We are busy reproducing in our students the models of communication that serve the powerful media institutions who employ our graduates, making us blind to alternative social practices and uses of technology. Hence our curricula are based in frameworks that are both individualistic and unethical. We have catered to the individual needs of students without regard to a larger social good. We have catered to the needs of media institutions without regard to our critical responsibility, as part of a university, to raise questions and challenge established thinking. As the news media adamantly insist on a separation of media and government, we should insist on a separation from the media in order to do our job.
Society is the worse for our absence as media critics.
Our students are lessened by our devotion to reproducing the way things are done rather than our enthusiasm for the way things could be. We would do well to think about our purpose in ways that go beyond individual students and media institutions. We ought to be providing leadership in creating, using, and sharing knowledge to address the important communication issues of our day. We insist that somehow our purpose and our role in the university is different because we are professional programs. The merger of speech and mass communication programs, changes in technologies, and the proliferation of new areas of the curriculum will force this question to consciousness eventually.