UCSD Professor Wins a Prestigious Grant

Soft-spoken UC San Diego professor Michael Schudson expressed great pleasure Monday at news that the MacArthur Foundation had selected him to receive $270,000 over the next five years to pursue his creative talents.

But the professor of sociology and communication--and a specialist in looking at how culture and the media influence each other--expressed some reluctance at first to explain how the Chicago-based foundation might have picked him as one of its 36 “highly talented individuals” to fund with grants ranging from $150,000 to $375,000.

“I was very lucky,” said the 43-year-old Schudson, adding that many of his colleagues at UCSD would be equally deserving of the award. Schudson is the seventh UCSD professor to be named a MacArthur Fellow since the program began in 1981. He came to UCSD in 1981, recruited for the La Jolla campus from the University of Chicago.

Individuals cannot apply for the grants--they are recommended by a group of nominators throughout the country. Names are reviewed by a selection committee, and the final list is picked by the foundation’s board of directors. Only then do the fellows learn they were even nominated, let alone selected.

The grants are funded from a legacy left by billionaire John D. MacArthur, founder of Bankers Life & Casualty Co., who died in 1978, and his wife, Catherine, who died in 1981. Their estate so far has provided more than $800 million to the program, whose only requirement is that a nominee “show creativity and promise,” in the words of program director Ken Hope.

Schudson said the grant “does feel like some kind of excessive award” and that he has no specifics yet on how he will spend the money, other than to gain more time for research and to help cover some family-related expenses.

Asked how he would have critiqued his own work if a member of the foundation board, Schudson said he would point to two major aspects that could have influenced trustees to look favorably at his selection.

“I suspect that the foundation was interested in my work, which, while partly oriented toward my academic colleagues, almost always looks at some issue of public significance . . . and the fact that I do my best to write in a way to reach the public beyond the professorial ranks,” Schudson said.

In addition, Schudson said, he “always tries, though not always successfully, to ask a slightly different question than others ask” when he approaches a subject for research.

“So, in my first book, (‘Discovering the News,’ published in 1978), which was on the history of the idea of objectivity in American journalism, instead of taking a stand on whether the press is too far to the right or to the left or biased in one way or the other, I asked how we (America) came to be interested in objectivity at all, when we are in a world in which most countries have a press where it is taken for granted that partisanship is what a newspaper should do. How did we ever arrive at a place where journalists defend themselves as professionals, and critics expect to be able to hold journalists to this model of fairness and neutrality?”

Schudson also wrote a book in 1984 on the social consequences of advertising and co-edited the book “Reading the News” in 1986 with professor Robert Manoff of New York University.

With the MacArthur grant, he hopes to accelerate research on two new projects: a book looking at the history of American political communication, and a second looking at how the American public remembers the Watergate political scandal of 1972-74.

“It’s a case study that grows out of my interest in social theory, in collective memory, in how society keeps track of its own past,” Schudson said.

Schudson demurs from the notion of creating any unified theory about American media.

“I’m very resistant to grand theories,” Schudson said. “Maybe that is why I have never come up with one, and maybe why I am so attracted to historical studies because the complexity of life shows through, that the recalcitrance of the historical record defies simple explanation.”

His interest in journalism comes in part from “the fact that it has a kind of romance for me.” But Schudson is not a frustrated reporter, he insisted. “I don’t want to give up my free summers and the opportunity to think things through, which journalists usually don’t have time to do.”

Schudson said that, although the grant could, in effect, allow him not to teach for the next five years, he will continue to offer his classes.

“I don’t think that hiding myself away in an office for five years is the best way to think through problems, and I do need to talk to students,” Schudson said. “In the same way, with my books, I do try to have the college sophomore in mind, in that (someone at that level) should be able to understand what I am writing about.”

The past winners at UCSD include: Ramon Gutierrez, professor of history, 1983; Michael Freedman, professor of mathematics, and Arnold Mandell, professor of psychiatry, both in 1984; Edwin Hutchins, professor of cognitive science, and Shing-Tung Yau, professor of mathematics, both in 1985 (Yau is now at Harvard University); David Rumelhart, professor of cognitive science, 1987 (Rumelhart is now at Stanford University).