unljnews

By CHARLYNE BERENS
Interim Dean

Sometimes it seems as if the tighter the money gets, the more people are lined up with their hands out, asking for your support. And now your university and your college are joining that line.

Last fall, the University of Nebraska Foundation kicked off  “The Campaign for Nebraska, Unlimited Possibilities.” Our college is part of that campaign, of course.

So the question is, why should you give to the J school? We hope you have fond memories of and warm feelings about this special place in Nebraska, but we have to find more reasons than that to ask you to support us today. Here are a few:

• Even though the media world is changing at warp speed, our college continues to provide the kind of education that prepares students for careers, for further education and for life. In so doing, we also serve the larger society by helping to cultivate the instincts and habits of good citizenship.

• Our focus is on preserving the good things we’ve always done well while adapting to the reality of a media that just won’t hold still. For all our students in all majors, we stress the basics: good research, good storytelling in words and pictures, clear and correct writing.

• But we also recognize that students must be able to apply their skills on ever-changing platforms, and we try to help them develop both a mindset and a basic set of skills that will let them keep learning and growing and changing as the media world demands.

• Despite the changes in the media, we are not losing enrollment in our college. In fact, news-editorial majors have increased from 184 in 1999 to 238 last fall — and print media have probably been hit hardest and changed most by what’s happening in the industry.

That indicates to me that students recognize that the principles and skills they will learn here will be valuable to them wherever their career path takes them. And that’s what we hear over and over and over from alumni. I think we’re onto something that’s worth fostering and supporting.

So let’s say you’re inclined to help us. But you want to know some specifics about how we’re planning to use the funds raised through the Campaign for Nebraska. Here are a few of our needs:

• An equipment endowment. As we move deeper into the electronic era, we desperately need more video cameras, more video and audio editing capabilities, more still cameras, more computer hardware and software — used by students in all our sequences.
  This semester, for example, we’ve nearly doubled the enrollment in NewsNetNebraska, the online publication course that’s the capstone for our journalism majors. So nearly 50 students must share four video cameras. And much of our video equipment is so old that it’s beginning to disintegrate before our eyes.

• An endowment to support our sales program. This is an important and useful addition to our advertising curriculum, one that will make our graduates valuable to companies both in and outside the mass media.

• An endowment for operating expenses. At the moment, only about 25 percent of our operating funds come from state money. We have to find the rest from private funds, and an endowment specifically for operating expenses would help stabilize our situation and let us plan better.

• Additional scholarships. The college isn’t the only one feeling the financial pinch. Families are, too, and the opportunity to offer scholarship support helps very good students come here to college – very good students who might otherwise not be able to afford UNL.

• More endowed professorships. This is closely related to our operating needs in that professorships often include money for faculty travel, research and development. In addition, professorships have helped us attract outstanding faculty by supplementing the state-funded salary and/or providing money for travel, development, etc.

• An endowment to support our international connections. Dean Emeritus Will Norton really put us on the international stage, and we want to continue our relationships with journalism programs in Ethiopia, Kosovo and elsewhere. This fund would provide assistantships for international grad students. It would support our own faculty members’ travel to Ethiopia and Kosovo to teach for a few weeks in those programs. And it would make it possible for us to reach out to other journalism programs in the developing world.

Thanks to Will Norton’s vision and leadership and skill as a fund-raiser and thanks to the energy and expertise of the faculty, we are an ever more viable college and an ever more valuable asset to the university and the state. But we couldn’t have come this far without private support, and we won’t be able to fulfill our dreams for the future without private support.

That’s where you come in, of course. When we come to you with our hands out, asking for your help, we hope you’ll consider giving not only to preserve the fine school from which you graduated however many years ago but also to invest in the future — to foster a school that will continue to grow, adapt and improve to serve the needs of both students and the broader society.

We can’t do it without you.