HyneSight

State of the College:
Strong national reputation

This spring the University of Florida is engaged in a campus-wide strategic planning process to determine its direction and major priorities for the next several years. UF is on track to be one of the nation's truly great universities, and the College of Journalism and Communications is in an excellent position to contribute to that goal.

The College already has a strong national reputation as a leading program in journalism and communications. Our goal is to sustain and deepen that reputation through the quality of our teaching, research/creative activities, and outreach/service.

The task force appointed by President Charles Young asked each college to respond to a set of questions to help the task force understand the colleges better and develop its recommendations to the president and UF's Board of Trustees. We saw the report as a chance to tell our story to members of the broader campus community. (The complete text of our response is available at www.jou.ufl.edu/taskforcereport.pdf.)

The strengths of the college are many:
faculty and staff with excellent academic and professional backgrounds;
bright and enthusiastic students; talented and successful alums;
loyal friends and supporters; and
excellent facilities, including the broadcasting stations of WUFT and WRUF.

People are at the heart of our success. But the College's strengths also include the programs and other things that people create:
strong curricula in advertising, journalism, public relations, and telecommunication;
research and creative activities that uncover new knowledge-or, at least, new ways of looking at existing knowledge-in our fields; and
service/outreach initiatives that extend our teaching/research/creative activities beyond the campus.

The College's goal continues to be to provide balanced programs in our fields at a national-and international-level of excellence. What is different today from years ago is the College's recognition of and appreciation for the fact that the balance must include the strongest conceptual and theoretical components as well as the strongest applied/practical components.

Achieving this balance requires more investment in research/creative activities than in the past.

There is not, however, an infinite source of resources to meet the investment needs/desires of a college like ours. To accomplish the College's goals and make the fullest contribution possible to the University and to the professions for which we prepare students, within the limits of available resources, we need to reduce our undergraduate enrollments, especially in Advertising and Public Relations. In Fall, 2001, 1,113 juniors and seniors were majoring in those two specialties, compared with a total of 756 juniors and seniors in journalism and telecommunication.

Correspondingly we need to increase our enrollments at the master's and doctoral levels so we can prepare professionals with more advanced abilities and knowledge and so we can strengthen our record in contributing new knowledge to our fields through research and creative activities. Our graduate enrollments will never be as high as our undergraduate enrollments, and we are committed to maintaining strong professional undergraduate programs. But at the beginning of the 21st Century, the truly great colleges of journalism and communications in this country have this kind of balance in their programs or are working toward it. UF's College of Journalism and Communica-tions intends to remain part of that top group. With the support of our alumni and friends, we believe we can achieve that goal. - Terry Hynes