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Graduate Study in Communication at UWM

Organizational/Professional Communication probes communication issues posed by the challenges facing 21st-century profit and non-profit organizations: management issues, changes created by technological innovation, communication training, and teams. This specialty provides advanced training to those who seek the Masters as either a destination degree or as a stepping-stone to doctoral organizational, technological, or small group communication studies.

Intercultural/International Communication focuses on communication relationships across cultures and nations as well as among diverse groups within a single culture. Courses on the theoretical aspects of global and cultural communication are complemented by those featuring cultural adjustment and training issues or communication about globally shared problems (i.e., AIDS).

Interpersonal Communication/Mediation examines interactions with others as unique humans, rather than as members of groups, cultures, or publics. Interpersonal Communication is fundamental to managing marriages, friendships, and superior/subordinate relationships. Conflict mediation and the study of social influence are central to this specialty.

Rhetoric/Public Communication analyzes Communication's operation in public fora, including politics, popular culture, social movements, and the courts. Its theoretical and critical perspectives range from classically-grounded argumentation, persuasion, and traditional public address to postmodern and post-postmodern approaches consistent with recent developments in media technology as well as in feminism, cultural, and critical theories.

Excellence in Action

UWM's Communication Department demonstrates not only commitment but also excellence in all three aspects of its scholarly mission: research, teaching, and service. Thirteen years ago, a discipline-wide survey identified UWM's Communication Masters program as among the nation's top five; this (the most recent) intra-disciplinary peer ranking recognized UWM as the Central States region's best Masters-only program (Trott, Barker, and Barker, 1988, p. 261). Certainly, there have been departmental and personnel changes over those thirteen years, but, as Jerrard and Jerrard observed of graduate programs generally:

What is most important in graduate school is the quality of the department and the faculty with whom you will work. . . . The faculty are the ones who make or break a graduate program. . . . Of course, faculty members don't always stay in one place. Some leave the department for other universities, some retire, but even if a few professors move away, a good department usually stays good. (1998, pp. 27-28)

Since Trott, Barker, and Barker's 1988 survey, UWM's Communication Department has added graduate faculty lines and earned numerous research and teaching awards, further enhancing its reputation as a premier program devoted to Masters-level study. This program both preserves the disciple's traditional strengths and extends its research focus and definitions in light of the contemporary influences of technological advances, globalization, and pop culture (see Auer, 1989, p. 60).

Research. Research is a top priority for this department and university. The Communication Department employs one of the field's "top 100" most productive researchers, Professor Mike Allen (Hickson, Stacks, and Bodon, 1999). All faculty members pursue active research agenda, and UWM's outstanding research record is celebrated for both its quantity and its quality, an equally important criterion (see Erickson, Fleuriet, and Hosman, 1993, 1996). Numerous professors have earned national research awards (e.g., National Communication Association's Golden Anniversary Monograph Award - Professor Kathryn Olson; National Communication Association's Wallace Award - Professor Olson; International Communication Association's Hunter Award - Professor Allen) or university-wide research awards (Professor Allen) for completed works. Communication faculty also regularly secure competitive research grants for their ongoing investigations from prestigious sources such as the Department of Justice (Professor Allen), the National Institutes for Mental Health (Professor Kathryn Dindia), the National Endowment for the Humanities (Professor Olson), the Center for Twenty-first Century Studies (Professors Olson and K. E. Supriya), and UWM's Graduate School (Professors Dindia, Jack Johnson, Meyers, and Olson). Professors often include graduate students in their research projects and actively facilitate students' efforts to publish or present their own intellectual work; course projects from the quantitative and rhetorical graduate classes frequently become students' first conference presentations and/or publications. The department's Jones and Lucas Awards provide small competitively-awarded grants for student research projects and travel.

Teaching. Quality teaching is a second departmental hallmark. This graduate faculty is well-known nationally and on-campus for outstanding pedagogy. Department members regularly are sought after to run workshops and present programs that assist other academics in improving their teaching effectiveness, and several have published peer-reviewed essays on communication education. As a group, UWM's Communication professors pride themselves on constantly innovating and updating their teaching practices. For instance, developing quality distance education techniques is a relatively recent teaching interest shared by several of our faculty, while long-term shared interests include the potential of innovative face-to-face instructional techniques and peer review of teaching.

Again, UWM's Communication faculty shines when one considers the prestige, the number, and the broad distribution across the graduate faculty of teaching awards. While most teaching awards officially recognize excellence in undergraduate education, the pedagogical abilities and care that such awards honor tend to infuse recipients' graduate teaching as well. Among the current faculty, Professor Johnson won the field's highest national teaching honor, National Communication Association's Donald H. Ecroyd Award for Outstanding Teaching in Higher Education, and two (Professors Dindia and Johnson) have been named top teachers university-wide. Over the years, five current faculty (Professors Johnson, Meyers, Olson, Supriya, and Lisa Bradford) have earned Central States Communication Association's "Outstanding New Teacher" distinction, two (Professors Allen and Olson) have been named UW System Teaching Fellows, one (Professor Olson) was named UW Syste Teaching Scholar, one (Professor Olson) was honored by the state professional association as Wisconsin's 1996 top college educator, and one (Professor Johnson) secured an alumni-sponsored university-wide award for superior teaching. Combining their interests in research and teaching, five faculty members (Professors Meyers, Olson, Dindia, Johnson, and E. Timmerman) have been "Scholarship of Teaching and Learning" fellows, and each engaged in research projects designed to improve higher education. Every effort is made to equip our graduate teaching assistants with similarly excellent teaching skills. Graduate teaching assistants receive extensive training before entering the classroom and enjoy continuing professorial supervision to promote their pedagogical abilities.

Service. Professional service and the practical application of communication expertise for the good of others are also central to this department's mission. For example, the Mediation Center offers low-cost negotiation assistance to the community, while simultaneously giving trained students opportunities to hone their skills through actual, supervised practice. The Center's director, Professor Burrell, recently earned the university-wide award for outstanding service. Our faculty members actively participate in campus, local, state, national, and international projects to address productively the communication opportunities and challenges created by globalization, new technologies, and UWM's urban location and "engaged university" commitments. For instance, in September, 2001, UWM's Communication Department co-sponsored a select national academic conference on "Presidential Debates," coupled with a public program re-broadcast state-wide on public radio; both first-year and second-year graduate students were involved in this event's planning and execution.

Most faculty members also involve themselves extensively in more traditional academic service activities such as university governance, serving as officers of or on committees for the discipline's professional organizations, and editing scholarly journals or reviewing others' research. Professor Dindia formerly edited the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Professor Allen edited the regional journal Communication Studies and cultivated graduate students' academic skills through editorial assistantships as well as an innovative editorial mentoring review board. Graduate students are mentored in professional development, involvement, and service throughout their tenure at UWM by both faculty and their more advanced graduate peers.

Careers. Our students choose among a variety of academic and non-academic career options. Jerrard and Jerrard, who are not in Communication but are respectively a professor of mathematics and a professional writer specializing in educational topics, open their book The Grad School Handbook with statements that attest to the value of the type of degree offered by UWM's Communication Department:

A highly skilled person gets respect on the job and from society, as well as more money and career mobility. Employers are looking for highly trained people who can communicate what they have learned. . . . Many studies have shown that the successful, highly paid people in today's economy are the "symbol manipulators." This is what you are if you are a writer, a lawyer, a professor, a computer programmer, or are in any profession requiring creative mental work. A graduate degree will give you specific skills as well as the confidence that comes with them. (1998, pp. 3-4)

UWM's Communication graduate program is flexible enough to prepare excellent doctoral students as well as to provide a destination Masters degree for "students in need of conceptual enrichment and practical skill enhancement" as they pursue non-academic career trajectories (Applegate et al., 1997, p. 116).

Successful UWM students qualify for the nation's top Ph.D. programs. In recent years, our graduates have gone on to pursue doctoral Communication studies at such schools as Arizona State University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Iowa, University of Minnesota, University of Texas, and Texas A&M University. Equally important is our preparation of Masters students who have aspirations other than doctoral study. Some who choose a UWM Communication M.A. are sought after to teach in two-year and some four-year colleges, while others launch successful professional careers in the business or non-profit sectors. Recently a New York University Graduate School dean predicted that Masters degrees, already popular educational choices, will continue to increase in popularity, "eventually becoming as indispensable as Bachelors degrees became in World War II's wake" (quoted in Magner, 1999, p. A16). An M.A. that enfolds diverse topic specialties and approaches to inquiry, including quantitative, qualitative, and critical methodologies, encourages the sophisticated reasoning and strong writing skills that are "the bread and butter of the workaday world" (Schneider, 1999, p. A12).

Employers increasingly prize and reward effective communication skills, and UWM is recognized for cultivating these abilities. As Andersen argued, problem-solving, information retrieval, critical thinking, team work, and oral and written communication skills are among the most valued workforce commodities for the 21st-century's information age, and "[i]t is in graduate education in communication, even more than in the baccalaureate, where these skills are honed and where the best performers are stretched" (1997, pp. 125-126). In an era when the versatility of doctoral degrees for contemporary American society is contested (see Atwell, 1996; Kuh, 1996; Magner, 1999), destination Masters degrees have emerged as higher education's "silent success" story that excellent, innovative Communication departments fashion into "highly rewarding educational ventures" (Andersen, 1997, pp. 124, 126; Conrad, Haworth, and Millar, 1993). Versatile Masters degrees, especially with internship and service learning possibilities, can help smooth the transition into corporations "desperate for people who can communicate well and work in various disciplines," attested Chicago Master of Arts Program in the Humanities graduate Matt Percy (quoted in Schneider, 1999, p. A12). Graduate internships, the Rhetoric area's interdisciplinary cooperation with the English Rhetoric faculty, and the Communication Department's aggressive and ever-expanding foray into technological and international communication position UWM graduate students to participate in innovative and highly rewarding educational ventures. UWM's metropolitan location, the department's exclusive graduate focus on Masters candidates, and Milwaukee's profit and non-profit internship opportunities prepare students to either pursue doctoral studies or take advantage of employers' appreciation for those with Communication Masters of Arts destination degrees (Andersen, 1997, p. 124).

By Kathryn M. Olson

References
Andersen, J. F. (1997). Graduate education trends: Implications for the Communication discipline. Communication Education, 46, 121-127.

Applegate, J. L., Darling, A., Sprague, J., Nyquist, J., and Andersen, J. F. (1997). An agenda for graduate education in Communication: A report from the SCA 1996 Summer Conference. Communication Education, 46, 115-120.

Atwell, R. (1996, October). [Interview with P. M. Callan, Executive Director of the California Higher Education Policy Center]. Crosstalk, 4. Available: http://professionals.com/%7Echepc/ct__1096/ctqa_1096.html

Auer, J. J. (1989). Pride in our past--faith in our future. In W. Work and R. C. Jeffrey (Eds.), The past is prologue: A 75th anniversary publication of the Speech Communication Association (pp. 59-64). Annandale, VA: SCA.

Conrad, C. F., Haworth, J. G., and Millar, S. B. (1993). A silent success. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Erickson, K. V., Fleuriet, C. A., and Hosman, L. A. (1993). Prolific publishing: Professional and administrative concerns. Southern Communication Journal, 58, 328-338.

Erickson, K. V., Fleuriet, C. A., and Hosman, L. A. (1996). Scholars and pub-junkies: Perspectives on academic publishing. Southern Communication Journal, 61, 271-276.

Hickson III, M., Stacks, D. W., and Bodon, J. (1999). The status of research productivity in Communication: 1915-1995. Communication Monographs, 66, 178-197.

Jerrard, R., and Jerrard, M. (1998). The grad school handbook: An insider's guide to getting in and succeeding. New York: Perigee.

Kuh, C. V. (1996). Is there a Ph.D. glut? Is that the right question? Communicator, 29, 1-4.

Magner, D. K. (1999, April 30). Master's degrees are the hot topic at a meeting on doctoral education. Chronicle of Higher Education, A16.

Schneider, A. (1999, May 21). Master's degrees, once scorned, attract students and generate revenue. Chronicle of Higher Education, A12.

Trott, D., Barker, D. R., and Barker, L. L (1988). Evaluation of Masters programs in the Speech Communication discipline: 1988. Communication Education, 37, 257-262.

Websites Consulted (September 15, 2000)

http://communication.ucdavis.edu
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu
http://www.uga.edu
http://www.unc.edu

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© 2003 UW-Milwaukee, Dept. of Communication
Last Updated: June 10, 2003