Dear Colleague:

I am writing to let you know that Loren Ghiglione has informed President Bienen and me of his plan to step down as dean of the Medill School of Journalism at the end of August 2006. It is our expectation that, upon returning to the Medill faculty following a year’s leave of absence, Loren will be actively involved in developing and directing a media ethics program at Medill. He will become the inaugural incumbent of the Richard Schwarzlose Professorship of Media Ethics, a term professorship we anticipate establishing shortly.

Loren, who turns 65 in April, will have served five years as Medill’s dean and a decade in journalism education administration. Prior to arriving at Northwestern in 2001, he directed the journalism program at Emory University for three years (1996-99) and the University of Southern California ’s journalism school for two years (1999-2001). His national recognition is evident in his election to assume the presidency of the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication in 2006.

The planned appointment of Loren to the new Schwarzlose professorship is especially appropriate given the emphasis Loren has placed on issues of ethics during his deanship. He established a faculty ethics committee, encouraged an ethics-centered undergraduate summer reading program, initiated a curriculum review by outside ethics experts, and helped start a series of workshops that regularly focus on ethical issues. He devotes the dean’s opening convocation for entering Medill undergraduates to discussing plagiarism and other ethical issues of concern to journalists. Significantly, during his tenure as dean, Medill began to require incoming students to subscribe formally to an integrity code before they are allowed to matriculate.

Prior to his arrival at Northwestern, Loren was recognized in the profession for his commitment to diversity, and he has brought that commitment to his deanship. He has co-chaired the Dr. Martin Luther King Day Committee two years and made Medill the home of the prestigious Ida B. Wells Award for the employment of minorities in news media. He has supported the development of an annual High School Journalism Day, a Medill-City Colleges of Chicago journalism program, student chapters of minority journalists’ organizations, and the Academy for Alternative Journalism. He has encouraged diversity in the school’s leadership posts and in faculty and staff hiring. More than 20 percent of Medill’s full-time faculty, 50 percent of staff directors and 35 percent of this year’s entering undergraduate class are people of color. For his diversity efforts, Loren recently received the Lawrence Young Breakthrough Award (“to an individual who transforms the paradigm of diversity in the media”) of the National Association of Minority Media Executives.

Loren was also committed to the importance of globalism in journalism education. Under his leadership, an 11-unit global and diverse cultures requirement, including a three-unit foreign language requirement (or demonstrated proficiency) was instituted for undergraduate students in the school. He also began undergraduate reporting programs in South Africa and India , initiated graduate and undergraduate research and reporting programs abroad and started an annual “Global Chicago” program that is expected to introduced 200 Medill students to Chicago as an international city this fall. He recently accompanied 17 Medill students to China to observe their new, student-organized Asia Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) program.

In addition, Loren has worked to make Medill more multimedia. After an absence of a quarter-century, a photojournalism course has been made a permanent undergraduate course; a hallway in the McCormick Tribune Center has been converted into a photojournalism exhibition gallery. Medill’s newspaper management project has become the media management project. Separate newspaper and new media programs have been put under one faculty member. A July meeting of Medill faculty and advisory board members with Silicon Valley technology experts has contributed to proposals to make several required courses more multimedia. And, at Loren’s request, the Knight Foundation has agreed to convert the school’s Knight Professor of Broadcast Journalism to a multimedia professorship.

As dean, Loren also has been a vigorous and effective fundraiser. In the past four years, Medill has raised some $27 million, including $18 million in commitments for future support of Medill. Gifts have more fully funded or added four endowed professorships. The $3-million debt on the construction of the McCormick Tribune Center has been met. A $3.2-million pledge from the McCormick Tribune Foundation is expected to provide 60 full-tuition scholarships for graduate journalism students over the next decade.

Loren helped to develop specialized master’s degree programs in business reporting, religion reporting and legal reporting; under his leadership, enrollment in the graduate journalism program enjoyed consistently robust enrollments, with the number of applications for the past three years almost 70 percent greater than the number of applications during the previous three years, 1999-2002. Resources devoted to the career services office have increased. And he worked to achieve greater national visibility for the School. The Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation recently included Medill among five schools participating in a ground-breaking $6-million cooperative journalism education initiative. Other schools invited to join the initiative are Harvard, Berkeley, Columbia, and the University of Southern California.

The school also has established a Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism and its own imprint for a series of 35 to 40 Northwestern University Press books titled “Visions of the American Press.” The first two new titles in the series, written by top scholars of journalism history, are being published this fall.

Prior to embarking on his career in journalism education, Ghiglione owned and operated a New England newspaper company for 26 years, won national journalism awards for reporting and research, wrote or edited six journalism books and served as president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.

President Bienen and I greatly appreciate Loren’s many contributions to the Medill School of Journalism – and to the University at large. We look forward to having an opportunity in the spring to recognize further his work as dean; and we are pleased by the prospect of Loren’s further contributions when he returns to the faculty following his leave of absence.

Sincerely,

Lawrence B. Dumas

Provost