By Michael Bugeja, director, Greenlee School, Iowa State University

Several years and re-accreditations have passed since journalism and communication schools began revamping their curricula to incorporate convergence. Given the economic downturn, it is time for curricular re-assessment—this time because of budget cuts. Many programs face two choices: lose courses or lose people.

Accredited journalism and mass communication programs may be suffering more than other academic units because seats in our skills classes and laboratories should be set at 15 and should not exceed 20, according to the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications. Moreover, those classes usually must be taken sequentially to meet pre-requisites for students to advance in the degree program. Colleges can demand higher enrollments in disciplines with relatively few majors, or cancel those classes. In our discipline, all that does is extend graduation rates.

There is another specter related to convergence troubling or being overlooked by administrators of journalism and mass communication programs: curricular expansion. A few institutions (to remain nameless) were early adopters, adding a bevy of new media courses to catalogs that, for the most part, focused on technology, software and audio/visual/text presentation. Some schools added a “new media” sequence to their stable of old media ones, especially programs offering Bachelor of Science journalism degrees (BSJ).

Many programs added new media to existing courses. The Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication fell in that last category. In anticipation of a new Ph.D. in science, technology and risk communication, the faculty at the Greenlee School opted to streamline courses and add digital techniques to existing courses such as Fundamentals of Photography taught by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dennis Chamberlin whose syllabus states:

“Photojournalism is a technology-driven medium and has always been very dependent upon advancements made in the photographic industry. In the past few years the computer and digital technology have played an important role in changing the way photojournalists work—and we will focus on improving digital photo skills so that you will be able to move on to the next level if you should choose. These recent changes have changed the profession to the extent that single images printed on paper have become overshadowed by the need for images and multimedia packages for electronic distribution. We will address this. …”

In introducing computer and Internet technologies into photojournalism, we didn’t have to add to our existing curriculum a course such as “Pixel Painting” or “Multimedia Packaging for Photojournalists.” Ours was a flexible curriculum with a relative few core courses such as Reporting and Writing for the Mass Media and Law of Mass Communication. We had emphases, though, in print (newspapers and magazines), electronic media, public relations, science communication and visual communication.

In general, curriculum grows without curtailment. Emphases aspire to be sequences, sequences to majors, majors to departments, departments to schools and schools to colleges. New hires often invent courses to feed research, and promotion and tenure documents usually reward those who add courses to the curriculum in the name of innovation, overlooking those who innovate in existing courses. As a result, curriculum spreads like kudzu through catalogs.

If you’re interested in other ways curriculum grows, read “How to Fight the High Cost of Curricular Glut” in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Here are ways to streamline curriculum in response to the economic downturn without increasing teaching loads for your faculty:

1. Restrict enrollment to non-majors in skills classes. Otherwise they take seats in low-enrolled courses, requiring you to add more sections.
2. Uphold standards such as an English Usage Test or other pre-major or grade requirement to eliminate students unsuited to our disciplines, freeing up seats for those willing to do the work.
3. Revisit or adjust for articulation agreements with community colleges with easier standards, such as no English Usage Test, allowing students to progress in your program until a graduation check indicates that they still need to fulfill basic requirements, but cannot.
4. Invest in academic advising so that your first-year majors or pre-majors have undergraduate plans of study before their sophomore year. Advising takes time but is the most effective way to ensure that classes have sufficient and/or optimal enrollment.
5. Encourage innovation in existing rather than in new or experimental courses. That may allow you to cut those early adopter stand-alone convergence courses or new media sequences whose methods by now are being duplicated in other, more traditional classes.
6. Cut or schedule less often courses with minimal enrollment or high drop rates that often indicate lack of interest in the subject matter.
7. Use the rubrics of seminars, workshops and independent studies for timely topics or ones that may generate enough enrollments only if offered once every few years.
8. Encourage your students to take classes in other disciplines to exceed (rather than merely meet) the accreditation minimum of 65 semester hours or 94 quarter hours in the liberal arts and sciences.
9. Eliminate the silos of sequences and use Occam’s razor to simplify degree programs in the name of academic truth: the more courses in the catalog, the more we have to teach them.
10. Remind faculty that curricular streamlining not only will decrease workload and save jobs in a slumping economy but also free up more time for research to meet promotion and tenure requirements.