CHICAGO
The incoming president of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (AEJMC) says that she plans to use her post to rally for increased diversity within the 96-year-old nonprofit organization. AEJMC is composed of journalism and mass communications faculty, administrators, students and media professionals from around the world.
Dr. Barbara B. Hines, a professor and director of the graduate program in mass communication and media studies at Howard University, is the 14th woman to serve as president of AEJMC. While progress has been made, she says to diversify the organization much more needs to be done.
“It wasn’t until the 1970s that women and then minorities started to become members of the academy and at that time there was really a recognition, in the early 1970s that we needed to be more diverse both in gender and ethnicity,” says Hines, who has taught at Howard University since 1984.
In response to the lack of diversity, AEJMC, under the leadership of Dr. Lionel C. Barrow, who is now professor emeritus of communications at Howard University, established an Ad Hoc Committee on Minority Education, which was designed to recruit, train and place minorities at universities across the country. Today, the Minorities and Communication Division is still active, but challenges remain. AEJMC is currently undergoing a strategic plan and is brainstorming ways to attract more minorities to the organization.
Its diversity efforts include establishing the Commission on the Status of Women and the Commission on the Status of Minorities in 1990. In 1992, Tony Atwater of Rutgers University took the helm, becoming the first African American to lead the organization. Also that year, AEJMC created the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Interest Group.
Last week, more than a 2,500 people — mostly academics — gathered here for the annual convention to present scholarly research papers and participate in panel discussions on topics ranging from the media’s impact on the 2008 presidential campaign to the way that the U.S. press has traditionally covered recent acts of genocide abroad. Many conference-goers complained that this year’s convention still lacked a strong minority presence and pointed to the declining numbers of minorities in communication and journalism departments at colleges and universities across the nation. More needs to be done, they say, to encourage schools to aggressively recruit and hire young minority talent.
