead of studying college freshmen and generalizing to the world, as much of the persuasion research did, we were studying teachers and students and generalizing to teachers and students. I had found a challenging area to pursue. It was at Purdue that I developed this as my lasting research agenda. It cemented the focus of my career on communication education and instructional communication. I did research on them. I championed them professionally. I taught both undergraduate and graduate courses focused on them. It was also at Purdue that I began my career as an administrator without realizing I was doing so.
University of Nebraska–Lincoln (1977–1982)
In 1977 I was invited to apply for a position as chair of the Department of Speech Communication at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL). I loved the students at Purdue, my colleagues, and the university, but I was intrigued by the challenge of being a department chair and I knew, liked, and respected many of the individuals on the UNL faculty. I also liked the fact that UNL, unlike Purdue, ran a very successful debate program which was the oldest organized student activity on their campus. One of its most notable graduates was Ted Sorenson, speech writer for President Kennedy. I interviewed for the position, received an offer, and accepted it. Rena, who was working as a medical illustrator in the Purdue University College of Veterinary Medicine, was ready for a change. While in Nebraska she and a friend, Elizabeth Nelson, founded their own advertising agency, E&E Communication Design, and ran it out of the basement of our home. Income from it and a scholarship funded our son Bruce’s undergraduate education at Grinnell College in Iowa.
The Department of Speech Communication was in the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS). It consisted of 10 faculty and 20 GTAs. CAS contained 40+ units in the Humanities, Natural and Mathematical Sciences, Social Sciences, and Interdisciplinary. Speech Communication was classified as one of the Social Sciences. Its intellectual focus included both humanistic components (e.g., rhetoric and public address) and social scientific components (e.g., interpersonal and small group communication). The Dean of the College was Max D. Larsen, a PhD in Mathematics. I enjoyed working with him. He was always available, he listened to me, and he responded in a clear and direct way. On an annual basis he evaluated all units in the College. When I arrived, the Department of Speech Communication was ranked as the 23rd strongest unit in the College. When I left 4.5 years later, we were ranked 14th.
My first task as chair was to lead a departmental academic review conducted by UNL’s Academic Planning Committee, a process that resulted in the preparation of a 243-page self-study document. A first step was reviewing and restructuring our graduate and undergraduate programs. The graduate level program was narrowed from seven areas of concentration to four, allowing the faculty to become more specialized and allowing students to study areas in greater depth. At the undergraduate level, the service-course orientation was broadened by allowing students to tailor their Arts and Sciences major in terms of nine areas of concentration leading to a variety of career options. A key part of the undergraduate effort, under the leadership of Bill Seiler, was restructuring the instructional format for the basic course as a means of both reducing GTA teaching load and building a strong undergraduate major program. This was accomplished by implementing the Keller Plan, also called the Personalized System of Instruction, for teaching the basic course. This effort was wildly successful on both counts.
The strongest students in the basic course each semester were recruited to serve as proctors in subsequent semesters, where they provided assistance to the course instructor. Many of these students became majors. Another part of our undergraduate focus was a successful effort to secure College of Arts and Sciences approval for listing ten speech communication courses as satisfying Liberal Education Requirements for the Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science degrees. We initiated the development of the Laase Communication Research Center, comprised of two rooms separated by an observation/control room and containing the latest in videotape technology. We also developed a Departmental Handbook describing the procedures, committees, and governing structure of the department and a forty-minute departmental promotional videotape that we used in a variety of settings.
As I did at Purdue, and in all my academic positions, I continued to teach a variety of classes. At Nebraska most of my teaching was at the graduate level. I did teach two undergraduate courses occasionally: Fundamentals of Human Communication and Interviewing. More commonly, though, I taught graduate courses on communication theory, including Human Communication Theory, Interpersonal Communication, and Theory Construction in Interpersonal Communication and on Communication Education/Instructional Communication including Instructional Communication, Classroom Communication, and Interpersonal Communication in Instructional Contexts.
I was also heavily involved in faculty governance, serving as a member and Parliamentarian of both the University and the Arts and Sciences Faculty Senates. I was a member of the University Senate Research Council and the Extension and Service Council. I joined and was active in a group cochaired by David Brooks in Chemistry and Robert Fuller in Physics called the Program for the College Teaching of Science. It was helpful in, among many things, obtaining funding for the Laase Communication Research Center. I also spent time with the academic advising program for the Huskers football team. My Chair’s Office was a corner one on the 10th floor of Oldfather Hall, looking down on the Husker football stadium. I had season tickets and went to all the games. My avid interest in football started when I was a starter on both offense and defense for Concordia Academy. As a student at the University of Minnesota I went to Golden Gopher games and at Kansas, the Jayhawks. I continued this tradition at Purdue, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Rutgers.
I found the Chair position at Nebraska enjoyable and rewarding. I intended to stay longer than I did. The department had begun to build a strong core of faculty in language and social interaction, a new area in the discipline, with hires of Wayne Beach, Sally Jackson, and Scott Jacobs. I had to hire Sally and Scott, though, on one academic line because that’s all I had. In 1982 the University of Oklahoma asked me if I would consider joining them as Chair of their department. I attempted, unsuccessfully, to leverage this offer into appointments for both Sally and Scott. When my request was denied, I resigned and accepted the offer at Oklahoma … and very soon after brought Sally and Scott to Oklahoma on separate lines.
University of Oklahoma (1982–1998)
The Chair position at Oklahoma (OU) opened when Bill Brooks resigned and I was asked to apply. I already had professional ties with many of the faculty. I applied and received the offer. Rena, who by this time had established a thriving business, told me that if I wanted to go I should but that she wouldn’t join me. She came along for a visit, though, met the faculty, and decided it wouldn’t be that bad. She and I considered Oklahoma a short-term commitment. We stayed there for 16+ years.
Oklahoma’s offering of communication instruction dates to 1896, four years following the University’s founding in 1892. The first teacher was 16-year-old Grace Adelene King. Miss Grace, as she was known, was the head of the school of music and offered classes in oratory and elocution until she left in 1901. In 1904 the university established the Department of Public Speaking and Dramatic Art. This Department was renamed the Department of Public Speaking in 1912, Department of Speech in 1937, Department of Speech Communication in 1971, and Department of Communication in 1977. When I arrived, the Department had offered BA degrees since 1935, MA degrees since 1937, and PhD degrees since 1971. The Department was included in the College of Arts and Sciences and housed, with other departments, in Kaufman Hall on the South Oval. In 1991 we moved to a new home, Burton Hall, a historic building on campus, when the University closed the School of Human Development. It was refurbished for us and we had it to ourselves. When I became Department Chair, there were 15 faculty members and 20 GTAs focused on a social scientific approach to the study of the nature, process, and effects of human communicative behavior. The Department also staffed and ran a Speech and Hearing Clinic providing instruction and services to the community.
Building on my experiences at Nebraska I began my role as Chair by asking the faculty to think with me about what we could do to become one of the nation’s strongest Communication Departments as perceived by both the discipline and the University. Several initiatives emerged from these discussions.
One focused on political communication. Bill Carmack, a past Chair of the Department, was teaching in this area when I arrived. An Illinois PhD, he had joined the OU Department in 1961. After leading his election campaign in 1964, Bill became an Administrative Assistant to Oklahoma Senator Fred R. Harris. Bill next became the Assistant Commissioner for Community Services in the Bureau of Indian Affairs within the Department of Interior. Staying in politics, his final role in DC was as Executive Director of the National Council on Indian Opportunity chaired by Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Bill was, in short, an incredible resource and we decided to build on that.
A few buildings away Lynda Lee Kaid was a Professor in the School of Journalism. A very productive scholar with many books, peer reviewed articles, and chapters on political communication and political advertising, she was in a department that considered practice more important than scholarship. We courted her and my Dean allowed her to move her line to the Department of Communication. Next we hired Dan D. Nimmo, one of, if not the, most productive and influential scholars in the field of political communication. To do this we transferred our Speech and Hearing Clinic to the Medical Center in Oklahoma City and used those resources to bring Nimmo to OU. We acquired the Political Commercial Archives in 1985, the world’s largest collection of political radio and political television commercials. The university purchased the collection from Julian Kanter, who was in negotiations to sell it to the Smithsonian. With its acquisition, Kanter became the first collections archivist. He started collecting political advertisements as an executive at a local television affiliate. When Mr. Kanter sold his collection to the university, he had over 25,000 commercials. Today, the archive, which is named in Mr. Kanter’s honor, houses more than 90,000 advertisements. Over the years, researchers from universities across the country and internationally have made use of the archive holdings to better understand the communication that takes place in political campaigns. The collection has also served as a resource for many media organizations and political campaign consultants.
A second initiative was less dramatic but equally positive for the department. We focused on building a national identity in intercultural communication. The University of Oklahoma has a long history of aiding, working with, and building ties with the Native American tribes living in the state. Bill Carmack was also a central force here. He brought into the Department Phil Lujan, an enrolled Kiowa and Taos Pueblo descendent who grew up in southwest Oklahoma in Kiowa County. Phil, a graduate of the University of New Mexico Law School, served for many years as Chief District Judge of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation where he was viewed as “the hammer of justice.” Indian courts exist because of the sovereign status of tribes as viewed by the U.S. government. In addition to being a judge, for 25 years he was an assistant professor in our department, where he developed courses in intercultural communication primarily using Native American examples. Bill Carmack and Brooks Hill also made significant contributions to this concentration. To add intellectual strength, we decided to look for a senior scholar with credentials in intercultural communication that matched Dan Nimmo’s credentials in political communication. Very quickly we focused on Young Kim, who was teaching at Governors State University in Illinois and asked her to join us. She accepted and we reached our goal of acquiring incredible strength nationally in Intercultural Communication.
Lynda Kaid was but one of four faculty lines transferred from other departments in the College to ours. For various reasons, each of them needed or wanted a new home at OU. We benefited from that as their presence enriched our department. Larry Wieder, one of the great early ethnomethodologists located in the quantitatively oriented OU Sociology Department, joined us. Together with the presence of Sally Jackson and Scott Jacobs in our department, we became a national force in language and social interaction. Lauren Wispé, a Harvard trained psychologist with a strong focus on the psychology of sympathy, added strength to our focus on interpersonal communication. Andy Van Gundy came to us from human relations, where he had built a national reputation in organizational development. He enriched our focus on both Organizational Communication and Communication Education. We added strengths in other areas of the department with the addition of new faculty including Jon Nussbaum, Sandy Ragan, Anne Nicotera, Eric Kraemer, and Dan O’Hair. And we hired Craig Dudzak to revive our debate program.
In addition to duties as Chair, I continued to teach at OU. For most of my time there I taught two required graduate courses: Introduction to Graduate Studies in the fall and Comparative Research Methods in the spring. These courses had as many as 40 students in them. I taught some courses at the undergraduate level. One that I especially enjoyed was Gateway to College Learning. It focused on socializing first year students into what it means to be a student at a major research university. Others included Small Group Communication, Research Methods, Interviewing, and Nonverbal Communication. Most of my upper-division undergraduate and graduate level teaching focused on Communication Education: Classroom Communication, Communication Principles in Education, Instructional Communication, Communication Training and Development, and Instructional Issues in Teaching Communication. I did occasionally teach other graduate courses: Nonverbal Communication, Conflict Management, and History of Communication Theory.
I also spent brief stints reprising my Purdue role as Director of the Basic Course. From 1988 to 1991, I developed and directed a Public Speaking class as part of the general education requirements of the College of Arts and Sciences. From 1991 to 1993, I redesigned and directed the Fundamentals of Communication class.
An important component of the department was nontraditional instructional efforts. These were under the aegis of the College of Liberal Studies, which President David Boren renamed the College of Professional and Continuing Studies. The earliest of these efforts, the Air Force Short Course, was conducted on campus. Beginning in 1970, once a semester, with United States Department of Defense funding, we brought a small number of practicing Air Force public affairs officers to campus for a short course targeted at enhancing their public relations skills. The goal of the curriculum was to expose students to modern communication theory and research and its application to the military public affairs setting. In this course we shared our communication expertise and research and facilitated interaction among the students, i.e., we taught them, but we also learned from them as they shared their war stories. They were an incredibly gifted group. A side benefit from this experience was that students from the class invited us to overnight stays on aircraft carriers, flights on supersonic jets, etc. For example, I have certificates on my walls at home describing me as an Honorary Crewmember of the Carl Vinson CVN-70 and an Honorary Pilot of a T-38 “Talon” supersonic jet. This affiliation remained until the Department of Defense discontinued the program due to budget cuts in 2007.
We also participated in off-campus teaching as part of OU’s Extended Campus Program. I was on the Executive Committee of Advanced Programs starting in 1982 and its Chair from 1990 to 1992. As part of Advanced Programs, our department offered a weekend Master's Program at sites around the world. My participation was focused on three sites: Washington, DC, Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma, and Guam. The teaching times and format was the same for all three. The classes would meet two weekends in a row (Fri-5:30–9:30pm; Sat-8:30am–5:30pm & Sun-8:30am–5:30pm). Several times a year, I would fly to DC on Thursday to teach a class (usually Introduction to Graduate Studies or Comparative Research Methods) to about 20 students, primarily officers in the U.S. military, who perceived a graduate degree as important to advancing their career. The students were talented and motivated. When I first taught in DC, it was at the Pentagon. For security reasons I had to be escorted everywhere and that included the restroom. After several years, the location moved to the Crystal City Marriott. While in DC I would stay in the OU apartment located in Dupont Circle. I got to know DC better than most locals. The Fort Sill site is a military base near Lawton, Oklahoma. Fort Sill evolved from a frontier cavalry post built during the Indian Wars into one of the most important military installations in the United States. Historically it was home to Geronimo, an intense, tenacious Chiricahua Apache warrior, who was a prisoner of war for the last 10 years of his life. The guardhouse that held him in the early years is now a museum. His remains are buried on the base. Fort Sill is surrounded by 94,000 acres of nature that are home to wild buffalo, longhorn steers, lots of other wildlife, and mountains. The military and civilian personnel and their members on the base numbered around 50,000. While at Fort Sill, I would stay at the Comanche House, a historic on-post hotel near all the Fort Sill attractions. I spent time wandering around the base and the surrounding grounds. In Guam, the site where we taught was on a military base. I explored the island, a vacation destination for people from Japan, driving a rental car on every paved mile of the island. In all three cases, I would get settled in, teach the first weekend of classes, and then have a week to explore the area before teaching the second weekend. I thoroughly enjoyed all three sites; I couldn’t have asked for better students.
Toward the end of my stay at Oklahoma I participated with a small group of individuals exploring and establishing the expansion of the Extended Campus to a Doctorate in Interdisciplinary Studies: Organizational Leadership. For it, a cohort of 25–30 students are admitted at the same time. They take all their program courses, except electives, together as a group. Faculty for the program come from multiple OU departments. The first and only location that I participated in was at a military base in Heidelberg, Germany. The degree is now offered at many locations in Germany, Italy, England, and Spain. I would fly to Frankfurt, Germany, rent a car and drive to Heidelberg. I would teach my class for a weekend, same days and times as the MA program. I would then have a week to explore the area before teaching another weekend and returning to Oklahoma. I saw, explored, and drove around many wonderful historic sites.
There were multiple benefits to participation in these nontraditional instructional programs. Those of us from the department who chose to participate, not everyone did, got to work with talented, motivated, and hardworking students. We also got to travel to and explore interesting places and we got paid extra for doing so. Ten percent of our pay went to a departmental fund that was used to purchase items not normally paid for by the university, for example, graduate student travel to conventions. The premise was that others were covering for us while we were gone so we should contribute to the department. My participation in the College of Professional and Continuing Studies led to several awards for me: the Kenneth E. Cook Award for Outstanding Academic Professor in the College of Liberal Studies and two Associate’s Distinguished Lectureship Awards granted for excellence in teaching, research, and service.
By the time I arrived at Oklahoma, the importance of connections within the university for the success of the department and school was ingrained in me. As a department, you not only need to be good you need to be perceived as good by others throughout the university. At Oklahoma I worked to build these connections. I was a member of both the University Senate, on the Executive Committee, and the College of Arts and Sciences Senate, Executive Committee and elected Faculty Secretary. I served on a very wide variety of College and University Committees: Chair, Academic Programs Council; Research Council; Faculty Appeals Board; Graduate Council; Chair, University Athletics Council (I saw the Oklahoma athletics program up close, especially the Sooners football program); College and Campus Tenure and Promotion Committee; Chair, Continuing Education and Public Service Council. I served on numerous search committees: Dean of College of Business, Chair of Educational Psychology, Director of Advanced Programs, Chair of English, and on OU Rhodes Competition and Premed Advisory Interview Committee, one of my favorites. I was also an instructor for the University of Oklahoma Training and Development Program, for which I presented many short courses on topics related to communication and leadership. I also served as a docent in the campus Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, where my specialty was leading tours for third graders.
From 1993 to 1995, I served as a Faculty Administrative Fellow in the Office of the Senior Vice President and Provost Dr. James “Jeff” Kimpel. Jeff—a Vietnam US Air Force Bronze Star recipient, a PhD in Meteorology, and a former OU Dean of Geology—designed this program to bring a faculty member into this Office to help with the work and to learn what a Provost does. My immediate predecessor was Anita Hill, a faculty member in the OU Law School and I got to know her as part of the transition. A year after I started, David Boren moved into the building and became Jeff’s boss as President of OU. In my new role I was integrated into the Provost’s Office. I worked most closely with Jeff and with his Associate Provost, Ravi Ravindran, meeting with both regularly. I received an incredible education in my three years in the Office. I served as Coordinator of the Campus Departmental Review Panel, which systematically reviews all departments every six years, and as Coordinator for the University Tenure and Promotion Committee. I represented the Provost’s Office on the Faculty Senate and went to all the Provost Office Meetings and the Dean’s Council. I chaired the Role of the Deans Committee and planned the comprehensive evaluation of deans. I served as the Provost Office Liaison to the Faculty Senate, the Budget Council, College of Liberal Studies Committee, and the Committee to Recruit & Retain Minority Faculty. Many special assignments came my way: a study of the annual evaluation of faculty, a study of student evaluations, a review of the ethics in research policy, a review of the Faculty Handbook, the creation of a budget for Oklahoma’s Museum of Natural History—the Sam Noble Museum. I coordinated and ran professional development workshops for academic administrators.
After my stint in the Provost’s Office, I went back to the department for three years as a faculty member. When the Deanship opened at OU’s College of Arts and Sciences I applied. After interviews the applicants were narrowed to two: me and the Interim Dean who was previously the Associate Dean. I was disappointed when I didn’t receive the offer.
During my rewarding career at Oklahoma, I received three of its most prestigious university-wide awards: OU Regents Award for Superior Teaching (1992), Henry Daniel Rinsland Memorial Award for Excellence in Educational Research (1995), and Presidential Professor, Class of 1998.
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (1998–2011)
In 1998, I received a call from Linda Lederman asking me to apply for the Deanship of the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies at Rutgers (SCILS), which was renamed the School of Communication and Information (SC&I) after I retired. I knew many of the faculty in the Communication Department professionally. In 1993 I was on a three-member External Review Team for the School, where some members of the other two departments met with me. I had worked with June Lester, the Director of the School of Library and Information Studies (LIS) at OU, in multiple university settings. She asked me to facilitate faculty meetings in her department, where I got to know the OU LIS department well. LIS at Oklahoma and LIS at Rutgers talk to each other. When I applied for the position, I thought I had support in the two largest departments: Communication and Library and Information Science. I received the offer and accepted it. This time Rena was as excited by the move as I was. Judith Brodsky, an iconic feminist artist, was at Rutgers where she had founded and was heading a center focused on innovative printmaking and papermaking (the Brodsky Center)—Rena’s emphasis as a fine artist. Both of us were appointed to the Advisory Board for the Center soon after we arrived at Rutgers.
SCILS consists of three departments: Journalism and Media Studies, Library and Information Science, and Communication. In 1953 the Graduate School of Library Service opened its doors to the first class of master’s students. In 1982 it became part of the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies when it was “advised” by the Rutgers President to merge with two other Rutgers departments—the Department of Journalism and Mass Media, which began as the Department of Journalism and Urban Communications at Rutgers Livingston College in the 1970s, and the Department of Human Communication, established at Rutgers College in 1971. This merger was not perceived by all members of LIS as positive. The new school offered two undergraduate majors, one in Human Communication and one in Journalism and Mass Media, a Master of Library Service (MLS), and a PhD in Library and Information Studies. In 1987 the Master of Communication and Information Studies (MCIS) program was established as a collaborative effort of the three departments and the doctoral program was converted from a PhD in Library and Information Studies to the interdisciplinary PhD in Communication, Information, and Library Studies.
Both during the interview and after I arrived, I talked with the faculty about what I perceived my role to be, describing it as being both a leader and a manager. As a leader, I would work with them to agree upon and describe our goals. What does it mean to be a disciplinary exemplar in an AAU university professional school? How can we build synergy from three such departments? As a manager, I said I would work with them to obtain the resources needed to achieve our goals. My sense at the beginning was that SCILS consisted of one exemplary department, Library and Information Science, ranked by its peers as one of the top ten programs in the country, one strong department, Communication, that was not ranked at the top of its discipline, and one weak department, Journalism and Mass Media.
My office was in the Dean’s Suite in a building built for the Graduate School of Library Service, across the street from its original building at the edge of the College Avenue Campus, a historic location in New Brunswick, which U.S. News and World Report refers to as Rutgers’ Flagship Campus. In addition to staff offices, the site had a large corner office for me with an adjacent conference room and three smaller offices for the Associate Academic Dean and two Assistant Deans, Administrative and Information Technology. Two of these I inherited, Sydell Spinner, Administrative, and Jon Oliver, Information Technology. I appointed Full Professor Kay Vandergrift from Library and Information Science to the role of Associate Academic Dean. The two Associate Deans who followed her were also from that department. I kept my office door open and walked around the building. I wanted to be visible and available. I had frequent meetings with the Associate and Assistant deans, weekly meetings with a group called Chairs and Directors, regular meetings with the three departments, and meetings each semester with the entire School’s faculty. Our goal was building the strongest possible synergistic school.
It was important also to establish relationships with the school’s professional groups. At the national level, in addition to my communication associations, I joined and went to conferences of the American Library Association (ALA), the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE), and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). Within the state, I built ties and went to meetings with the library, public relations, communication, and journalism communities. I met with the school’s Alumni Association Board, went to regular meetings of the New Jersey Press Association, and made a home for the New Jersey Center for the Book, a national program sponsored by the Library of Congress to celebrate books, reading, libraries, literacy, and the nation’s diverse literary heritage. We were the first of the state centers hosted by a university, a model which other states have emulated.
When I arrived at Rutgers, SCILS did not have a Development Officer. I spent several years campaigning for and was eventually given one. We were a successful team in raising funds for the School within the state and across the nation.
I was also heavily involved in the university. In addition to attending regular meetings of the President’s Administrative Council and the New Brunswick Deans Council, I was on the University Senate. It met primarily in New Brunswick but traveled at least once a year to the campuses of Camden and Newark. Within the Senate, I Chaired the Committee on Rutgers University and the Public and served on the Committee on University Governance. I also served as Administrative Liaison to the University Senate’s Equal Opportunity Committee, Chaired the Rutgers University Television Network Advisory Council, and was a member of the Academic Advisory Committee for the Rutgers’ Integrated Administrative Systems Project, the Information Sciences Council, the Center for Mathematics, Science, and Computer Education, and the University Committee to Develop New Employee Welcome & Orientation Programs. I was also a judge for the Rutgers Academic Challenge.
Rutgers takes pride in being one of the most diverse campuses in the nation and works hard at creating synergy that supports this. The Committee to Advance Our Common Purposes (CACP), a university-wide committee founded in 1987, works across all three campuses to recognize, promote, and build programs that value and advance diversity, equity, and inclusion. CACP has a significant budget with which it funds programs, provides grants, and gives awards. It was an honor to chair this committee from 2001 to 2006.
As at both Nebraska and Oklahoma, I was involved with the Rutgers Athletic Department. Here it took the form of serving on the Academic Oversight Committee for Intercollegiate Athletics. Our role was to work with all athletic programs to ensure that the top-quality athletes who come to Rutgers are Rutgers quality students and are provided the academic support they need to succeed in the classroom. While the Committee worked with all sports, the two that occupied the largest part of our time were football and women’s basketball. One indicator of our success is the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate, a 1,000-point score based on team progress toward graduation. From 2008 to 2019, the average score for all 22 sports at Rutgers ranged from 948 to 991, scores that placed Rutgers at the top of universities in its class. In addition to the Committee I served as faculty mentor for both men’s and women’s crew and swimming and diving.
In addition to administrative duties, I continued to teach classes. At the graduate level, I taught a required course for the MCIS program, Methods of Inquiry, familiarizing students with the research methods used by scholars in the fields of communication, mass media, and information studies. My two upper-division undergraduate classes were Conflict Management and Interviewing. My favorite course, which I taught each semester starting in 2007 until I retired, was a one-credit course called Bryne Seminar. In 2007, Rutgers alumnus John J. “Jack” Byrne and his wife, Dorothy, donated $2 million to set the program in motion. The 10-week, 80-minute course with a pass/no credit grading structure begins the second week of each semester and is capped at 20 students. There are no final exams and the course features enrichment activities such as field trips and guest speakers. The goal of the course is described as: “We want to break down barriers, create a smaller community, and connect students with premiere faculty members. We also want students to understand what research faculty members have to offer and what it means to be an academic mentor.” The title of my seminar was “Working Through Conflict.”
In mid-2005, I started to notice that Rena had a persistent cough and encouraged her to get it checked out by a doctor. She did and in late October of 2005 she was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer by Dr. Joseph Aisner, named a “Top Doctor” by Castle Connolly Medical Ltd., who was the head of the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey in New Brunswick. We explored options for treatment outside the area and decided to remain in New Brunswick under Dr. Aisner’s care. Rena fought hard against this mortal illness, but she died on May 19, 2006.
In June of 2006 I was eating by myself in Sophies Bistro, a Rutgers faculty favorite. Betty Turock’s sons David and Drew came out from the party room where they were celebrating Betty’s birthday and invited me to join them. I thanked them but said I was too sad to come to a party. In early March of 2007, I called Betty and asked her if she would like to share a meal with me. Several individuals take credit for suggesting that I do this, but I think I was simply checking in with a friend who I knew had experienced the loss of her spouse, as I had mine. Her husband, Frank, had died of lung cancer in October of 2005. I asked Betty whether lunch or dinner would be better. She said dinner because evenings were hardest for her. Dinner it was at Sophies Bistro on March 8, 2007. I enjoyed her company very much and we began to share meals and go to social events together. At one of them we were walking from campus to downtown New Brunswick when Betty put her hand in mine. It felt good. Our friendship became a romance. On November 21, 2010, we got married.
I may have met Betty before my arrival at Rutgers in the fall of 1998. I was on a review team for the School in 1993. My focus for this review though was the Department of Communication. When I arrived at Rutgers it was hard to miss her. In LIS she was both the Chair and the Director of its master's program. After her tenure, these two roles were separated. I learned that she was a major reason why her department was rated by its peers as among the top ten programs in North America. Betty was part of the Chairs and Directors who I met with on a regular basis. I asked her to be Associate Dean when that slot opened. I also asked her to assume difficult tasks in the School, including chairing the Search Committee for the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication when it opened. Betty often hosted events in her home on the Raritan River and invited Rena and me to them. We got to meet and like her husband, Frank, her two sons, David and Drew, and her two granddaughters, Joy and Hope.
In 2008 I took a year-long sabbatical, my first at Rutgers, intending to retire at the end of it. After an elaborate retirement party hosted by my School, however, I decided I wanted to end my career in the classroom rather than administration and went back to teaching for two years before retiring in May of 2011. Betty told our colleagues it was because I liked my retirement party so much, I wanted another one. During the last two years I taught primarily undergraduate courses at the junior and senior level on interviewing and conflict management, and a Bryne Seminar introducing first year students to a research university. Betty and I also co-taught a PhD level seminar on leadership for students in the School’s doctoral program. This was a wonderful two years!
Reflecting on my Rutgers tenure as SCILS Dean, I believe that the School and its departments made substantive progress toward the goal of having three departments that are “significant disciplinary exemplars that create synergy by their interaction.” The department that traveled farthest was Journalism and Mass Communication. When I arrived, it was a very small department with few aspirations for national reputation. It saw its focus as producing undergraduates for careers in journalism and mass communication. My first move was to transfer Bob Kubey from the Department of Communication to Journalism and Mass Communication without much enthusiasm on his part at the time. He became a significant voice for JMC’s participation in the school’s graduate programs. When its chair retired, I asked my Associate Dean Betty Turock to chair the search committee for a new chair. That resulted in the appointment of John Pavlik as chair. John was serving as the Executive Director of The Center for New Media in Columbia’s School for Journalism. We hired him despite reservations by some members of his department around the question, “How will he be able to make tenure and promotion decisions for us?” He led the department to a series of important hires that transformed it. They included David Greenberg, a frequent commentator in the news media on contemporary politics and public affairs. David’s PhD dissertation became his first, award-winning book, Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image (2003). Making this hire possible was the willingness of our History Department to list David jointly on their faculty. Before I retired, a once weak department became a significant force at the undergraduate, master's and PhD levels.
The Department of Communication became a stronger department with a large, respected undergraduate program and active participation in multiple graduate programs. During my tenure it built on its strengths and shared its success within the discipline, the university, and the broader community. The department’s research foci and primary areas of education were five: Communication and Technology, Health Communication, Interpersonal Communication, Language and Social Interaction, and Organizational Communication with a major emphasis on Leadership. It supports several research centers, clusters, and labs in these areas. They are the Center for Communication and Health Issues Partnership for Education and Research, the Center for Organizational Leadership, the NetSCI Lab focused on networks research, the Rutgers University Conversation Analysis Lab, and the Laboratory for the Study of Applied Language Technology and Society. Its faculty are active participants and leaders in the discipline’s professional associations, and they publish in their journals.
Already deservedly acknowledged by U.S. News and World Report as among the top ten LIS departments in North America (#1, School Library Media; #7, Library and Information Studies; #6, Digital Librarianship; #6, Services for Children and Youth; #8, Information Systems), the Department of Library and Information Science took actions that burnished its reputation, especially within the university. With the encouragement and support of the Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, the department created and offered an Information Technology and Informatics undergraduate major that became the largest in the School. Uniting theories from the humanities and social sciences with practical computer-based competencies, it emphasizes the evaluation, implementation, use, and management of information technologies. At the master’s level, the department became one of the first at Rutgers to offer an online option for the MLS degree, providing a path for students who have neither the time nor money to obtain a degree on campus.
Many other accomplishments made us more productive. With Jon Oliver, Assistant Dean for Information Technology, in charge, we built an innovative and forward-looking IT infrastructure, the first VoIP on campus, wireless, smart classrooms, and support staff that made it possible to deliver one of Rutgers's first online master's programs. We shifted our radio and television production facilities from analog to digital and added two computer labs.
When the merger of three departments into one school occurred, what was enough space for one department became very overcrowded. We began exploring with university decision makers the possibility of acquiring a new building and were put on the university waiting list for new buildings. We were also offered existing locations off the College Avenue Campus (CAC), but had no interest in taking ourselves out of the center of Rutgers New Brunswick life. Our short-term solution while we waited to climb the waiting list for a new building was to acquire adjacent buildings. We added two to the existing Simeon DeWitt Building, the Huntington House and the SCILS Annex.
To make more efficient use of scarce resources and allow student support staff offices to stay open over the lunch hour, we moved from a decentralized staff to a centralized one. Two new budget staff positions, business manager and grants officer, were added. We built an infrastructure that supported the ever-increasing number of faculty involved in externally funded research. We were finally able to establish the new position of SCILS Development Officer, which helped to produce almost $6 million in revenue during a capital campaign.
In the 2004–2005 academic year, Rutgers University began the process of implementing an all funds budgeting system for distributing financial resources to academic units. Many tweaks were made to the process in succeeding years as the focus of budgeting decisions moved to more local levels of administration while encouraging the strategic investment of resources at the local, campus, and institutional levels of organization. SCILS, with three of the largest undergraduate programs in the university, became one of three schools generating significantly more income than costs for the university. As a direct result it received far more resources than it had in the past.
So how do I judge the success of my tenure as Dean? At Rutgers, I directly reported to the Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, who directly reported to the President. I was hired by Joe Seneca, who held that role from 1991 to 2003. He was followed by Phil Furmanski, who served from 2003 to 2011. Joe was an economics PhD; Phil a chemical biologist. I couldn’t have asked for two more congenial and supportive persons with whom to work. I didn’t always get everything I requested but I was always listened to as a full partner in the process. They conducted annual reviews of me that were uniformly positive. I felt respected by them and by my fellow Deans. On at least a monthly basis, I had lunch with a small group of the most powerful Rutgers Deans at one of two New Brunswick restaurants, the Frog and the Peach and Panicos, to talk about the state of the university.
In April 2001, three years into my tenure as Dean, the University Senate, of which I was a member, passed a resolution that Deans be evaluated on a five-year cycle in at least five areas:
Quality of relationship with and care for students
Quality of collegial relationship between the dean and the unit’s faculty
Performance in personnel issues relative to faculty and staff
Performance on financial and strategic management of the unit’s resources
Overall performance
Personally, the most meaningful evaluation of my Deanship occurred after my retirement. A new building was going up next to the Annex when Acting Dean Claire McInerney saw Betty and me at a conference. She surprised me when she asked if it were all right if they named the new building the “Friedrich House.” I managed to say, “I would be incredibly flattered.” When I got back to campus, I sent her an email asking for details. She wrote back:
We have a new building that was constructed behind the “Annex” on what was formerly a parking lot. This is the building we’d like to call the Friedrich House. Your name was chosen because of your ten-year service to SCILS and because you were very well liked when you were here. At the meeting when your name was suggested by a faculty member, everyone else shouted agreement and pleasure at the idea. That’s enough of a reason for me, and Karen and Harty to agree. We’ll have a low-key opening of it when we have all the folks moved over and all the items absolutely in place—probably in late March or April. What’s required of you, you asked? Very little, but, of course, we’d like you to come to the official opening of the building where we’ll have a reception. It would be nice too if we could use some of the photos that you had taken at your retirement party so that we could make copies and frame them to have them installed in the halls of the Friedrich House. We can also make another copy of the big photo that you just had taken and have that in the entrance.
Professional associations
My career was enhanced by active membership in professional associations throughout my career at the state, regional, national, and international levels.
State associations
I didn't understand the importance of professional associations until I entered graduate school. During my years at KU, I was encouraged by my professors to attend annual meetings of the Kansas Speech Association, which I did. I continued to join and participate in state associations throughout my career. My first office in a professional organization was as Chair of the Rhetoric and Public Address Interest Group of the Indiana Speech Association in 1968–69. Thank you J. Jeffrey Auer, who nominated me for this role. In Nebraska, I was involved with the Nebraska Speech Communication Association and chaired its Teacher Certification and Preparation Committee. I chaired the Communication Division of the Oklahoma Speech-Theatre-Communication Association. In New Jersey, I participated in both the New Jersey Communication Association and the New York State Communication Association. I also visited annual meetings of some of the other state associations (e.g., Texas, Michigan, Tennessee, Illinois, Iowa, South Dakota). State association are home primarily to teachers but also students and professionals. The teachers represent all levels: elementary, secondary, community college, college, and university. The focus of these associations is studying, improving, and applying the principles and practices of communication to all walks of life with an emphasis on the context of their state. They provide an excellent venue to recruit graduate students and to place graduates in teaching positions. Membership and participation in them is a must for administrators of communication units at colleges and universities.
Like most of my peers, I didn’t go to regional or national meetings as a graduate student. Once I got to Purdue, I joined the Directors of the Basic Course in Midwestern Universities. I didn’t miss a meeting while I was at Purdue. It moved from school to school and I hosted one of the meetings of the group at Purdue in February of 1972.
Regional associations
There are four regional communication associations: Central, Eastern, Southern, and Western. All have annual conferences and I’ve attended all of them. Central was and is my home. The first Central States Communication Association (CSCA) Convention that I attended was held April 18–19, 1969, at the Case-Park Plaza in St. Louis, Missouri. A member of my PhD. committee at Kansas and an influential person in my life, Wil Linkugel, planned the program and so I was there. Until I took the Rutgers position, I only missed one CSCA convention and that was because I was on a sabbatical in France. Sessions in 1969 went from 9 am on Friday to 3 pm on Saturday. There were 130 individuals listed on the program. Within this program, which easily fit into my suit pocket, was this statement: “All wives attending the convention are cordially invited to a coffee reception in the President’s Suite immediately following the keynote address. Check at the information desk upon arrival for the room number.” This statement remained in the CSCA convention program until 1973 when Jerry Anderson changed it. On the top of page 33 of his program for the April 5–7 convention at the Hotel Leamington in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is the entry “Program: Feminism, Sex Roles and Communication: The Hard Facts;” at the bottom: “Spouses of members are cordially invited to a coffee reception in room 1473, the President’s Suite, Friday at 9:30 am.” At the next annual meeting Ken Andersen’s program in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, April 4–6, 1974, listed a Planning Meeting of the Women’s Caucus.
My first significant CSCA office was as a member of the Nominating Committee in 1971, which I chaired in 1974. At this time, I was a faculty member at Purdue and my new chair was David Berg. David was the Executive Director of the Association. He asked me if I wanted to follow him in his CSCA role. I did and became Executive Secretary Designate in 1974 and Executive Secretary from 1975 to 1977. In this role I managed, with the help of one part-time assistant, Kathleen Turner who was David’s assistant and a Purdue PhD Student, the activities of a 1,700+ member organization with annual expenditures of over $30,000. One year later, I was elected Vice President of CSCA in 1978, moving up to President-Elect in 1979 and President in 1980, the 50th anniversary of the association. I chaired other CSCA committees serving as Chair of the Finance Committee, the Federation Prize Committee, and the Outstanding Young Teacher Award Committee.
The CSCA convention that I planned was in Chicago, Illinois, April 10–12, 1980, at the Radisson Chicago. I expanded the parameters of the convention in two ways by starting the program on Thursday at 1:30pm and I scheduled 7 sessions per time slot rather than 6. I was the second president to have the assistance of 9 division chairs in planning the conference. I chose my fellow KU graduate student, Jesse Delia, for the Spotlight on Scholarship slot. Office hours were held by Jane Blankenship, R. R. Allen, Gerry Miller, and Karlyn Campbell. The next year, 1981, I presided over the 50th anniversary CSCA convention at the Palmer House in Chicago.
CSCA granted me its Outstanding Young Teacher Award in 1970 and the Central States Speech Association Service Award in 1978. In 1998, CSCA established the Friedrich Award, presented annually to the author(s) of the Top Student Competitive Paper submitted to the Communication Education Interest Group. In 2010, I was granted membership in the CSCA Hall of Fame, awarded to “those who have contributed to the discipline of communication through meritorious scholarship, teaching/mentoring, participation at conventions, and service to the association.”
National associations
My first Speech Association of America (SAA) conference was in 1969 at the Statler Hilton Hotel in New York City. SAA’s President that year was Marie Hochmuth Nichols. I didn’t realize it at the time, but she was only the fifth woman President of our Association and the first to be elected to the office by a vote of the whole membership. The four prior women Presidents elected to that post by committee were Henrietta Prentiss in 1932, Maud May Babcock in 1936, Magdalene Kramer in 1947, and Elise Hahn in 1958. Dr. Nichols was also the first woman to edit an Association journal, the Quarterly Journal of Speech. In 1969, only 5 of 55 Association Presidents, or 9%, had not been white males. After Nichols, there wasn’t another woman President for almost ten years. In 1969, our first and only person of color President, Orlando Taylor, was 30 years in the future. In 1968, when I joined the faculty at Purdue, my colleagues included only one woman, Alice Donaldson, and one Black man, Molefi Asante, who joined the faculty with me. Purdue had only recently begun to award assistantships to females. Its founding Chair, Alan Monroe, believed that giving assistantships to women was a waste of resources because they would only get married. In the late 1960s, people of color and women across races and social classes launched a challenge to the dominant white male academic enterprise, a challenge that led to the formation of NCA’s Women’s Caucus (1971) and Black Caucus (1974).
In 1969, SAA meetings occurred in December between Christmas and New Year’s. This was only my second time in New York City. The first time was when I traveled with the KU debaters and Donn Parson to the National Debate Tournament (NDT) at West Point. Don believed in cultural enrichment for his debaters and assistant debate coaches and so we saw Marat Sade on Broadway and went to MOMA as part of the NDT experience. For SAA though, I flew in, went to the hotel where I stayed for the duration, then went home. It took me a year or two to learn that it was possible to attend a conference and enjoy the city in which it was held.
At SAA, I was on the program twice: (1) Presenting a paper: “The PRCA as a measure of self-reported speech anxiety: An empirical explication of a construct.” This paper summarized my PhD dissertation. With the help of both Bob Kibler and Sam Becker, it was published in Communication Monographs. (2) As Chair of a program: “Contributed papers on undergraduate speech instruction.” I spent most of my time following Purdue colleagues Bob Kibler and Larry Barker around as they taught me the importance of meeting people, networking, going to business meetings, and volunteering for tasks. In addition to work, I went to some parties and I got a tour of the National Office by Bill Work. My Kibler/Barker lessons resulted in my selection to: Chair, Undergraduate Speech Instruction Interest Group Nominating Committee, 1968; Nominating Committee, Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division, 1971; Chair, Scope and Concerns Committee, Instructional Development Division, 1970–1971.
I missed very few NCA conventions after the first as my focus on communication education intensified. I was appointed to the Planning Committee for the National Conference of Teacher Educators on Speech Communication and the SCA/American Theatre Association Task Force on Teacher Competencies. I served on the Association’s Curriculum Development Planning Committee in 1972. I became Vice Chair Elect of the Instructional Development Division (Vice Chair Elect, 1972–73, Vice Chair, 1973–74; Chair, 1974–75). This position meant that I was a member of the SCA Legislative Council, the association’s governing body. Once there I became Chair of the Legislative Council’s Resolution Committee. Then I served in multiple additional roles before being elected to the Presidential sequence: Committee on Faculty Development, Task Force on Assessment Testing, Nominating Committee, Affirmative Action Committee, Chair of the Publications Board, Administrative Committee of the Legislative Council, Task Force on Subgroup Structure. Two NCA awards I received that I greatly value are the SCA Golden Anniversary Award (1974) and the NCA Mentor Award (2003).
I also became editor of one of our national journals. Communication Education, founded in 1952, the third oldest NCA journal with Quarterly Journal of Speech first (1915) and Communication Monographs second (1952). Originally named The Speech Teacher, it became Communication Education under my predecessor Ken Brown. I was its editor for volumes 28, 29, 30 (1979, 1980, 1981). In planning my editorship, I set one primary goal: producing a journal read and perceived as useful by all members of the association. To me this meant not only speech education colleagues, which was its original target, but rhetorical and communication scholars. It meant not only university faculty, but primary and secondary teachers and non-academics. To accomplish this, I tried to think strategically as I formed my editorial board, a very diverse group that included senior rhetorical and communication scholars as well as high school and community college teachers. I chose to accept manuscripts that used APA and MLA style formats. Both in print and in person I described the goals of Communication Education as innovative and inclusive. In terms of format, I sought and included two types of articles: Featured and Instructional Practices. For Featured articles, I made a special effort to attract reports of instructional communication research (ICA added Division 7, Instructional and Developmental, in 1972). In addition to articles, I asked Cassandra Book to serve as Teaching/Learning Resources Editor. I included two special issues among the twelve that comprised my editorial tenure (V28#4, Rod Hart on “The Status of Graduate Study in Communication” and V29#4, Frank Dance on “The Status of the Discipline”). I also asked Gerry Phillips to edit a Symposium on Shyness, CA, Reticence. I had a professional graphic artist design the cover and intersperse art throughout the journal. With lots of help, including a wonderful Editorial Assistant, June Rugg, I processed 497 manuscripts, selecting 100 for publication. For Features, I had 337 submissions, of which I published 48 (14.2%); for Instructional Practices, I had 160 submissions, of which I published 52 (32.5%).
So how did I do in terms of my goal? Early on in my editorship, including the January 1980 issue, the Publication Board conducted a questionnaire study of subscriber responses (441 of which 429 were usable). From it and the publication data I learned that: (1) The majority of the manuscripts (67%) focused on issues related to higher education; only 6% focused on the concerns of elementary teachers and 3% on the concerns of secondary teachers. (2) Most members do read CE: 50% read it regularly and 43% read it occasionally. In the general rating of CE context areas, 51 rated the Feature articles of some value, 39% found them very valuable, and 8% said that they had little value. Forty-seven percent found the Instructional Practices reports to be of some value, 38% said they were very valuable, and 12% said they had little value. (3) The questionnaire ended with an invitation to comment generally. More than two-thirds were positive and only 15% critical. Most criticized were articles that were removed from the problems of the classroom and the artwork. Most praised were “solid articles based on research useful to teaching.”
In 1986, I was elected to the SCA Presidential sequence: Second Vice President, 1986–87, First Vice President, 1987–88, President, 1988–89, Immediate Past President, 1989–90. The two candidates that year were Jim Fletcher, a mass communication scholar from Georgia, and me. In these years campaigns for the presidency were less overt than they are today. Most candidates would go to the four regional associations: Eastern, Southern, Central, and Western, where they were introduced as the SCA Presidential candidates at the business meeting. That was it. I attended a couple of state meetings in addition to the four regionals.
As First Vice President, I planned the SCA conference held in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1988. My hotel Presidential Suite was occupied immediately before me by George W. Bush. The security around it, I was told, was intense. My predecessor, Mike Osborne and his wife Suzi, planned their conference using large sheets of paper on poster boards. I was the first President to use a computer to program a convention. I used my Apple II+ to minimize conflicts for panel presenters rather than doing it with paper on poster boards. The next year I presided over the Diamond Anniversary Jubilee, 75th Convention in San Francisco, California. My hotel Presidential Suite there had been occupied before me by Ringo Starr, who was traveling and presenting concerts with his All-Star Band. My Presidential speech at a Sunday Champagne Breakfast was a call for demonstrable diversity in the discipline. I made Affirmative Action one of the two major priorities of my presidency, the second was Graduate Education. I also focused on advancing four of Michael Osborn’s initiatives: changing the name of the association to include a national designation and broaden speech to communication (from Speech Communication Association to National Communication Association), his SCA Goals & Questions Task Force, his Task Force on Subgroup Structure, and his Task Force on Undergraduate Research in Communication Studies. I did this because I thought it important to devote more than one year to important initiatives if we wanted to assure their success. Attendees at the convention received a “History of SCA” authored by Bill Work and Bob Jeffrey. They also received a special issue of Time magazine dedicated to advances in communication since 1940 and an SCA-engraved diamond-shaped paperweight. Bill Eadie chaired the committee that planned the convention’s “Gala Celebration.” That year, Jim Chesebro joined the staff of the National Office, the SCA brochure “Pathways to Careers in Communication” was first published, and the SCA Consulting and Program Assessment Service was initiated.
I am especially proud to have been part of the team that brought Jim Gaudino to NCA as Executive Secretary. At the beginning of our Association in 1915, administrative functions were performed by two individuals working from their home institutions. The first occupants were Secretary H. B. Gislason, University of Minnesota, and Treasurer G. N. Merry, University of Iowa. In 1928, these two roles became one when H. L. Ewbank, University of Wisconsin, assumed the role. In 1963, William Work became the first Executive Secretary housed in an independent National Office located within the Statler Hilton Hotel in New York City. When Bill retired in 1988, the Executive Committee advertised for his replacement, interviewed candidates, and selected James L. Gaudino. Jim was a 1972 graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy where he was an offensive tackle on the Falcons football team. He served in California, Tukey, and Germany after graduation. He earned a Master of Science degree from Troy University and a PhD in communication from Michigan State University, where he focused on public relations and public opinion formation. Jim was our Executive Secretary from 1988 to 2004. During his tenure, the National Office moved from New York City to Annandale, Virginia, and then to its current location at 1765 N Street NW in Washington, DC. Jim led NCA’s efforts to partner with other associations in the DC area and to capitalize on our location in the nation’s capital. His leadership skills were incredible, and his tenure was a very productive one for NCA.
International Communication Association
I became a member of the International Communication Association (ICA) at the time it took that name. It was founded in 1950 as the National Society for the Study of Communication (NSSC), a subsidiary of what is now the National Communication Association. NSSC formally separated from NCA in 1967. Its founders felt that NCA prioritized the humanistic study of rhetoric at the expense of the scientific study of communication. They also felt that NCA valued academics over professionals. NSSC created an organization focused on communication studies that welcomed both. It took on the name International Communication Association in 1969 to facilitate its effort to reach out to anyone in the world who shared their interests. My colleague at Purdue, Bob Kibler, got me involved in ICA. My primary interest was its Instructional and Developmental Division. I was its Vice Chair (1981–1983) and Chair (1983–1985). I also served on the ICA’s Committee on Innovation, Board of Directors, Finance Board, as its Representative for Section J of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and as Chair of its Nomination Committee. Over the years I attended some but not all the annual conferences.
Broader association memberships
Other professional communication associations attracted my attention and I became a member of the American Forensics Association, International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetoric Society of America, and Association of Communication Administration. In addition to professional communication associations, I became a member of other allied associations relevant to my research interests: the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Vice Chair and then Chair of its Communication Research SIG; the American Psychological Association (APA), Divisions 1, 5, and 15; and the American Sociological Association. I remain a member of AERA and APA. I was a member of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) from 1968 until I arrived at Rutgers where the AAUP is the Faculty Union and I was management. I firmly believe in the importance of AAUP as a strong voice for university faculty. I am a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and value its journal and internet presence. As I mentioned earlier, I believed it important to join other associations relevant to the three departments that comprised SCILS, including ALA, ASIS&T, NJLA, NJCB, AEJMC, NJPA. In short, I believe membership in relevant professional associations is a must for academics.
A professional responsibility that I embraced and thoroughly enjoyed was serving as a referee for the discipline. Whether it involved reviewing an article submitted to a journal, writing a letter of recommendation, doing a program review, or reading a book prospectus for a publisher, when I was asked, I seldom said no. Hopefully when I did, I tactfully gave a reason and made every effort to do well what I took on. In my written responses I worked to be honest, responsive, direct, thorough, and helpful. I built on role models like Sam Becker, Bob Kibler, and others. I also had role models to avoid (e.g., the “Masked Avenger”). I asked myself how I would feel were I receiving this evaluation. In addition to my editorship of Communication Education, I served on the editorial boards of many of the discipline's publications: SCA Education and Instructional Development Publication Series, Journal of Communication, Communication Quarterly, American Communication Journal, Communication Research Reports, Journal of Communication and Media Arts, Basic Course Annual, Communication Monographs, Communication Yearbook, Central States Speech Journal, Human Communication Research, Journal of Spanish Research on Information Science, and Oklahoma Speech, Theater, and Communication Journal. I served as an ad hoc reviewer for ACA Bulletin, Argumentation and Advocacy, Howard Journal of Communications, Western Journal of Speech Communication. I did textbook reviews for publishers: Ablex, Addison-Wesley, Burgess, CBS Educational and Professional Publishers, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Macmillan, Prentice-Hall, Random House, Rinehart, and Wadsworth. I served on External Review Teams for: James Madison University’s School of Speech Communication, Ohio State University’s Humanities Education Program, SUNY-Buffalo, Department of Communication Graduate Program (Chair), University of Massachusetts, Emporia State University, University of Southern Maine, West Virginia University, Kearney State College, University of Tennessee, San Diego State University, Memphis State University, Department of Speech Communication and Journalism, Wayne State University, School of Communication and Information Studies, Rutgers University, Department of Speech Communication, Southwest Texas State University, Centre for Extension and Continuing Education, University of Agriculture, Malaysia, Communication Department, University of Central Oklahoma.
A substantial amount of my time and attention was devoted to writing a plethora of letters for students applying for jobs, individuals being considered for tenure/promotion, and colleagues seeking a new challenge within the profession or at another location. Many were for students whom I mentored in their undergraduate programs or in their graduate years, including through their terminal degrees.
Retirement
After retiring in 2011 I remain active at Rutgers, professionally, in the broader community, and with family. Betty and I continue our professional ties at Rutgers and especially with our School. We attend and are active at professional gatherings of both the Library and Communication communities.
Upon retirement, Dick McCormick, the Rutgers President, asked me to become the founding chair of the Retired Faculty and Staff Advisory Council exploring what Rutgers can do for retirees and what retirees can do for Rutgers. He also asked Betty to serve on this Council. During our tenure we were part of creating not only an active permanent Council but an attractive physical presence on campus, which included a receptionist’s station, meeting room space, a refreshment station, and a smaller room with computer access. The Council participated in a celebration of Rutgers's 250th anniversary by contributing a very popular art and music program, chaired by Betty, on the Newark campus.
At Rutgers I continued my role as a volunteer art museum docent at the Zimmerli Art Museum. During my 16+ years at Oklahoma I was a docent for the Fred Jones Museum of Art, where I led tours of both their permanent collection and special exhibitions. I learned a lot about art by studying both and I loved sharing what I learned with groups visiting the museum. While I led tours of groups of varying ages, my special focus was 3rd graders from the schools in the state of Oklahoma. I’m currently a docent at the Rutgers Zimmerli Art Museum, a 70,000 square foot facility housing 60,000+ art objects, with special strengths in Russian, American, and European art. I give tours to groups ranging from pre-school to seniors. The Zimmerli has the largest collection of non-conformist Russian art in the world, including Russia. When the Russian Librarian, a friend of Betty’s, wanted to explore Russian dissident art, he visited us.
In addition to professional and university activities we regularly enjoy cultural activities, especially art, music, and opera, within our broader community that stretches from Boston and New York City to Philadelphia and DC. We attend four operas per year at the Metropolitan Opera. We also have access to 700 full-length recordings of Met performances via online streaming from Met Opera on Demand. Annually we participate in a speaker series at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. We are surrounded by significant art museums and musical venues. We also enjoy traveling and spending time with family. Son Bruce and his wife Alka live in DC and Betty’s two sons, David and Drew, live nearby in New Jersey with their families, and her two granddaughters Joy and Hope, work and live in Boston and Florida, respectively, which provide cultural and beach vacation opportunities as well as time with them.
Since 2001 I’ve been a member of the Advisory Council of the Brodsky Center. My introduction to membership on the Council came at the same time as Rena’s. For all but the early years I’ve been the Council’s Chair. The Brodsky Center was founded as the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper in 1986 by Judith K. Brodsky, an artist, printmaker, arts advocate, and professor of art at Rutgers. It was established as an international forum for the exchange of new ideas in print and papermaking processes and education. It is a collaborative paper and printmaking center devoted to the creation of new work. In 2006 it was renamed the Brodsky Center in honor of its founder. In the summer of 2018, it joined the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) as the Brodsky Center at PAFA. PAFA, founded in 1805, is the oldest art museum and art school in the U.S.A.
The mission of the Brodsky Center aligns uniquely with the mission of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to educate students and to develop and promote the work of outstanding and innovative artists. The primary focus of both rests on diversity. The two have consistently supported women and artists of color. PAFA and the Brodsky Center have a congruent interest in enabling artists to create new work in paper and print. Artists-in-residence are invited to engage in one-on-one collaborations with the Brodsky Center's master printers and papermakers. These experts and innovators make it possible for artists to translate their vision into media that may be new to them. The Brodsky Center is dedicated to the promotion of editions, paper, and the printed image as central to contemporary art practice.
As part of the school at PAFA, the Brodsky Center provides internships and professional opportunities for students to learn about the process of editioning, marketing, and selling artists’ prints. Students learn from artists-in-residence, who make prints alongside them in the print shop. A new papermaking facility at PAFA provides papermaking opportunities for both Brodsky Center editions and PAFA students.
Artists-in-residence give talks that are widely announced, thus affording access by the public to interaction with distinguished visual artists and their ideas. In addition, the Brodsky Center organizes traveling exhibitions that introduce contemporary prints and handmade paper projects to regional, national, and international audiences.
Since its founding, the Brodsky Center has completed over 300 editions with a diverse range of emerging and established artists. Editions produced by the Brodsky Center are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Cleveland Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Newark Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Stadtmuseum Berlin, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, and other international institutions as well as many private collections.
Key family support in my life
I feel incredibly blessed to have married two strong, feminist, opinionated, talented, accomplished, and attractive women. Both were much more extroverted than I. It is an added blessing that the members of our families opened their arms to both of us. Below are brief descriptions of Rena and Betty. Rena and Betty met and spent time together in New Jersey and they liked, respected, and admired each other. In the last months of her life Rena told me multiple times that she expected and wanted me to marry again. I believe that she would be happy with my choice.
Erena Rae
Rena earned her BFA degree in drawing and printmaking from the University of Kansas while I worked on graduate degrees there and pursued a 30-year career in graphic design and commercial illustration. Her commercial art garnered awards from professional magazines and organizations, and the Oklahoma Arts Council continues to use the calligraphic logo that she created in the 1980s. Rena was also instrumental in the highly praised redesign of Calligraphy Review Magazine, serving as the publication’s art director and occasional writer/editor from 1985 to 1992. Much of this work was done under the umbrella of E & E Communication Design, an advertising firm she created in Nebraska with her partner, Elizabeth Nelson. She retired from commercial art and returned to her drawing and printmaking roots in 1998 when we moved to Rutgers. Her award-winning prints and mixed-media works focusing on feminism and social issues have appeared in publications and juried exhibitions throughout the U.S.A., as well as in China, Russia, and India. A mixed-media print Rena created in response to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was selected for inclusion in the book, The Best of Printmaking: An International Collection, and three of her works were included in Milton Glaser’s 2005 publication, The Design of Dissent: Socially and Politically Driven Graphics. Rena especially enjoyed creating “mail art” to commemorate unusual “holidays” (e.g., Buy-Nothing Day, Chair Awareness Day, Discovery Day) and sending the letterpress postcards to her “AEPW list”—a select group whom she deemed “artistic, eccentric, or potentially weird.” Her work is in numerous private collections, as well as in the permanent collection of the Ben Shahn Galleries at William Paterson University, the archives of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Wood Engravers Network archives of Princeton University. Examples of her art are on the website: www.thistlewoodpress.com.
Reflecting on her art Rena wrote:
The art that moves me most is art that points out unfair or unethical practices in today’s society—especially practices which have become so routine that either they go unnoticed or they are assumed to be “normal.” My social conscience (the feminist part, at least) was born the moment my first-grade teacher announced that the word he was a neutral pronoun. I sensed right away the implications (and unfairness!) of my little brothers getting to own such an important word; and since that time I have noticed again and again that it is a very short—and inevitable—step to go from excluding a whole group of people in word, to excluding them in deed. Thus, due to a combined interest in language and social issues (plus that ever-vigilant feminist muse), many of my works deal with the dichotomy inherent in words vs. deeds. The so-called “feminine suffix” is a particular thorn (and part of an on-going theme which also sometimes includes, as a taunting and ironic element, the U.S. military slogan that was ubiquitous in recent decades: “Be all that you can be”) because I have such high regard for (and am in awe of) the almighty power of language. It's a scary truth that the more “normal” something seems, the more insidious it can be. Whatever the method and medium, the challenge remains the same: to try to express ideas through art. I realize, of course, that my efforts cannot even begin to address all forms of social inequities, but I will be happy if my work adds up to even one little stitch in the human-rights quilt.
Betty J. Turock
Betty is a Past President of the 68,000-member American Library Association (ALA), the oldest and largest library association in the world. As President she traveled over 300,000 miles advocating for libraries and librarians, testifying before Congress and the Federal Commission on Communications to focus interest on just and equitable access to electronic information for all people of our nation and the nations of the world. Because of this passionate advocacy Librarian of Congress, James Billington, called her “the Paul Revere of the Information Age.” During her tenure as ALA President and as part of her quest for “Equity on the Information Highway” the Telecommunications Act of 1936 was revised and libraries were for the first time in history designated universal service providers with the mission of increasing access to telecommunications services by making them available to all, including those in low income, rural, insular, and high cost areas. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, enacted 60 years after the 1936 Act, mandated special discounts for libraries for which Congress created the Education-Rate to financially support public access to digital information.
Another significant act of her ALA Presidency involved federal funding for libraries. Prior to her presidency, federal level support for library programs and services were located in the Department of Education (DE), which often made library funding priorities of secondary and unequal importance to those of elementary and secondary schools. Funding for libraries came to the DE through the Library Services and Construction Act, renamed the Library Services and Technology Act in 1996. As the deadline came closer and closer for the seven-year renewal of funding, the DE had not submitted renewal legislations to Congress. Betty made two visits to the Office of the Associate Secretary with still no action underway. She explored what might be done to make library funding independent of DE with Jeanne Hurley Simon, Chair of the U.S National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, Carol Henderson, Director of ALA’s Washington Office, Elizabeth Martinez, Executive Director of ALA, and Patricia Schuman, the Chair of ALA’s Legislation Committee. These conversations set in motion with Senator Paul Simon of Illinois, the husband of Jeanne Hurley Simon, and strong support from Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, a plan to move libraries into their own federal agency. The vote was taken in the two Houses of Congress and the Institute of Museum and Library Services was created with its own identity, legal profile, and headquarters building.
As ALA President the accomplishment of which Betty is most proud is the founding of the Spectrum Scholarship Program to recruit members of underrepresented populations to graduate programs of library and information science and to fund their master’s and doctoral degrees. To date, the Spectrum Scholarship Program has educated over 1,000 Emerging Majority students as library and information science educators and professionals.
Betty’s knowledge of libraries is expansive. She spent 15 years in the field before entering academe, where she held management posts in school, public, and academic libraries. She also served as Senior Advisor in the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement. The author of more than 100 publications, she is the recipient of numerous awards. Within ALA she received the Jesse Shera Award for Outstanding Research, the ALA Equality Award, and the Lippincott Award for distinguished service to the profession. She was also named by ALA as one of the Extraordinary Library Advocates of the Twentieth Century. In 2012 ALA conferred on her Honorary Life Membership, the highest award the Association bestows for contributions so outstanding that they are of lasting importance to the advancement of the entire field of library and information science. Her graduate alma mater, Rutgers University, honored her with the SC&I Distinguished Alumna Award and the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Graduate School.
Betty has traveled, lectured, and served as a consultant nationally, as well as internationally, in the countries of Russia, India, the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. She served as a member of the Board of Advisors and the Dean’s Council at Johns Hopkins Medical Institution; on the National library Council, Johns Hopkins Undergraduate University; and on the Boards of the American Library in Paris, France, and Keystone College, LaPlume, PA.
My son: Bruce Gregory Friedrich
Rena and I married on August 4, 1962. It wasn’t long before both sets of parents began asking when we would have our first child (we were both our parents’ oldest child). We waited until both of us completed our degrees at the University of Kanas and were settled in at Purdue. Bruce was born on August 7, 1969, in West Lafayette, Indiana. He was named for Rena’s two brothers: Bruce and Greg. When asked when we would have our second child Rena would respond “When you do it right the first time you don’t need to do it again.” While true, Rena’s doctor told us it would be dangerous for her to have a second child.
Bruce graduated from Norman High School in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1987. He was on the debate team and served as president of the Cleveland County Young Democrats during his Junior and Senior years. After high school he selected Grinnell College where, after a couple of detours for the Plowshares Movement and prison, he graduated Phi Betta Kappa with a BA in English, Economics, and Religion. From 1990 to 1996 he worked in a shelter for homeless families and a soup kitchen in Washington, DC, as a part of the Catholic Worker Movement. While there a friend gave him Christianity and the Rights of Animals by Andrew Linzey, an Anglican Priest and professor of theology at Oxford University. It, he said later, “changed my life.”
Bruce married Alka Chandna in 2002. Alka has a PhD in Applied Mathematics and currently works at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) as Vice President and Laboratory Oversight Specialist. Bruce worked at PETA as Director of Vegan Campaigns from May 1996 to August 2009 in the DC area. From August 2009 to May 2011 he was, as part of Teach for America, at the Baltimore Freedom Academy, where he taught English, social justice, and government to 10th and 11th graders in Baltimore’s inner-city area. While there he completed an MA degree in Education from Johns Hopkins University. From May 2011 to September 2015 Bruce worked for Farm Sanctuary in the DC area as a Senior Policy Director for Farm Sanctuary. Then back to the academy, he received his JD degree from Georgetown University Law Center, graduating magna cum laude, Order of the Coif. From September 2015 to the present, Bruce has been Co-Founder and Executive Director of The Good Food Institute (GFI), an international nonprofit that is fostering a sustainable, healthy and just agricultural system through food innovations. With branches in the U.S.A., India, Israel, Brazil, Europe, and Asia Pacific, GFI is accelerating the production of plant-based and cell-based food in order to bolster the global protein supply while protecting our environment, promoting global health, and preventing food insecurity and animal cruelty.
Bruce has penned op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Wired, and many other publications. He has appeared on The Today Show, NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News, and a variety of programs on MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN. His 2019 TED talk has been viewed two million times and translated into dozens of languages. Bruce has coauthored two books, contributed chapters to seven more, and has written seven law review articles.
Life as an academic
Academic contributions
As an academic, I value the tripart focus of university professors—research, teaching, and service—and see them as inseparable. It was teaching, though, that drove the other two. I enjoy learning new things, but I enjoy even more sharing what I have learned with others. I am particularly delighted in sharing my knowledge with my students and learning from them. I also enjoy making the insights of the communication discipline available to the broader community.
Teaching
When I retired in 2011, I had been teaching 48 years. No matter my university role, I continued to teach. My record includes over 40 differently numbered undergraduate and graduate courses in both small and large class format. Some of these courses were in my area of specialty; others were service courses and required core courses (e.g., Introduction to Graduate Studies, Research Methods, Statistics); yet others were popular multi-sectioned courses (e.g., Public Speaking, Nonverbal Communication, Interviewing, Conflict Resolution). I savored my experiences with all of them. I take pride in having served as the official adviser to well over 200 MA students and directing to completion 40 PhD dissertations, half women and half men. I am especially proud of the fact that many of them continue to attend the annual meetings of their professional associations and play leadership roles in the discipline. I have frequently been described as a “teacher’s teacher” and have won multiple teaching awards including KU’s Margaret Anderson Award for Excellence in Teaching, CSCA’s Outstanding Young Teacher Award, OU’s Regent’s Award for Superior Teaching, several Distinguished Lecturer Awards, and the NCA Mentor Award. For all courses taught since 1968 ratings on the broad core item of Course and Instructor Evaluations were 4.5–5, on a 5-point scale.
Research
Equally as rewarding was the opportunity to contribute to the discipline’s knowledge base through presentations, journal articles, and books. I have presented over 150 papers at the meetings of professional associations and special conferences. My first journal publication was in Speech Monographs, for which I thank Bob Kibler and Sam Becker. Other referred publications appeared in journals including Communication Education, Journal of Communication, Communication Research Reports, Communication Quarterly, Central States Speech Journal, ACA Bulletin, Journal of Thought, Improving College and University Teaching, International Journal of Instructional Media, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Intercultural Communication Studies. I coauthored both textbooks—Strategic Communication in Business and the Professions; Human Communication: A Communication Competency Approach; and Public Communication—and books focused on communication education and instructional communication—Teaching Communication: A Handbook of Theory, Research, and Methods; Education in the 80s: Speech Communication; Growing Together … Classroom Communication; and Teaching Speech Communication in the Secondary School. I received funding for my research from both university sources and from external agencies, including the Exxon Education Foundation, the Council for the Advancement of Small Colleges, and the National Science Foundation. The awards I received for research and service include the OU Presidential Professor Award, Kenneth E. Crook Faculty Award, Josh Lee Service Award, Outstanding Communicator Educator Award, Henry Daniel Rinsland Memorial Award for Excellence in Educational Research, and the NCA Golden Anniversary Award.
Service
From the beginning, I considered service as a requisite for a fully developed professorial career. As a graduate student I learned the importance of building links both inside and outside the university. Communication professors have much to share with the world and when they do so everybody benefits. Outside the university I acted as a consultant for numerous groups and organizations, sometimes paid but often not. Consulting occurred in multiple environments locally, nationally, and internationally with business, government, and academic organizations. I was also heavily involved internally within my home universities in the Senates of Purdue, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Rutgers, and serving as a Faculty Fellow in the Provost’s Office at Oklahoma.
Lessons learned
So, what lessons do I take from my professional life? While there are many, let me mention five.
Lesson #1: Teachers make a difference
My mother, followed by Mrs. Ronnenberg, were my grade-school teachers in one-room schoolhouses where I was one of two and then three students in my class. They taught me how to read and to value reading. I read every book in the school library multiple times. My high school teachers taught me that participating in debate and academics was as interesting and rewarding as participating in athletics where I won 14 letters over four years. My undergraduate professors at the University of Minnesota taught me that good questions are more important than answers and that being an academic is a rewarding calling. My KU professors socialized me into the communication discipline on the softball diamond, in the classroom, and within the broader community.
Lesson # 2: The university professor has a full but flexible career
Although the hours of work are long, they are varied and don’t require a nine-to-five schedule. While you must do your fair share of teaching, research, and service, the proportions of each and how you construct them are constrained only by your creativity. Academics have practically unlimited choices in terms of focus and emphasis. Choices are yours as you put together your academic profile. And any choice you make need not be permanent. You must teach your classes but with online teaching more prevalent, that can occur from home. If you tire of teaching a course or you find it in need of updating, you can recreate it or teach another course of interest to you. Change is never absent and the university never stagnant or boring. Here you can build on your strengths.
Lesson #3: While professors are the core of academic life, they need administrators as full partners
Retrospectively I came to see myself as an administrator in roles starting with serving as Director of the Basic Course at Purdue or probably even earlier as an assistant debate coach at Kansas. The tasks of administrators are to be both a leader and a manager. As a leader an administrator works with all members of the group to establish, clarify, and obtain buy-in to the goals of the group. Once the goals are clear, understood, and accepted, the task is to work as a manager to obtain the resources necessary to achieve the goals. The success of the group depends on both goals and resources; both halves of this equation require a great deal of work. To achieve success an administrator one needs to be perceived as both fair and effective. Robert Birnbaum (Chronicle 9/9/92) conducted a five-year study of leadership at 32 academic institutions which he claimed refutes four myths about how to accomplish this: (1) a leader needs vision? Not so: vision best comes from constituents; (2) a leader should be transformational? Not so: a leader should seek evolutionary gains; (3) a leader needs charisma? Not so: a leader needs attention to structure, routine, and established order; (4) a leader should keep distance? Not so: close is better. All four of these points resonated with me throughout my career.
Lesson #4: Life is a result of both planning and accident
Had I followed the early script for my life, I would have become a Missouri Synod Lutheran minister. Later I planned on becoming a lawyer. An invitation from Donn Parson to come with him as an assistant to the KU debate program he was hired to direct set me on the path to my academic career. Accidental mentoring brings opportunities. This accident led to a wonderful career and life.
Lesson #5: I can’t imagine a better life than being an academic in a university setting
While other careers may be more rewarding financially, for me, none of them provide a better environment in which to live. Purdue, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Rutgers all provided communities rich in the resources that allowed me to grow in all dimensions—intellectually, socially, culturally, morally.
A life’s work
While my career path was less than straightforward, the final road was selected because of the rewards I thought it would bring. I have received and do still receive more of them than I ever expected. I am proud of the communication discipline and the many leadership roles that it has provided me: CSCA Executive Secretary and President, NCA President, and Communication Education Editor, among them. I value enormously the friendships that I have formed and know that, when I am traveling, there is hardly a college or university at which I wouldn’t know or be known by someone. I will never cease to celebrate working with and impacting the lives of students. I am forever grateful for the awards I have received for teaching, research, and service. I cherish the role that I played in establishing communication education as an important research focus of the discipline. And, as I write this history of my career for the NCA Heritage Project, I have abiding gratitude for the ability to center in communication a career to which it was worth dedicating my life.