Annenberg sets long-term goals

Last spring, Annenberg School of Communications Dean Michael Delli Carpini was approached by black Ph.D. students concerned about the lack of race-focused communication classes. Instead of delaying the process by searching for another faculty member, Delli Carpini prepared and taught the course himself.

If reapproved by the Board of Trustees in February, Delli Carpini will continue in his role as dean for a second term, during which he hopes to continue setting and fulfilling Annenberg’s goals.

The job’s biggest challenge is to “improve a school that is pretty much at the top of its field,” he said.

Instead of making sweeping policy changes during his second term, he plans to “refine” and “adjust” both the undergraduate and the graduate program to fit economic and technological changes.

Delli Carpini explained that, to counteract a possible “transition in faculty” due to turnover and retirement, he plans to expand the faculty base.

He also intends to provide more practical job training for graduate students and adjust the structure of the graduate program.

Changes will impact graduate students “from the way we admit them, to how the curriculum looks, to how we assure job placement,” he said.

He also intends to make the undergraduate program “slightly more structured.”

Delli Carpini said he is aware of pressure from students to create an undergraduate journalism major and to emphasize practical applications to ensure jobs immediately after graduation.

However, he said he doesn’t think that an undergraduate degree in journalism is a “good idea” and favors a broad liberal arts undergraduate education.

While he is attuned to the complaints of students, Delli Carpini noted that he sometimes has “pedagogical reasons not to respond 100 percent.”

“We are not a journalism school, and we never will be a journalism school,” he said.

The field of communication, he said, “suffers from the reputation that communications is what you go into when you don’t know what to do,” but he emphasized that Penn’s communication major is “rigorous.”

Delli Carpini’s first term was met with widespread approval, according to Provost Vincent Price and Annenberg professor and former dean Kathleen Hall Jamieson.

Under Delli Carpini’s leadership, the “complexion of the school has changed dramatically,” Jamieson said, explaining that the school has moved into the “global communication” and “media technology areas.”

He has also hired more women and minorities in a largely “white, male field,” she said.

The infrastructure of communications around the world is calling for a “different kind of research and education,” said Price, who worked closely with Delli Carpini as a faculty member in Annenberg.

But under Delli Carpini’s leadership, he said, the school will “just keep going up.”

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.