Reality of international obligation is an abrupt awakening
By Dean Paul S. Voakes

Dean Paul Voakes tours Faisal Mosque, a Pakistan national landmark, with the Colorado delegation and hosts. All entering the mosque must remove their shoes.

One morning at about 2:30 a.m. this past summer, I was awakened by the rattling of the windows in my hotel room. Groggily thinking I was back in California and experiencing a minor earthquake, I went back to sleep – almost.

I then noticed the sounds of not-too-distant explosions running the gamut from "pop-pop" to "boom." Groggily thinking that it was a July 4 fireworks show, I went back to sleep – almost.

I then realized I wasn't in the United States. I was in Islamabad, Pakistan. I was hearing the opening salvos in the Pakistani army's siege of the Red Mosque, which had been occupied by Taliban radicals for the past several months and that was about 10 blocks from my hotel.

For a brief moment, I wondered, "What am I doing here?"

In the ensuing four months, back in Boulder, I heard variations on that question. It's an apt question, which I'd like to place in a larger context:

What should our School be doing to help strengthen journalism and mass communication throughout the world?

But first, back to Pakistan. What, indeed, was I doing there? Earlier in the year the provost at CU's Denver campus, Mark Heckler, was asked by a representative of the Pakistani government if UCD would be interested in becoming a founding partner for a new university in Pakistan – a university dedicated solely to media education.

Provost Heckler was intrigued, but he realized that his campus did not provide the full range of media subjects the Pakistanis desired, so he called me. I thought the idea was fascinating. I've never known of a four-year university anywhere that awarded degrees only in media-related fields, and here was an opportunity to create one from scratch, with no existing academic barriers, traditions or bureaucracies to limit the thinking. I also recognized that Pakistan is one of the most volatile, but one of the most strategically important, nations in the world. I felt I owed it to the School to keep an open ear.

The conversations between Islamabad and Denver progressed to the point where the Pakistan Ministry of Information and Broadcasting invited me and my counterpart dean in Denver – David Dynak, dean of the College of Arts and Media – on a fact-finding mission to Pakistan. We needed to see for ourselves the potential facilities, the ministry's level of commitment to the project and the media climate in the country.

I came back with impressions as diverse as the Pakistani population. Because the government had deregulated media six years earlier, we saw a cacophony of new, politically feisty newspapers, magazines and even broadcast outlets. And we saw a dearth of media education. The few mass communication departments that existed in the universities there took the academic media-studies perspective rather than professional education. Young Pakistani journalists and practitioners of public relations and advertising are basically educated on the job. We talked to several media managers, both nationals and ex-pats, who felt that an American-style undergraduate and/or master's program was sorely needed in Pakistan.

But what exactly were we being asked to do? The plan was essentially to establish a program so rigorous, and so similar to our CU programs, that we could certify that a degree there would be equivalent to a degree at UCD or our own School. The ministry was asking UCD – and us, by extension – to help design the university, establish curricula, order the technology, hire the faculty and complete a variety of other administrative tasks. The ministry would fund the new university and pay our schools handsomely for our services. We would start the process with a smattering of "short courses" for working media professionals, either in Islamabad, in Denver or Boulder, or from Colorado to Pakistan via the Web.

But then things started to come apart. The battle I heard that morning in July was to usher in a new period of terrorist violence and political protest that has resulted, as I write this, in a continuing "state of emergency" that includes the shutdown of some of those new, feisty broadcast outlets. Even before the media crisis, our SJMC faculty had serious doubts about partnering with the Musharraf government. In early November, I informed Provost Heckler that the School would not be joining with UCD in the media university project until we felt more confident about the personal safety of Americans and political stability in general in Pakistan. UCD's response was to withdraw from the project entirely.

The Pakistan opportunity was unusual, to say the least. But it did elicit some important, broader questions about what our role is in the global development of media.

The School's 2006 strategic plan accords considerable importance to international activity. We dedicate ourselves to innovation, excellence and "empowerment," which we define, in part, as helping strengthen the skills of "media professionals throughout the world (and in the process strengthen our own skills) by having our faculty and students partner with them. The positive change we seek is to enable professionals worldwide to more commonly approach their work with respect, openness, independence and honesty, and for scholars worldwide to address ways in which media can play a role in addressing social problems," according to our plan.

Later on in the plan, we state, "We will enhance our students' and our own understandings of other cultures by expanding their opportunities to study and engage in media abroad and to extend our learning to educators and media professionals of other nations."

We feel an obligation to reach out to media practitioners and educators anywhere in the world, to enhance mutually the quality of what we're doing. But what does that mean in more specific terms? Currently, our only endowed faculty chair is in Global Media (Bella Mody). One of the two UNESCO chairs in journalism in the United States is on our faculty (Meg Moritz). Several of our faculty have taught and researched abroad, many as Fulbright Scholars. Our undergraduate students have one of the highest rates of "semester abroad" participation on campus. Every year at least two journalism/communication departments from universities overseas approach us in search of some sort of partnership, usually involving student or faculty exchanges.

Clearly, the global village is shrinking, thanks largely to the news media, and the Pakistan conundrum showed us starkly that we need to define how we're going to embrace this change. A few questions pop to mind immediately:

• Under what circumstances should we partner with an existing university abroad? Or with a government interested in creating an academic program?
• Under what circumstances should we decline to participate in a country for political reasons?
• Under what circumstances should we send our own faculty or staff abroad to teach or consult on behalf of the School?
• To what extent should we be developing Web-based courses that any student anywhere in the world could register to take?
• To what extent should we be offering journalism/communication courses by which professionals or educators from abroad would come to Boulder for four or six weeks?
• To what extent should our efforts to participate globally be allowed to rechannel resources from our educating of Colorado and U.S. students in Boulder?
• To what extent should we expand our recruitment and acceptance of students from outside the United States?

And that's just a start. Professor Moritz has agreed to lead an ad hoc faculty group early next year to create a position paper that, I hope, answers questions like these. Meanwhile, what do you think? Don't hesitate to write or e-mail me your view at Paul.Voakes@Colorado.edu