Dr D’s Helpful Hints for Mid-Career Scholars

By Wayne Danielson

Retirement Day, March 29, 2003

Thanks to everyone for a wonderful day.

A festschrift is a fine way for a teacher to wind up a career, and I am grateful to Lorraine Branham, Ellen Wartella and all of you for making it possible

I would like to say a word about each of our speakers:

I think Steve Lacy knows more about numbers than anybody. What’s more, he can write about them with skill and grace. It’s no wonder that he has become a nationally known scholar of media economics.

T. K. Chang went to the far north to pursue his career in teaching and research. In the pure air of Minnesota he creates his crystal clear concepts and warms them with his passionate regard for democracy.

I advised Dominic Lasorsa on his master’s degree and then encouraged him to go to Stanford for the Ph.D., hoping that this change of universities would make it easier for him to return one day. He did return, and, over the years, we have collaborated on many projects. He’s a great friend and a great colleague.

Steve Reese – Steve Reese continued to collaborate with Pam Shoemaker after their academic paths diverged. Their communication theories book provides an excellent addition to an earlier communication theories book, also a collaborative work, by Jim Tankard and Werner Severin. When I teach the communication theories course, I always use both texts. I once asked my students to use content analysis to pick out which chapters in the theory book Jim Tankard had written and which ones Werner Severin had written. As I recall, they got almost all of them right.

George Sylvie earned the master’s degree from Missouri and the Ph.D. from the University of Texas. He teaches a broad range of courses, studies management theory, does administrative work, and strongly supports the notion of using information technology and the internet to advance teaching in journalism. If George has his way, it won’t be long before UT offers at least part of its professional master’s degree on the Web.

After Max McCombs came to teach at the University of North Carolina, I immediately went away for a year’s leave at the University of Texas. While I was gone, Max teamed up with Don Shaw to create agenda setting theory. I’ve always wanted to take credit for their important creation by virtue of my absence from the campus – but I have never had the nerve. I think I was there the following year when they did their first field study on agenda setting with a magnificent grant of $100.

Pam Shoemaker was the founding mother of the Survey Research Center at the University of Texas. She ran many projects through the Center, including her own early work demonstrating the importance of deviance in the news. The Center she started has just moved into brand new quarters on Lake Austin Boulevard, and I hope to hang out there some next fall.

Jim Tankard was a master’s student in the graduate program at Chapel Hill. Later he went on to Stanford, the Ph.D. and a brilliant career in teaching and research that continues to this day. At Chapel Hill, Jim worked with that massive sample of newspapers we had used to estimate completion of coverage in the presidential campaign of 1960. The second study was intended to show the influence of community differences on newspaper content. We had differences in communities, to be sure, but differences in content were meager. I regarded the study as a failure. Years later, I decided that that was the finding. The definition of a newspaper – what it is and what it must contain -- is so strong that it overrides most community differences. If you’re going to have a newspaper, you’re going to have a sports page – even if nobody in the community is interested in sports.

I was pleased to hear today about Cindy Royal’s study with Jim Tankard on completeness of information on the Internet. It just goes to prove the wisdom of the old song – old ideas, like old teachers, never die, and sometimes they don’t even fade away. Perhaps Cindy’s work will encourage people to try to straighten out that L-shaped curve – so that, eventually, we will recover more of our past. Or – we may simply find out that the past didn’t have all that much information in it.

Communication research has contributed greatly to two methodologies that have changed society in the last century – the social survey and content analysis. Our country would no longer function politically or economically without the survey, and without computerized content analysis we could no longer keep up with the knowledge we have created. I take pride in the contributions our speakers have made to these far-reaching developments.

As almost everybody knows, I grew up in Iowa, the land of helpful hints and snappy sayings. Some of you may not know of my proposal to use snappy sayings as screen savers on the computers in the journalism labs. Instead of falling asleep while listening to boring lectures, students can watch the screens and learn something useful. In any case, I thought it would be appropriate for me to end tonight with a few snappy sayings, but unfortunately our speakers used up most of my best ones earlier today.

Here are some of my leftover helpful hints for scholars in their mid-career:

If you have to choose between an opinion and a fact, choose the fact.

* Remember that every human utterance contains all of civilization. You just have to be intelligent enough to find it in there someplace.

* Taking things apart – analysis – is important, but synthesis – putting them back together – ah, that is truly an accomplishment.

Pay no attention to people who say “It can’t be done” or “Everybody knows that already.” They are incorrect on both counts.

When in doubt, take a random sample.

* If you don’t believe in random sampling, be sure to ask your doctor to take all of your blood the next time you go in for a checkup.

Study only significant problems – ones that resonate. Wilbur Schramm said that.

Nothing is more practical than a good theory. Wilbur Schramm said that, but I think he stole it from Kurt Lewin.

If you don’t ask a question you know how to answer, you will never answer any. Kurt Lewin did say that, and Wilbur Schramm gave him credit for it.

Don’t waste time worrying about people who don’t like your work. Concentrate instead on outliving them.

Go sit on a rock in the woods and ask yourself: What is the question? When you know what the question is, answering it usually becomes a lot easier.

Never underestimate the power of analogy. Someone studying micro-organisms right now has just discovered the answer to the problem in communication research that you are struggling to understand.

Pay attention to what interests your students. Listen to their music, go see the films they like, try dancing their dances. Like it or not, your students are the future.

* Be patient. Hang anything in a lake long enough, and a fish will come along and bite it.

I think the computer is a new kind of person, one well worth getting to know.

It seems to me that the difference between being alive and being dead has been greatly exaggerated. I know some people who are undoubtedly alive who seem to me to be pretty much gone; I know other people who are undoubtedly dead who are still very much with us.

Enjoy what you do. Academic life is not all that bad once you have tenure.

Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. I agree with him, but I like my version also – the unlived life is not worth examining. Run toward life. Life is a party, and you’re invited.

Change is possible. Ask any butterfly.

LaVonne joins me in this – my final piece of advice: Read a good book every week, write in complete sentences, and invite your grad students over for spaghetti and meatballs once in a while.

___________

* Snappy sayings marked with an asterisk have already been quoted by our speakers today. Content analysis reveals that omitting them tonight resulted in a significant savings of your time.