College creates country’s first chair in public interest communications
Nonprofit organizations and government agencies, already 1.5 million strong, are increasing faster than their for-profit counterparts. Now Frank Karel, JM 1961, a pioneer in public interest communications for these entities, is joining forces with the College to prepare students for careers in this field.
Dean John Wright recently announced the creation of the Frank Karel Chair in Public Interest Communications – made possible by a $2 million grant to the College from the Trellis Fund, a family foundation headed by his wife, Betsy Karel. It is the first of its kind in the country.
The grant qualifies for a 100 percent match from the state, yielding a $4 million endowment that will allow the Department of Public Relations to hire a veteran professional to train students for work in cultural, scientific, educational, advocacy, human and social service, public policy-oriented and government organizations.
Karel held the senior communications posts at the Robert Wood Johnson and Rockefeller foundations, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions and National Cancer Institute. Prior to entering this field, he served as The Miami Herald’s first science writer. In this Q&A, the alumnus of distinction outlines his thoughts about the chair.
How did you come up with the idea for the chair?
I wanted to do something that might advance my field – using communications to support and even drive the missions of nonprofit and government organizations. Creating a chair in this field was a way to do this, as well as to honor and continue UF’s tradition of excellence in teaching.
Like so many alumni, my undergraduate professors profoundly influenced my life and career. Buddy Davis [JM 1948, MA 1952], Hugh Cunningham and L. John Martin in this College come immediately to mind, as do Sam Proctor and Junius Dovell in history and political science.
Working with Dean Wright, I crafted the specifics of the chair by the example and with advice from Susan Tifft, a Duke University professor who was already an acclaimed biographer and journalist and who also had government, political and think-tank experience before entering the academic world. With this breadth of experience and accomplishment, she has inspired students in a special way. After talking with her, I wanted this chair to be like the one she occupies – one that accomplished practitioners would move in and out of, rather than making it their entire career.
How so?
The College will appoint chairs for five-year terms with only one five-year renewal. The College will recruit a practitioner with at least 15 years of experience, so it’s meant for someone in mid-to-late career.
What’s the job description for this position?
The College is working on this now, but it will contain the standard elements that make a faculty position interesting and productive – teaching, student advisement and research – plus writing, speaking and other activities to help foster the growth and development of a scholarly base.
What do you mean by scholarly base?
In the early stages of many fields, practitioners learn on the job or by apprenticeship without the benefit of having an established body of knowledge and skills that have been developed and tested. The person holding this chair may have no credentials as a research investigator, but I hope he or she can influence and assist other faculty in addressing major problems in the field.
For example?
A big one would be, broadly speaking, how information can be effectively created, crafted and communicated so as to support and even drive social change in areas of great complexity and challenge. For instance, improving public education, ending the country’s dependence on petroleum, creating an affordable, universal health-care system or reducing human rights abuses around the world.
The central focus of public interest communications is using communications to advance the mission of the organization, be it a university, think tank, grant-making foundation or any of the wide variety of nonprofits, including hospitals, civic action and advocacy groups, libraries, museums, human-rights organizations and environmental action groups, as well as government agencies and departments.
Do you know people in the field who fit what the College is seeking in this chair?
Some, but recruitment will have to reach far beyond my Rolodex to find the best of the best. They don’t exist in great numbers, and they are in great demand.
Will public interest communication courses be open to students with majors other than Public Relations?
Certainly to other students within the College, and I hope throughout the university. Let me also add that I envision the person holding this chair teaching graduate as well as undergraduate students.
How would you measure the chair’s success?
First and foremost will be the graduates embarking on relevant careers. How many and how well prepared are they? And, over the years, how do they fare? And second is the extent to which those in the chair have fostered research that is useful in the field.
I hope, too, that this chair will be a step toward building an academic foothold for the field of public interest communications. That can only happen if it is the first of many such faculty positions here and at other great universities. Call it intellectual contagion. That’s the most ambitious aspect of my dream.
Any meaningful assessment of all this is probably at least 20 years down the road. But well before that, there should be indications as to whether things are headed in the right direction.
This article was originally published in the Fall 2008 issue of communigator.
The Campaign for the University of Florida