COJO changes: Faculty take new posts

There will be some changes in the COJO Department when fall semester begins later this month. Two faculty members are moving to new jobs that will affect the department.
Tracey Patton, associate professor, took over as director of the African-American Studies Program on Aug. 1. She will continue to teach three classes a year, including her popular Cross Cultural Communication course that has raised money for an orphanage in Africa.
Tracey also was director of graduate studies in the department. Dr. Michael Brown will resume that role.
At African-American Studies, Tracey replaces Gracie Lawson-Borders, who also is an associate professor in the COJO Department. Gracie moved from AAST director to associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences on Aug. 1. As associate dean, she no longer will be teaching COJO classes. Those include Media Convergence and Minority Media Ownership, which I consider crucial classes for our journalism majors.
We wish them both the best of luck in their new endeavors.
However, their departures coupled with the hiring freeze at UW will impact students. After a couple years of requests, the department finally obtained permission to hire a new journalism professor. We had to shut down our job search after budget woes forced the university to make budget cuts.
As a result, we won't be able to offer as many courses, particularly in journalism, as in recent years.

Conferencing: A trip to Grand Targhee

Two weekends ago, I was in Grand Targhee, Wyo., to present a paper at the 23rd Visual Communication Conference.
While conducting research is not part of my job description, I occasionally write a scholarly article for publication in journals or to present at an academic conference. Tenure-track and tenured faculty at UW are required to publish, but I do it just as a mental hobby to keep my brain functioning at an acceptable level.
What I've discovered about academic writing is that it's a lot harder to get published in a journal than it is in a newspaper or magazine. Before coming to UW, I did a fair amount of freelance writing and had stories published in such places as the Boston Globe newspaper and Fly Fisherman magazine.
Those stories were probably read by thousands, possibly tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands (in the case of the Globe). In contrast, an article in a scholarly journal may attract an audience measured in single or double digits.
So figure out why there is so much prestige in being published in academic journals. Never have so many worked so hard and stressed so much for so little audience.
In any case, my paper was entitled "Tapping the Collective Unconscious on Page One: Two Case Studies of Traditional Community-newspaper Flags." The study looked at the flags of the Glenrock Independent and Guernsey Gazette, both weekly newspapers in Wyoming. The research applied Jungian analysis to try to explain how the artwork in the two flags taps into the collective subconscious of readers in both towns. If interested in the details, here is a link to the article.
I kind of felt like a dinosaur at the conference, where many participants were exploring some cutting-edge, 21st-century topics such as visual memes, technology dissection, veromones, Second Life, etc. The Viscomm conference attracts a wide range of experts, including journalism faculty and grad students, artist types, and other educators and researchers.
The COJO Department hosted the conference this year, and three of our graduate students and four of our faculty presented research at the conference. Although it rained three of the four days, Grand Targhee was a beautiful, visually stimulating locale for the event. The highlight for participants was a cookout at a local dude ranch that included wagon rides through herds of elk and bison.
For people who came from as far as California and Rhode Island, Viscomm 23 was about as Western as it gets.

Summertime: When the learning is easy

Summer classes are under way at UW, and I'm teaching two classes during a three-week session. Online Journalism is in the morning, and Graphics of Communication is in the afternoon.

The three-week classes are kind of an endurance race - can students and faculty last three hours, 10 minutes per class Monday through Friday for three weeks? Can you cram in everything you'd cover during a normal 15-week semester into 14 days (no classes on Memorial Day)?

My observations after years of teaching in summer is that students actually learn better in three weeks than in 15. I base that on anecdotal evidence as well as on their actual performances.

For instance, last summer in Online Journalism, the average final grade was 85.3 percent. This spring, the average in the same class was 82.5. I didn't run a statistical analysis on the grades to see if they were significantly different, but judging by the gap, I'm willing to bet they were.

What accounts for the difference, I think, is that students are only taking one class during summer and are able to focus all of their attention on that single subject. During a regular academic semester, full-time students are taking 4-6 classes and their energies have to b e divided among all of those courses.

While summer classes can be intense, they also seem to be better learning experiences. Higher education should consider revamping the old semester system into three-week sections, during which students would take just one class in each section.

Graduation into the real world

Graduation is a time for celebration, and there were lots of events at the University of Wyoming at the end of the semester to put people in the mood.

First, I attended a luncheon to honor the finalists for the Spitaleri Award given to the top female student at the university. Hanna Bush, a senior in journalism from Gillette, was a finalist, and I attended the lunch with her and her parents. Hanna didn't win the award, but the recognition of being one of the top seven women out of the entire senior class is truly an outstanding achievement. And the lunch was pretty good.

The next week, I went to breakfast with Hanna and her parents (they put in a lot of driving!) to honor the College of Arts and Sciences top 10 graduating seniors. Dean Oliver Walters and his staff put on a nice spread, and I ate way more than usual for breakfast that day. By the way, Hanna also was editor for the Branding Iron this past year.

Last weekend, the winner of the first Larsh Bristol award for photojournalism was honored at the UW Alumni House. UW student Joe Riis had a public show of his photography funded by the Bristol award. Larsh Bristol was an alumni of our journalism program, and his friends set up this award after his death. Riis has done some incredible work documenting the migration of the Jackson Hole antelope herd. His work is also being funded by National Geographic, which gives you some idea of the quality of his photography project.

Hanna and Joe are just two of the remarkable students you will find at UW. I think you'll be hearing more about them in the future.

Roller derby mania hits Laramie

Last weekend there were two sporting events in Laramie - the University of Wyoming spring football game and the first-ever bout for the Naughty Pines roller derby team.

Guess which event attracted the most fans?

The roller derby sold 730 tickets at $10-$15 apiece. It was a sellout. Meanwhile, only about 400 fans turned out for the Cowboys game, which was free. As many as 1,000 fans may have attended the derby because a lot of comp tickets were given away.

I'm not going to predict that roller derby will always outdraw UW football, but I was amazed at the crowd for the debut event. People had to park as far away as the Rec Center and walk through drizzle and rain to the ice arena where the derby was held.

Many people probably didn't know the rules, but that didn't stop the crowd from getting loud and crazy, ringing cow bells and stomping feet on the steel bleachers. Even though the Pines got creamed by the more experienced Denver squad, they never lost the support of their fans. It should also be noted that Denver had a ringer - their best jammer previously was a competitive speed skater.

Beer sales helped fuel the crowd, no doubt. The Altitude had a table with kegs of wheat beer and IPA for the older crowd and the ever-popular Pabst's Blue Ribbon for the college set. In future bouts, the beer situation needs improvement. There were only two servers and people spent more than 20 minutes in line. Altitude needs at least twice as many servers next time.

The Naughty Pines originated in the COJO Department with some graduate students and administrative assistant Sue Benson. Judging by their initial outing, the Pines were a rousing success.

Putting the student back in student athlete

When I walked into my Online Journalism class on the first day of this semester, I felt like I was entering Lilliputia, and I was one of the midgets. I stand about 6-feet tall and normally don't feel dwarved in most social settings. But this class was full of huge guys who are on the Cowboy football and basketball teams.

The other student-athlete in the class, a UW golf team member, is average size.

For the most part, the athletes have shown up for class regularly and are performing satisfactorily in their academic work. That amazes me, considering the time they must spend outside of the classroom on training, practice and travel.

I played two years of high school football until I realized there wasn't much of a future for a 130-pound quarterback. But I remember coming home after a full day of school followed by two tough hours of practice. After wolfing down as much food as my mother could cook, I would face another 1-3 hours of homework most evenings. Then, exhausted, I'd try to grab at least eight hours of snooze time.

But I can't imagine trying to do that at the college level, juggling a full-time course load with a grueling schedule of weightlifting, cardio workouts, full-contact practices and long road trips.

Apparently, a lot of athletes can't handle that strict regime either. Graduation rates for major men's sports are a big concern for the NCAA, and many universities face penalties and sanctions for not meeting graduation benchmarks.

Those penalties don't concern me much. I am more concerned in getting individual student-athletes their diplomas in their five years of scholarship time. Athletes with full-ride scholarships get a heck of a deal - free tuition and fees, room and board, and books. Even at an inexpensive state school such as UW, that can be worth over $100,000.

In exchange, student-athletes provide entertainment for thousands of alumni and fans, and generate millions of dollars in ticket sales and donations. Some sustain injuries that will bother them the rest of their lives.

But if they don't graduate, I think they are being cheated by the system.

My solution: allow athletes to take a part-time courseload during their seasons. For football players, that would mean they would only have to take nine credit hours (three classes) in fall. It would be more problematic for basketball, but I propose starting their season later in fall semester and running it longer into March in spring semester. Under my system, basketball players would only have to take nine hours in spring then.

To keep them on track toward graduating in five years, I propose that student-athletes get three hours of internship credit during fall for football or during spring for basketball.

Student-athletes in other sports would also be eligible for part-time courseloads and internship credit. The hard work they put in for practice and intercollegiate competitions should be worth internship credit. Every athlete would be allowed to take up to 12 internship hours over their college careers.

A lot of professors would say that student-athletes are only part-time students anyhow. But I think reforming academic standards would result in better grades, more learning and higher graduation rates.

Hardball: Chris Matthews Live

One of the great things about working at the University of Wyoming is the opportunity to meet people from all over the world, from all walks of life. One benefit of being in Wyoming is that the state attracts a lot of famous people, too.

Over the years, I've had former Interior Secretary James Watt speak to a class, talked about horses with former 20/20 anchor Hugh Downs, and listened to former U.S. Sen. Al Simpson's stories and yarns at several social functions.

The latest public figure to visit campus was Chris Matthews. The host of MSNBC's Hardball was on campus today at the invitation of Al and Pete Simpson to discuss the Obama presidency. But first, Matthews took the time to have lunch with students and faculty from the Communication and Journalism Department.

Most of what I know about Matthews comes from Saturday Night Live skits poking fun at him and from recent quips from the right wing about his "man crush" on Obama. I've seen his show a few times but don't watch it regularly.

So it was interesting to hear him talk about his career as a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner who has written five books and got into journalism because he was fascinated by politics.

Although he had just returned from Egypt and was kind of run down from the quick trip to Wyoming and our 7,200-foot altitude, Matthews was very accessible to the students who wanted to know, basically, what it's like to be him.

His biggest news story? Covering the fall of the Berlin Wall for the Examiner easily topped the list for him.

His gaffe while dancing on the Ellen Show? He praised Ellen DeGeneres for having the savvy and guts to turn the controversy over her lesbianism into one of the most popular TV shows on the air.

But my favorite anecdote had to do with his role in the Culture of Celebrity. Matthews said he was shopping for sunglasses in Bloomingdale's recently and, within 20 minutes, somebody had put video of his shopping trip online.

Thanks to the Simpson family for inviting Matthews here, and thanks to Chris Matthews for taking the time to talk with our students.