Video Transcript: Belo Center Challenge

Music Introduction.
Graduation Announcer: Dean Hart, the convocation is now assembled.
Dean Hart speaks to audience:
The faculty and I take great pleasure in welcoming the graduates and their families and friends to
this ceremony. We're happy to have you all here today. Today is a day for a thousand celebrations.
Your graduation culminates one of the most significant stages in your lives.

Dean Hart voiceover:
One of the differences between a communication training and a University and things one could learn 
in a for profit enterprise is that a university student is expected to have philosophical depth and 
historical perspective, the appreciation for the aesthetics of modern life and also a sense of 
morality quite frankly.

To bring those traditional, intellectual strengths and assets and questions to bear 
on a new world of communication. Being able to share a message world-wide is really an extraordinary 
possibility today with modern communications. But unless one has something to say, unless one has 
something that is powerful, and meaningful and moral, and logical, all the techniques in the world 
aren't going to help you.

At The University of Texas, our student must be first and foremost university students. And then 
secondarily, students that want to do a particular thing in the world of communication. 

(Speaking at Graduation:
You'll remember the professors who have taught and advised you, the readings, the research that
challenged you. The new friends you made. The loves you lost and found anew. All college sojourns 
contain such experiences.)

Voiceover:
Have a really terrific group of department chairs.
Barry Brummett is the Chair of the Communication Studies Department which is the most traditional
department in which students learn the basic skills of communicating.

Barry Brummett Voiceover:
People who study communication study the way that people talk to each other, the way that people 
interact with each other, the way that people use nonverbal means of exchange, gesture, eye
contact. Things like that. In every case we're trying to get people to be able to express 
themselves more clearly. And to understand each other more clearly and understand why things don't
work so well and to try to fix them.

Sharon Strover is the Chair of the Radio, TV, Film Department. It focuses upon the electronic media
particularly (although those media are expanding each day into new areas particularly with computers). 
And Sharon is the overseer of that group of faculty and students. 

Sharon Strover:
Visual Media are the cultural currency of the twenty first century to the extent that a program like
ours can grow a cultural literacy and really train people not only how to put messages together but
also train people to think their images and what kind of power relationships they suggest, how true
they are to reality. The people in our program are the people who shape those realities. It's 
extremely significant that they have a sense values and that they truly understand no only what
they are doing but the importance of what they do.

Dean Hart:
Craig Champlin is the Chair of the Communication Sciences and Disorders Department. 
That faculty is particularly concerned with the kinds of problems that develop in speaking and hearing.

Craig Champlin:
I'm interested in how normal hear and what happens when the hearing system breaks down. What happens
when disorders affect human hearing. Students who leave here would become audiologist, or speak
language pathologists for the most part. We've taught hearing and speech concepts the same way for
maybe fifty years but with the emergence of technological advances we're now able to provide 
demonstrations and I think the new media allows us to get across concepts that are difficult to 
conceptualize and I think that taking it to a deeper level of demonstrates is very important to 
understanding how things work.

Dean Hart:
Lorraine Branum is a career journalist. She oversees the Journalism program which is one of our 
most storied departments. 

Lorraine Branum:
The school of Journalism has four disciplines. Print Journalism which is newspapers and magazines.
Broadcast Journalism. Photojournalism. And Multimedia Journalism which is our newest sequence and really
involves online journalism in that the internet is becoming a place where more and more people are
going for news and information. So what convergence means in our program is giving students more
skills to tell multimedia stories. We continue to stress the importance of writing. We continue to
stress critical thinking skills. And we also continue to stress the importance of ethics and values,
accuracy and fairness. This is the foundation of journalism. 

Dean Hart: Isabella Cunningham is the Chair of the Advertising Department. And Advertising and
Public Relations has a very large number of students both the graduate and undergraduate level.

Isabella Cunningham:
We have grown a department to 1200 undergraduate and 200 graduate majors so things have changed
tremendously. Now-a-days we work with interactive media and we work with non traditional forms of
media. The university is the only place to do pioneer research in assessing the effectiveness of 
advertising and public relation using non-traditional media. I think it's an invaluable opportunity
for students to come here and get involved in programs like ours that cooperate with industry and 
and also provide the research environment necessary solve those questions.

Dean Hart:
You can transform the college. I do believe this is going to be transformative project in the life
of the college. I know it will be. The College of Communication has had for many years an advisory 
council. The advisory counsel is made up of people from the various media industries and we very
much appreciate their help because they bring to us knowledge of changes that are occurring in the 
industry. You know the college has always been built around the various kinds of platforms of 
communication. And so there is the newspaper, television news, feature films, there are documentary
films, their is radio, public relations, advertising and now the internet and there was a time at 
which each of these platforms was very different from one another. That's all changing in an area
of media convergence where advertising is going off the page into your ipod or on the website. So our
students can no longer be just trained in one of the traditional platforms but have to be able to 
really reach across and be able to tell a story in many different media.

College of Communication currently has a three building complex but the complex was built originally
in the late sixties and early seventies for a thousand majors. We now have thirty five hundred. And 
so we've really outgrown the building. We desperately need to be able to have new rooms that will have
classrooms, specialized laboratories and at the same time the kinds of media that are being
developed we need new places for our students to be able to experiment with them. To try new things out.
And that takes room we really just don't have now. And so I think this college and the possibilities
of communication in the future just sits particularly well in the state of Texas where limits have
never been acknowledged and where possibilities have always been cherished. 
And I believe that.