A Conversation with Dean Hart

Why Communication Scholarship Matters

Roderick Hart, dean of the College of Communication, was recently interviewed for the premier issue of Fresh Thoughts by Dave Garlock, head of the magazine sequence in the School of Journalism.

Rod, your accomplishments are impressive: dean of a major college on campus, author of 12 books, holder of research fellowships, distinguished scholar awards, major teaching awards, not to mention director of the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic participation. What am I missing?

Well, I used to think of myself as a decent basketball player. I am sure those days are gone, but I love the game with a passion.

Does that explain why you have a full basketball team made up of five granddaughters?

That really worked out very well. I also love language and writing. I come alive in writing more than anywhere else. I’m a better writer than a basketball player.

How did you end up as a college dean then?

I wanted to be a teacher since about my sophomore year of college, and I have loved my job ever since. I started my freshman year in college as a political science major who wanted to go to law school. The kids across the hall in my dorm were engineers who had to take basic English composition and were scared and couldn’t write. I said, “What’s the problem?” One said, ‘I have a paper due and don’t know what to do.’ I asked him, “what is your argument, what do you want to say?”

Long story short, I spent two years as an unpaid consultant to kids trying to pass freshmen composition. I didn’t charge them, didn’t think about it at the time. People just came to me. One night I was in bed about midnight and I hear a knock on my door. This fellow said — direct quote­ — “You … the guy … that helps with papers?” I had never met the guy before. He had come from another dorm. It was the most complicated sentence he had ever produced in his life.

Pretty soon I realized I was teaching them. I wasn’t writing their papers, or telling them what to say, but just drawing it out of them. I really did not want to go into teaching but it kind of snuck up on me without my knowing it until suddenly, one day, I realized that’s what I should do.

And do you miss not going to law school?

I swear to God, there is nothing I could do that even compares to teaching. I chose the right job and I chose the right field. I love all aspects of what I do. Mostly I study language, but I love the full range of media and thought, and if you look at my resume, I have been promiscuous: I have written in a lot of different areas, mostly just following my nose.

Grants and contracts are also not foreign to you, such as the $250,000 education grant you received from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to evaluate citizen education in the nation’s schools. Does your background explain your success in this area?

Probably. I was brought up Irish Catholic in Boston. We were what they used to call Shanty Irish, as opposed to Lace Curtin Irish. My mother was a very political animal and she told me very early in life how important politics was — because of the discrimination against the Irish immigrants. So, that was burned into me, plus trying to get young people involved. For me, it came organically from my mother. But even if it can’t come organically we have to find ways to get kids involved in politics. That’s why I started the Annette Strauss Institute.

Would you like to see more research done in the College in areas of the media or the political sphere?

I kind of buy the whole package in the College. Each of the departments is doing some really interesting research — whether analyzing the impact of contemporary film or trying to understand how different patterns of news coverage affect people’s social understandings. I think we do all of those things, plus research into the effects of advertising on consumer behavior and the important research being done in Communication Sciences and Disorders on speaking and listening, and the problems that develop through life’s circumstances.

But we also have some interesting research in areas that fall in the cracks between the departments: such as political communication, which draws upon Television, Print Journalism and Communication Studies. Or health communication, which we have done in Journalism and Communication and Advertising/Public Relations. And certainly in the area of new media, which really affects every department in the College.

This is why our new Belo Center is so important. I’m particularly excited about those areas because we can bring so much strength to bear on them, given the size and complexity of the College.

What other unique research attributes does the College bring to the table?

I think we rarely are accused of doing theory for the sake of theory. Most of our projects are grounded in the real world. And the job of the researcher, of course, is to have a conceptual/theoretical understanding of these effects. But we are grounded in the very real things being said to real people that have an effect on their jobs, emotional lives, and intellectual horizons. Scholars in our field try to assess those sorts of things.

A lot of other things in the mass media are also important, such as of how people are being covered in terms of gender or race or ethnicity. That relates to the whole nature of the United States of America, where we are supposed to be a diverse society. But sometimes the messages we receive from the mass media get in the way of our appreciating what a wonderful cornucopia this nation is.

I think it is our job to monitor things in the media, and when we see patterns of bias and misrepresentation, or insult or injury, we ought to call attention to it. I think we do a good deal of that and don’t think we can do enough of it. I have also been trying to encourage work in international communication. The world is becoming smaller and smaller, and we are all becoming neighbors to people we don’t know and who have very different lifestyles.

A good number of faculty members in the College are interested in the effects of communication on societies that are different from ours — much more traditional societies in which diversity and democracy are not encouraged. We need to know a lot more about such worlds, and communication researchers have a special way of studying human interaction, either through the media or in day-to-day relations. To me, this is a very exciting area because the more we can understand how communication is used from culture to culture, the more we can understand the human kaleidoscope.

In 2007, you co-authored a paper on Jon Stewart and said, in a clever, biting way:

“We find (Stewart’s) sins against the Church of Democracy to be so heinous that he should be branded an infidel and made to wear sackcloth and ashes for at least two years, during which time he would not be allowed to emcee the Oscars, throw out the first pitch at the Yankee’s game, or eat at the Time-Warner Commissary.”

Well, I had written a book about this subject, and it’s really important to me. I think what people like Stewart are doing is manufacturing and distributing political cynicism, and what cynicism does is push people away from participating because they feel that civic life isn’t worth it. I tell my students that if they don’t vote, I’ll get two votes. And if they and their sisters don’t vote, I’ll get three or more votes.

I also ask my students to think about why someone might want to depress turnout and to whose advantage it is to have fewer people vote. When people like Jon Stewart make us feel justified in being apolitical, or anti-political, it becomes a powerful force and one that is dangerous to democracy.

What do you think the people who seem to adore Jon Stewart’s views get out of all this?

I think one of the things they can get out of it is a perverse kind of self-satisfaction — of being inert, of not being involved. Stewart doesn’t let his viewers think of themselves as slackards. Instead, they can think of themselves as sanctified slackards but none of this really advances our democracy. There are a lot of folks making a lot of money trashing the political system. And while I don’t mind anyone making a buck, it does offend me that they are making a buck at the expense of democratic participation.

Why did you decide to launch Fresh Thoughts?

I think everyone knows that students are breaking down the doors today to study in the communication field. It’s a very popular field and we do a great job of teaching young people, and getting them involved in communication and the media: professionally, personally, emotionally, psychologically.

But one of the great strengths of this college is the research being produced, most of which has important implications for society. I think people are less aware that the research being done in the College is really top-notch, and I wanted them to understand that — as well as our teaching prowess and outreach to society. We have some really top scholars here, such as one of my colleagues who is doing research on the images of minority athletes in advertising and what effect that has on kids going to college, or not going — or only thinking about sports instead of education. That’s powerful research.

Do you feel this will spur other researchers to do more things?

Well, I’m hoping so. One of the things I’m trying to do is to bring some money into the College to get undergraduates involved in research. We do not do enough of that sort of thing. We need to capture a percentage of undergrads and have them realize how they can be part of research. I think that is a hill we haven’t been climbing enough and we need to get more students involved — possibly turning them on to graduate work and maybe even becoming college professors.

Is this a pretty steep hill to climb?

I think it is something that most undergrads won’t think about unless it is introduced to them. I certainly did not think about it as an undergraduate until about my junior year when a professor said to me, “you really ought to be thinking about going to graduate school.” At that time, I hadn’t thought about it. I really did not know what I wanted to do with this teaching bug of mine. I wound up doing some independent studies and I learned a lot more about the field and applied to graduate school. That’s how I got into this. So I’d like to see more young people have that opportunity.

This first issue shows how broad some of the College’s research is, like Dr. Swathi Kiran’s work showing a quarter of stroke survivors can lose the ability to read, write or talk. Her Aphasia lab seems to be making a lot of progress in this area.

Absolutely. Communication Sciences and Disorders looks at the relationship between the body and the mind. I think we academics can sometimes get so interested in what is inside people’s heads that we forget that the head is connected to a body, and if the body isn’t cooperating, special problems develop. A stroke can sever the connections between brain and body and that is why the CSD research is so crucial.

That also seems to follow for Dr. Wei-Na Lee’s research into the disturbing role television advertising plays in childhood obesity. She discovered about a third of ads running in some shows targeted 8 to 12-year-old children.

And you don’t see a lot of advertisements for apples, oranges and vegetables. You see lots of ads for highly-refined carbohydrates, which kids love, but that gets in the way of healthy growth. It’s shocking, and of concern, and probably a paradigm case for why research in this College is so important. Our research should not only be helpful and informative to an array of scholars, but it should also make a difference in the way people live their lives. We are an applied discipline and that is our glory.