Ghiglione Will Step Down as Medill Dean in August

Loren Ghiglione

Loren Ghiglione plans to step down as dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University at the end of August 2006.

Provost Lawrence B. Dumas announced that, upon returning to the Medill faculty following a year’s leave of absence, Ghiglione will be actively involved in developing and directing a media ethics program at Medill. He is slated to become the inaugural incumbent of the Richard Schwarzlose Professorship of Media Ethics, a term professorship the University anticipates establishing shortly.

“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,” Dumas said. “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 focused 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,” Dumas added. “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.”

Ghiglione said, “It continues to be an honor to serve the Northwestern and Medill communities as the school’s dean.  It will be an equal honor to hold a professorship named after Dick Schwarzlose, one of Medill’s great scholars and teachers.  I have enjoyed working with Medill’s dedicated faculty, staff, alumni and administration, and look forward to spending more time with the school’s wonderful students.”

Ghiglione, 64, will have served five years as Medill’s dean at the end of this academic year and a decade in journalism education administration. Prior to coming to Northwestern in 2001, he directed the journalism program at Emory University for three years and the University of Southern California’s journalism school for two years. He is scheduled to assume the presidency of the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication in 2006.

Ghiglione was recognized for his commitment to diversity prior to coming to Northwestern, and that commitment has continued during 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 persons of color. 

Ghiglione is also committed to emphasizing globalism in journalism education.   Under his leadership, a global and diverse cultures requirement, including a foreign language requirement, 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 introduced almost 200 Medill students to Chicago as an international city last weekend.  He recently accompanied 17 Medill students to China to observe their new, student-organized Asia Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) program. 

In addition, Ghiglione has worked to emphasize a multimedia approach to journalism education.  Photojournalism has been made a permanent undergraduate course.  The 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-oriented.  And, at Ghiglione’s request, the Knight Foundation has agreed to convert the school’s Knight Professor of Broadcast Journalism to a multimedia professorship. 

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

Ghiglione also helped 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.  In addition, the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation recently included Medill among five schools participating in a groundbreaking $6-million journalism education initiative.  Other schools invited to join the initiative are Harvard, UC-Berkeley, Columbia, and the University of Southern California.  

“President Bienen and I greatly appreciate Loren’s many contributions to the Medill School of Journalism – and to the University at large,” Dumas said. “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.”

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.