Paul Scott; Founding Member of Cal State L.A. Journalism Dept.

Paul T. Scott, founding member of the department of journalism at Los Angeles State College, which later became Cal State Los Angeles, died Sunday after a long illness. He was 83 and had been living in Santa Barbara.

Scott was the founding faculty member of the journalism department at the college, which was created in 1947 on the same campus as Los Angeles City College as a two-year “upper division.”

Scott was born in Duger, Ind., in 1904, and earned a master’s degeree from the University of Iowa and a doctorate from USC. He later taught journalism in the Philippines and at three other American universities before joining the Los Angeles State faculty in 1950.

In 1956, Los Angeles State College began moving to its present campus in El Sereno, where it eventually became a four-year institution and then a university. Scott remained there until 1970, when he retired to Santa Barbara with his wife, Beryl.

To scores of budding Southern California reporters attending his classes, Scott was best known for his courses on law and the media. Scott was a specialist on libel and slander, according to Nick Beck, a former student and later a colleague at Cal State, and felt strongly that writers should be knowledgeable on those issues. “That was the course he loved,” Beck said, “and he was extremely tough teaching it.”

Other colleagues noted that Scott seemed easygoing in grading other journalism classes, but rarely gave A’s in his law course.

Besides his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Paula Scott, of Mountain View, and a son, Kevin, of Irvine. A memorial service is scheduled at 2 p.m. today at First Christian Church in Santa Barbara.