Cal State Plans School for Communications at Fullerton Campus

Cal State Fullerton is getting a School of Communications--only the second such school in the 19-campus California State University system and the first for a state-supported university in Southern California.

Cal State Fullerton President Jewel Plummer Cobb announced Thursday that effective July 1, the university will merge its existing Department of Communications and Department of Speech Communication and form the new School of Communications.

“No other university in California will have such a large, comprehensive school devoted to the study and applications of communications principles--from telecommunications to organizational communication to speech therapy,” Cobb said. “This is a very stellar day for us.”

About 2,450 students at Cal State Fullerton--roughly 10% of the university’s enrollment--major in either speech or communications, which includes news reporting, photography, radio-TV-film, advertising and public relations.

The Communications Department, headed by Edgar P. Trotter, has received several regional and national honors, including being selected as the Western locale for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Journalist in Space competition in 1985. The Communications Department has 2,100 majors, making it the third-largest communications program in the nation, Cal State Fullerton officials said. The Speech Communication Department, headed by Joyce M. Flocken, has about 350 majors.

Elevation of the departments into a school will add to the prestige they already enjoy, Cobb said.

In the California State University hierarchy, a “school” outranks a “department.” A department has a chairman, subject to a dean, but a school is semiautonomous and has its own dean. Cobb announced that a national search will be started to find “a scholar of national reputation” to head the new school. She said the university hopes to install the new dean by June.

The new School of Communications will become the seventh school on the Cal State Fullerton campus. The existing six are: the School of Arts; Business Administration and Economics; Engineering and Computer Science; Natural Science and Mathematics; Humanities and Social Sciences; Human Development and Community Service. The departments of Communications and Speech Communication are part of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Creating the new school involves only negligible costs and many benefits, Cobb said. The biggest cost will be hiring a dean, she said. A major benefit will be increased visibility, which is expected to lure outstanding scholars, both faculty and students, to the school.

Cobb predicted that the merged departments will also attract more grants and donations.

She said the so-called “information explosion” of the late 20th Century has created thousands of new jobs in communications.

“With Southern California second only to New York as a world communication center, it is fitting that we transform this carefully planned initiative (for creation of a School of Communications) into a reality,” she said.

When the new school starts, the Department of Communications and the Department of Speech Communication will continue as subunits within the school, Cobb said.

No new building is planned to house the merged departments.

The only other campus of the California State University that has a School of Communications is Cal State Chico in Northern California, Trotter said.