Letter from the Outgoing Director, Professor Paula A. Treichler

July 16, 2004
by: Paula Treichler

Dear students, faculty, alumni, and friends,


It is with great pleasure that we launch this new website of the Institute of Communications Research and the Media Studies Program. The website is designed to introduce and describe our academic programs and provide information and news about faculty, staff, students, and alumni; to make readily available current information and resources of potential value to all users of the site; to illuminate the study of media and communications and approaches to teaching and research in the humanities and social sciences; and to communicate and affirm the Institute's core intellectual traditions and highlight its values, interdisciplinary practices, scholarly accomplishments, and creative initiatives. We invite all of you to participate in the website's ongoing construction and evolution.

But beyond these functions of the website, we want it to illuminate and actively engage with important intellectual, social, and political events in the world outside the academy. Indeed, the new website is supported in part by the Ford Foundation grant that enabled the Institute this past year to study communication, culture, and policy, and to identify the Institute's potential contribution to rethinking their relationship. Through a year-long series of policy briefing sessions on critical issues in a range of areas relevant to media and communication, one powerful conclusion emerged: in the decisions that shape the larger social world and the vast global arena in which it is now embedded, academic research in the humanities and social sciences is increasingly insignificant. This is a painful lesson for practitioners in disciplines that talk freely of "interventions," "critiques," "public engagement" and "social justice." More importantly, it means the crucial decisions that shape the world are being made with inadequate knowledge. On the one hand, few leaders in the public sphere are willing or equipped to understand or intelligently employ the research that most scholars in the human sciences produce; at the same time, most scholars are equally unwilling and poorly equipped to produce knowledge in forms and forums that can actually be used by decision-makers and the larger public.

But our work this past year produced a second, considerably more hopeful, conclusion: the Institute, together with the rich network of resources on this campus and in this community, is ideally situated to develop and implement innovative approaches to cultural, communication, and media policy, to the teaching of policy at the graduate and undergraduate levels, to the conduct and dissemination of policy-relevant scholarship. In short, we will now be exploring strategies and tactics for acquiring the language and translation skills to mediate more effectively between scholarly knowledge and the realities of media and communication in the larger social world. This is, we believe, fully in keeping with the Institute's role in the College of Communications and with the credo of the University of Illinois that seeks partnerships between learning and labor.

This website, then, is one direct outcome of our work on the Ford Foundation policy project. The site will serve to make available all aspects of the project and to provide a productive site for continuing work. Again, your participation will contribute to its success.

The website is the product of considerable discussion, research, and hard work, and many people deserve credit. The website's core working group over the past year included Amy Aidman, Alice Filmer, Ivy Glennon, Bonnie Howard, Marie Leger, Victor Pickard, Roswell Quinn, Nena Richards, and me. Kelly Gates, who set up and managed the Institute's previous website, helped greatly with the transition by, among other hings, setting up a consultation with Kipling Knox, to whom we are also indebted; as the person in charge of completely redesigning the website for the whole UIUC campus, he gave us excellent information about the process. As a result of our preliminary research, we selected the firm OJC Technologies to work with us on the website redesign. This Urbana-based group was familiar with the Institute and wired into many of the same networks; moreover, their participation in the website construction highlights our community connections. We are also deeply grateful to Becky Lentz, the project manager for our Ford Foundation grant that provided some of the support for the website redesign. Finally, we owe thanks to the College of Communications, including Ron Yates, Kim Rotzoll, Tom Galer-Unti, Rhonda Kornegay, Dean Oliver, and Greg Zike; all of them helped make this new website possible.

Finally, as you may know, I am retiring next month from the University of Illinois. Although I will stay connected to the campus and continue to teach and work with students, I think 32 years as a full-time faculty member is quite a respectable length of service. My experience as Director of the Institute these past three years has been one of my greatest pleasures. Stay in touch, and be well.

Paula A. Treichler