UWM is considering disbanding its journalism, advertising and media studies (JAMS) department to merge it into the communication department.
“My recommendation is that we pursue moving the JAMS degree and the staffing into the communication department,” Dean of the College of Letters and Science Scott Gronert said in a meeting with JAMS faculty on Nov. 6.
Gronert said he will present the recommendation to faculty members of the communications department next week, followed shortly by a meeting with both departments to talk about concerns and approaches to the transition.
The final decision will be left up to the executive committees of both departments, but before that happens, they will have to work together to build a transition team that will create a plan for how to make the transition successful. That team will work towards addressing issues with resources and academic staff representation in department governance, but Gronert said all JAMS staff will be retained after the transition. “The plan is to move all of the staff to comms,” Gronert said.
However, Gronert said members of the communications department already expressed interest when he briefly discussed the matter with them. “At that point, no recommendation had been made, but they certainly were well aware of what were potential recommendations, and they were very interested in it,” Gronert said.
Gronert added JAMS would retain “some degree of autonomy,” but several JAMS faculty and academic staff expressed concerns about their future roles in department governance if the transition takes place.
Director of the digital arts and culture program Marc Tasman raised concerns over JAMS academic staff representation on department governance bodies if the transition goes through, which they have had issues with in their own department executive committee over the past few years, feeling “disempowered” up to this point in the decision making process,” he said.
Since the JAMS department has never had anyone besides a white man as chair, senior advertising lecturer Joette Rockow is concerned that the department will continue to pick white men. “I am really afraid that I am going to retire from this department in a few years and I am going to have to say that I work for a department that never had a woman in a position of leadership,” Rockow said.
Gronert made the recommendation based on a report prepared by the JAMS Advisory Committee that offered two suggested options to create a more stable structure of governance for the JAMS department.
The other option outlined in the report was to maintain the overall structure of the JAMS department while restructuring the way it is governed by potentially allowing non-tenured staff and faculty from the department to serve on the executive committee that makes important decisions such as hiring personnel and resource allocation.
Gronert said he doesn’t recommend keeping JAMS as an independent department because restructuring its governance would take too long. “I viewed the restructuring plan as impractical in the foreseeable future given the level of investment it would require with the current budgets and enrollments in L&S,” Gronert told the Post.
The advisory committee shared a summary of their report with all JAMS faculty outlining the two options. Faculty members anonymously responded to the summary with their thoughts on the two options after it was shared April 30, 2020.
Five of the seven faculty members who responded said they would prefer to keep JAMS as an independent department, according to the final report. Several responses referenced concerns about a continued lack of academic staff representation in departmental governance.
Despite their concerns, JAMS faculty and staff are staying optimistic about the future of their program. “I’m trying to go into this with a positive attitude that it’s going to work out,” Rockow said.
Rockow said going into the transition with the attitude that people in the two departments are going to clash is not the right attitude. “I’m starting from a place where people are going to get along,” she added.
Chair of the JAMS department Kent Redding said the transition planning phases as a trial period to test out whether or not merging JAMS into communications is a viable option.
JAMS staff should stay positive going into the transition, “but also be prepared that if there are bumps on the road, there are potential, not likely, but potential off ramps,” Redding said, noting that the transition could still fall through.
Several members of the JAMS department agreed they must figure out what parts of their department they need to protect most during the transition immediately after Gronert made his recommendation.
Students enrolled as JAMS majors or minors during and after the transition will still receive JAMS diplomas. JAMS staff said they will also work to keep the current focus tracks of journalism, advertising and media studies largely the same for students if the transition does become official.