Kenneth Stark

Профессор Кеннет Старк – один из крупнейших современых американских специалистов в области журнализма. В настояще время он является профессором School of Journalism and Mass Communication в Университете штата Айова, и в течение 17 лет с 1975 по 1996 возглавлял эту Школу. Он был Fulbright Professor в Китайской Академии Социальных Наук в Пекине (1986-87) и в Университете Бухареста (1994-95).

They came to the University from everywhere – Iowa farms and communities, the cities of the midwest, throughout the nation. And from other lands. They arrived with different goals at different times, though often their student and professional paths crossed. When they arrived in Iowa City, they didn't have a lot in common. Maybe an interest in journalism or some other kind of writing or drawing or editing or taking pictures. For many the campus newspaper, the Daily Iowan, became a common magnet, a meeting place, an Algonquin of the cornfields. Off hours there was Donnelly's or the Airliner.

Though different in many ways, they shared a few things. One was a desire to communicate. Another was the intellect and talent not only to make a living at communication but to excel at it. They shared that propelling force called ambition which converts to achievement.

They represent a motley band of professional communicators as well as a distinguished group of individuals whose lives symbolize the success and the tradition of the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

What they all do have in common is membership in the School's Hall of Fame. The goal of the Hall of Fame is unambiguous: to recognize outstanding individual achievements in the fields of journalism and mass communication.

The Hall of Fame is coordinated by the School’s chapter of Kappa Tau Alpha, a national honorary society dedicated to scholarship in mass communication. There is no lobbying for the Hall of Fame membership. Faculty members each year submit nominations, and selection then is by secret vote of Kappa Tau Alpha faculty members. The selection process has worked this way since 1948. Each new member also is invited to the campus to be recognized. Today, walking along the second floor corridor of the School's Communications Center, you will see hanging high on the West wall framed portraits of all members of the Hall of Fame. The first picture is that of George Gallup.

The lives and careers of Hall of Fame members not only encapsulate the history and traditions of the School but also the changes and the continuity of communicator professionalism itself. From advertising to speech pathology, from science writing to international correspondence, from educator to novelist, from wire services to public relations, from broadcasting to magazines, from cartoons to public polling, from publisher to editor – they are all represented.

Most but not all of this elite club are graduates of the School of journalism and Mass Communication. Many cut their teeth on the Daily Iowan. All, in one way or another, were touched by the University of Iowa and, in turn, left their marks on the campus and far beyond.

This book is about those people – and about Iowa and journalism and mass communication and achievement.

Their accomplishments proclaim the rich heritage of the University of Iowa’s school of Journalism and Mass Communication. It is a heritage that goes back to the horse and buggy era. For it was Luther A. Brower, publisher of the Cedar Rapids Republican, who in the early 1900s journeyed twice a week by horse and buggy to Iowa City to lecture about journalism at the University. That was some time before the Daily Iowan installed a satellite dish atop the Communications Center to snare wire stories from around the world.

Later, an English professor, Conger Reynolds, offered Iowa's first journalism courses on a regular basis. And that was some time before the School equipped a reporting laboratory with computers. Reynolds was to become nationally prominent as a pioneer in corporate public relations; he was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1958.

The University formally established the Iowa journalism program in 1924. Present at its creation were two people who were to become very special to the School – Les and Dorothy Moeller. They were among the members of the first graduating class. They became Iowa newspaper people. He was to return to the School as a teacher and to become the School’s longest-tenured director (1947-1967). In 1977 the School’s Kappa Tau Alpha designated itself the Les Moeller Chapter. Dorothy became an assistant to famed speech therapist Wendell A. Johnson, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1965, and was to become an author in her own right. Les was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1966, Dorothy in 1979.

Over the years the School has been a leader in journalism education, not only in the preparation of practitioners but also in the approach to communication education itself. It was at Iowa that the late Wilbur Schramm, foremost scholar in the communication field and admitted to the hall of Fame in 1951, drew up the blueprint for the interdisciplinary doctirate degree in the then-emerging field of mass communication. One of the first two Ph.D. recipients in 1948 was Charles Swanson, inducted into the hall of Fame in 1983.

One cannot help but wonder why the Iowa program and those associated with it have been so successful. The faculty ? Yes. The students ? Yes. The program itself ? Yes. The University ? Yes. Many factors contribute. But the most important ingredient has to be the people – the students and faculty who take seriously learning together, applying intellect and talent to communication problems and striving to understand the relationship between a nation’s public communication system and equality and justice. The result is an evolving democracy, which, to paraphrase E. B. White, is merely the recurrent suspicion that more than half on an informed people are right more than half the time.

Max McElwain Profiles in Communication, Iowa Center for Communication Study, Iowa City, 1991, p. ix-xi

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