A Letter from the University of Montana School of Journalism Faculty

On November 17th the University of Montana announced that it would be cutting 201 jobs in a major restructuring. The School of Journalism was one of the programs targeted in these cuts. In response, the faculty of the school has issued the following statement. More on the cuts from the Kaimin and the Missoulian. If you wish to make your support for the University of Montana School of Journalism known, please email comments_community@umontana.edu or comments_students@umontana.edu.

Nov. 23, 2015

President Engstrom and Provost Brown:

We at the School of Journalism are proud of our record of support for this university, but we strenuously object to a university’s budget-cutting process that targets our newest professors, those with expertise at the cutting-edge of our profession and who represent the diversity so essential to the mission of this institution and its obligation to serve the larger community.

Here are the probationary faculty this process puts at risk:

• Jason Begay, president of the Native American Journalists Association, a veteran journalist and editor of the School of Journalism’s perennially award-winning Native News Project, the only statewide journalism project that goes to each of Montana’s seven reservations annually to report in-depth on the lives of the state’s first inhabitants. Surely his work is central to UM’s aim to serve the most under-reported community in the state.

• Jule Banville, a leading voice in the national resurgence of audio storytelling through podcast and radio. Her students have been among the nation’s best. No other university can claim to have as many national radio Hearst winners in recent years as the University of Montana — four of them in the last three years were mentored by Jule. Her students’ work is also shared and aired nationwide through the Public Radio Exchange. Her podcast, “Last Best Stories,” has kindled a growing community of Western storytellers. Surely her work supports the university’s strategic aspirations in media arts.

• Joe Eaton, a rare investigator skilled at finding the stories hidden within Big Data. Next month, a national magazine will feature his expose of the sophisticated crime rings that are defrauding Medicare and fleecing taxpayers. Our students aren’t the only ones excited to work with him. So too are the creators of SOBA’s new master’s program in Business Analytics. Surely his expertise is valuable to UM’s strategic interests in healthcare and data science.

To cut any of these new faculty members would be a blow to the school’s future. The national attention these faculty bring clearly aligns with UM’s strategic vision, and the loss of any of them diminishes its validity.

So too would the loss of a single graduate assistantship or tuition waiver that Professor Henriette Lowisch has so skillfully used to grow the school’s trailblazing master’s program in Environmental Science and Natural Resource Journalism. This interdisciplinary program attracted its largest class this fall. Additionally, this exciting work figures directly in UM’s strategic goal to recruit students interested in ecology and the environment.

We also would object to any attempt to cut faculty positions through our current restructuring proposal, now before the Board of Regents. That plan, which cuts no faculty lines, was designed with the administration’s support. Its aim is to simplify our program and clarify its intent to serve students seeking an education across all mediums that serve journalism today.

For all the hand wringing about the traditional news media, this is a time of great excitement in journalism. Our students are landing jobs right out of college. As their careers continue, they’re at the forefront of all the major developments.

• If you watched the recent coverage from Paris, you saw the wrenching photos taken by J-School alumnus Shane Thomas McMillan and heard his reports on CNN.
• If you read about a judge’s recent order that a man convicted of murder be given a new trial based on startling new evidence, you saw the work of J-school-trained investigators Jessie McQuillan and the late Spencer Veysey.
• If you heard NPR’s coverage of America’s reaction to President Obama’s decision to drop the Keystone Pipeline, you heard J-School alum Nate Rott get to the story’s heart.
• Digital and multimedia journalist Thomas Nybo’s short film for UNICEF on Europe’s refugee crisis drew more than a million views late last month on Facebook. A few days later, he told his story in words and photos on Nicholas Kristoff’s New York Times blog.

We could go on. The value of the School of Journalism, the smallest school on campus, has long been greater than its size. We produce some of the nation’s best journalists, and we do it at a time when the world’s appetite for credible information has never been greater. As a nationally ranked school, we have long attracted a significantly larger percentage of nonresident students than the campus at large.

And we have done it with a remarkably frugal number of faculty and staff. Our thin but extremely competent staff members are essential to our efforts to serve students, and the loss a single one would diminish that work at a time when we can least afford it.

This school did not get fat during the recession-fueled increase in enrollment. With the administration’s encouragement, we made a conscious decision to “right size” years ago when we created an upper-division professional program designed to better serve a select population of our best students.

For all that, we are not oblivious to the university’s need to balance its costs with its revenues. But that process should be a creative and bold product of the bright young minds that will be this university’s future — many of whom this budget cut will target.

We at the School of Journalism are proud of our robust support for UM efforts like the Global Leadership Initiative, and we would like to be a part of the solution to how we attract and retain journalism and media students at the University of Montana. But cuts to our faculty and graduate program will make that job exponentially harder.

We urge you to reconsider this effort, which seems reactive, opportunistic and far from truly strategic.

Sincerely,

Professors Dennis Swibold, Denise Dowling, Ray Ekness, Keith Graham, Lee Banville, Ray Fanning, Henriette Lowisch, Jeremy Lurgio, Nadia White and Joe Eaton.

If you wish to make your support for the University of Montana School of Journalism known, please email:

comments_community@umontana.edu or comments_students@umontana.edu