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2003 letter
September 20, 2003
Dear Faculty, Staff, Students, and the General Public:
A decade has passed since the establishment of
the College of Communications and Information Studies. The
current arrangement of units has more than fulfilled its early
promise. The college as a whole has grown significantly by any
measure during this decade: our level of grant funding has grown
by 465 percent; our undergraduate student body has grown by 76
percent; and our college wide endowment has grown by 270
percent. We are widely recognized as the most successful
grant-getters in communication at a public university and we are
ranked 11th nationally for our Ph.D. program. Our undergraduate
students have received numerous writing awards and have
frequently been elected to lead UK's student government
association. The original vision of then Dean Boyd and the
college's faculty has been more than fulfilled. Increasingly
other universities, including the Universities of South
Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama, are configuring themselves in
similar ways.
Students
Our courses continue to be in high demand. This
last year we graduated 346 undergraduate students, nearly 10
percent of the university's total. The College's major
enrollment continues to grow to the current figure of over 1,200
undergraduates. In addition, our service courses, particularly
those related to oral communication, are experiencing
considerable enrollment pressures.
Emily Hagedorn placed second in the
national Hearst Journalism Awards Programs college
feature-writing category. Andrea Uhde finished in fourth
place for the college personality/profile writing competition.
The University of Kentucky placed fifth overall in the Hearst
Journalism Awards program. Brandy Johnson, a College
Ambassador for two years, was honored by the American
Advertising Federation (AAF) as one of the Nation's Most
Promising Minority Students. Our AAF competition team once again
won our region. Thirteen students from the Department of
Communication participated in the Southern States Communication
Association's Undergraduate Honors Conference.
People
Our alumni, faculty, and staff continue to
accomplish wonderful things.
Dr. Enid Waldhart served as Vice-Chair of
our Senate Council. Buck Ryan received the Provost's
Award Outstanding Teaching Award for Tenured Faculty. Dr. Derek
Lane was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure and Dr.
Rick Zimmerman was promoted to Professor. Yvonne Cappe
led the local arrangements for the National Press Photographers
Association's Advanced Team Story Telling Workshop this last
spring. Dr. Donald O. Case's book Looking for
information: A survey of research on information seeking, needs,
and behavior was selected by ASIST as the Best Information
Science Book of the year. While Dr. Roy Moore was on
sabbatical this last spring, Professor Emeritus Lewis Donohew
served as Acting Associate Dean.
Dr. Beth E. Barnes, the assistant dean
for professional graduate studies at Syracuse University's S. I.
Newhouse School, has joined us as the new Director of the School
of Journalism and Telecommunications. We welcomed several new
assistant professors this year, Dr. Seth Noar, David
Cichoki, and Aaron Boyson in Communication and Mike
Farrell and Dr. Alyssa Eckman in Journalism and
Telecommunications.
Richard Wilson (BA, Journalism, 1966), a
retired Courier-Journal reporter and news bureau chief, served
ably as interim director of the School of Journalism and
Telecommunications spearheading a successful reaccredidation
effort for the school. The Richard G. Wilson Alumni Speakers'
Symposia and Printing Fund has been established in his
honor.
During our annual Bowling
Executive-in-Residence Program alumnus Jack Guthrie
(Journalism, 1963) was recognized with the Lifetime Achievement
Award for Public Relations given annually by the School of
Journalism and Telecommunications.
Graduate Programs
Our doctoral program continues its excellent
record of placements. Most noteworthy is the recent outstanding
placements of Dr. Maria Brann at West Virginia
University, Dr. Suzie Allard at the University of
Tennessee, and Dr. Gretchen Norling at the Mid-Atlantic
Cancer Information Service as a Research Director.
Our School of Library and Information Science
provides critical service to the Commonwealth as a leader in
distance learning most recently reflected in its role in a
consortium, headed by Louisiana State University, to develop a
distance learning curriculum in archive management.
Research
Many of our current graduate and research
programs already have been identified as achieving Top Twenty
status, largely because of the success of our cohort of health
communication researchers in attracting nearly $35,000,000 in
outside research funding over the last decade. Most recently,
Dr. Zimmerman has been awarded $1,575,000 by NIAAA for a
school-based alcohol and HIV prevention program in South Africa.
Dr. James Andrews is Co-PI on an Agency for Healthcare
Research and Quality grant focusing on Informatics Enhancements
for the Kentucky Ambulatory Network.
Development
As you can see, securing resources and attaining
excellence go hand-in-hand for a modern university. Over the
next two decades, building on a successful capital campaign and
the advantages that only private support can bring, we aspire to
achieve top five status, with all of our College's programs
recognized for their excellence.
We appreciate your support of our faculty and
students. Your gifts have made a difference. They have helped us
to provide much-needed scholarships and are the source of
endowed professorships and teaching awards. Janice
Birdwhistell, our Development Officer, has been instrumental
in helping us raise our level of private giving and awareness of
our College's needs. If you have any questions regarding our
scholarship or our endowment programs, please contact her. We
have new web sites for the college (http://www.uky.edu/CommInfoStudies)
that can provide you with even more information about our
programs. Our annual phonathon will be conducted September
21-25. It raises over $30,000 every year to support our student
scholarships, equipment for our student labs, and other
programs.
Fourth Annual College Recognition Ceremony and Dinner
On November 14 at the Hilary J. Boone Center we
will celebrate with alumni, friends, staff, faculty, and
students our college award winners. We will recognize the
following:
- Outstanding Staff - Pamela Thompson
- Teaching Excellence - John Clark
- Faculty Research - Derek Lane
- Friend of the College - Nell Vaughn
- Outstanding Alumnus - Jody Dreyer
e hope you will able to join us for this dinner (tickets are
$20) that also recognizes our students who have received major
awards over the last year.
In this letter, I have celebrated the latest
year in an outstanding decade of achievement for our alumni,
students, faculty, and staff. We hope that you can join with us
in achieving our goals, goals that will ensure the Commonwealth
of Kentucky is ready for its future in 2020.
Sincerely,
J. David Johnson, Dean
College of Communications and Information Studies
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