Mission Statement

The mission of the College of Communication is four-fold:

As the most comprehensive academic unit of its kind in the United States, the College of Communication is too large and too complicated to have but one mission. Instead, its mission is four-fold.

An intellectual mission

1) to ensure that the traditional arts and sciences remain central to the study of human communication,

2) to collaborate with faculty members in the arts, humanities, and social sciences across campus to address the most pressing issues of the day, and

3) to make communication training central to the educations of all University of Texas undergraduates regardless of major.

An entrepreneurial mission

The world is being made smaller by the Communication Revolution and the College must work to understand what that means by

1) building close ties to the communication professions,

2) vigorously pursuing interdisciplinary activities,

3) staying current with new interactive and aesthetic technologies, and

4) pursuing an increasingly international agenda.

A pedagogical mission:

Here is our future: We live in an era of media convergence where once-separate industries - radio, television, advertising, newspapers - are being folded into vast media conglomerates. The College must prepare its students in multiple ways as a result, helping them reach across the various communication disciplines for new insights, new skills, new forms of expression, and new kinds of employment.

A social mission

The mass media are implicated in all that happens today. Political campaigns are heavily determined by media perquisites; enlightened health care depends on savvy information campaigns; the nation's youth are being inundated with popular culture; the world has become unknowable without a discerning press. This collection of facts makes communication training both a practical matter and a moral one as well.

The University of Texas is devoted to generating intellectual excitement in its students, transforming their lives, and turning them into leaders. That is the College of Communication's business as well.