CSUN Creates New Media, Arts School

In a long-awaited move, Cal State Northridge on Monday reorganized two of its eight academic “colleges” to more closely align instructional departments in related fields.

The decision created a new college that brought together six departments in communications and the arts under Philip Handler, former dean of the School of the Arts.

Known as the College of Arts, Media, and Communication, it will include the art, music and theater departments from the former School of the Arts and the journalism, radio-television-film and speech-communication departments from the former School of Communication, Health and Human Services, as well as campus radio station KCSN-FM (88.5).

“From a practical point of view, the departments can share resources,” Handler said Monday, explaining that he hopes to encourage cooperation among faculty members to better prepare students for a rapidly changing world.

“Students will have greater resources available to them. They won’t be limited to the department of their major.”

Plans call for the creation of a multimedia laboratory for use by the approximately 3,000 students in the new college, a student resource center and interdisciplinary courses, he said.

The former School of Communication, Health and Human Services, which once grouped such disparate fields as journalism and kinesiology, has been renamed the College of Health and Human Development. It includes the communicative disorders, family environmental sciences, health science, kinesiology, and leisure studies and recreation departments, as well as the child development program and the National Center on Deafness.

Former CSUN kinesiology professor Ann Stutts was named dean of the college last week.

Provost Louanne Kennedy said of Stutts’ appointment: “Her vision for interdisciplinary, inter-professional and community-based collaborative programs will place the college among the new leaders in higher education reform.”