Journalism dept. loses full accreditation
By Crystal Forester
Staff Reporter

TCU’s journalism department needs to hire more minorities and solve budget problems before it can receive full accreditation, said Tommy Thomason, department chair.

The department received provisional accreditation after a recent visit by a site team from the Accrediting Council for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

This is the first time the department has not been fully accredited since 1967, Thomason said.

The two problem areas the site team found were budget and diversity. Before the department can receive full reaccreditation, the issues must be addressed, Thomason said.

“This department has grown significantly over the last decade, and the budget has just not kept up,” said Thomason, a journalism professor.

Meetings are being held this week with the provost, College of Communication Dean William Slater and Thomason to look at what the university can do to address the budget and diversity issue, Thomason said.

The journalism department will have a chance to send a report to the accrediting council about how it plans to take care of the problems in March and again in May, Thomason said. If the accrediting council accepts the proposal, the department would be fully re-accredited. If it does not accept the proposal, then the department will have until May 2005 to fix the problem, he said.

The two issues that were brought up by the site team were outside the department’s control, Thomason said. The accreditation team had only good things to say about the faculty and curriculum, he said.

Journalism professor Doug Newsom said she thought the accreditation team was fair and honest with its review.

“The good thing is that the things they found wrong, we (faculty members) can’t do anything about,” she said.

Although the accreditation team said the budget was not adequate for the number of students and faculty the department has, the team did not state how much more money was needed, Thomason said.

“There is no magic formula that says if you have this number of faculty and this number of students, then your budget needs to be X amount,” he said.

Drake University’s journalism program is comparable to TCU’s, and its budget is three times the size, Newsom said.

“My overall sense of our budget is that it needs to triple,” she said.

As for the diversity issue, the site team told the department that if Earnest Perry, a black professor, was still on the faculty, then the department would have received full accreditation, Thomason said.

“He resigned in May, which was really too late for us to make an all-out concerted effort to find another minority faculty member to take his place,” he said.

The university made several attempts to keep Perry at TCU but could not give him a lighter teaching load and the doctorate students needed to help him with his research, Thomason said.

Perry was replaced by Beverly Horvit, a white assistant professor, who taught at the University of Texas at Arlington before coming to TCU.

In 1992, the site team found the department did not meet the requirements for diversity but still gave the department full accreditation, Thomason said.

“Back then diversity was not the 800-pound gorilla that it is now,” he said.

Assistant journalism professor John Tisdale said the accreditation team had a narrow definition of what minority representation is.

“The definition is evolving. I don’t think it should be so limited,” Tisdale said. “We need to find creative ways to attract nonwhites, both students and faculty, to TCU.”

Senior broadcast journalism major Jacque Nguyen said diversity is an important issue at TCU and therefore should be an issue in the department.

“Being a minority student myself, it helps to see a diverse group of students, as well as teachers,” Nguyen said.

Newsom said there is huge competition all over the United States for journalism faculty members and an even bigger demand for minorities.

“There are even fewer minorities with Ph.D.s and experience,” she said. “You can’t deal with what we do without experience.”