History Of Communication Study [Paperback]

WILBUR SCHRAMM AND THE FOUNDING OF COMMUNICATION STUDY

The difficulty in summing up a field like human communication is that it has no land that is exclusively its own. Communication is the fundamental social process.

Wilbur Schramm

On April 14, 1981, Wilbur Schramm returned from Honolulu, where he was living in retirement, to Iowa City, to give the Les Moeller Lecture at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. It was a nostalgic visit. Schramm had first come to Iowa in 1930 to pursue his Ph.D. degree. In 1943 he had organized the first Ph.D. program in mass communication in the world while he was director of the Iowa journalism school. When he moved to Illinois in 1947, Les Moeller took over Schramm's position at Iowa. Schramm (1981) began the 1981 Moeller lecture in this way:

Miss Betty [his wife] and I want to thank you for letting us come back to spend a few days with you on this campus for which we have so much affection and have not seen for so long....It was about 48 years ago that I became aware of a slender, pretty girl in the front row of one of the first classes that I taught at Iowa....About 18 months later she and I were married....Iowa was a remarkable place in the 1930s and '40s, and chiefly because of the spirit of creativity that pervaded it....Remember this was Iowa in the middle of the Depression, with a budget about one-eighth what I found when I went to Illinois in 1947....In a place where one might not expect to find him, the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, was one of the most creative psychologists in the world, Kurt Lewin. I want to talk about what has happened to academic journalism and communication since the decade of the '30s when Ted [George] Gallup was a brand-new Ph.D., Frank Mott was a brand-new Director [of the School of Journalism] at Iowa, and the country was in its worst depression.

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