New Oral Communication Program Aims to Clarify Voice of Student Body
Kathleen Turner will direct Davidson's new oral communication program
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4/6/2004
Contact: Bill Giduz 704/894-2244 or bigiduz@davidson.edu
Davidson will launch an oral communication program this year under the leadership of Kathleen J. Turner, who approaches her new position from the conviction that “communication is what makes us human.”
Turner, a respected and prolific scholar with broad interests, has pursued that notion in scholarly communities for about thirty years. She has studied consequences of President Lyndon Johnson’s relationship with the press during the Vietnam War, the intent and effect of product placements in the media, the appeal of the music and cinematography of the TV show “Miami Vice,” and the portrayal of women in comic strips. “I’m just interested in so many areas!” she confessed.
Turner has been chair of Queens University’s communication program since 2000, and was appointed as the Knight-Crane Chair there in 2001. She previously taught at Purdue, Denison, Notre Dame, Tulsa and Tulane universities. “Communication enables us to define ourselves and our place in the world, and enables us to create, sustain, and change our society,” she said. “Those are also the basic goals of a liberal arts education.”
A Davidson committee co-chaired by Ann Marie Costa, professor of theatre and chair of that department, and Clark Ross, vice president of academic affairs, selected Turner following a national search. She has been hired with a broad mandate to integrate the study and practice of oral communication into the college’s liberal arts environment. Vice President Ross said there’s a feeling on campus that students can gain from formal instruction in speaking well. “We want to take a more ambitious approach to helping our students excel in all areas where oral communication is important in their lives — from class presentations, to job interviews, to articulation of their views in everyday conversation,” he said.
Ross said that Turner’s breadth of experience and leadership skills marked her as an ideal candidate for the job. “It’s clear that she’s a superb teacher, with a good sense of how an oral communication program can interface with our academic disciplines,” he commented.
Turner will assume her Davidson title of Director of Oral Communication and Professor of Communication Studies on August 1. The position encompasses responsibility for both curricular and extracurricular initiatives. She will work with faculty members across the curriculum to integrate oral presentations by students into their courses. She will also work to raise the general level of oral communication skill on campus through establishment of a speech center. This facility and its personnel will help students prepare for job interviews, develop classroom presentations, lead meetings, and practice for activities like Mock Trial. The speech center will be located with the college’s current writing center, which has a similar mission to help students develop writing skills in and beyond the classroom.
Turner will also work to expand course offerings in the area of communication. She will take over teaching the college’s only current speech course, and work with faculty to begin introducing additional courses in the area. Vice President Ross noted that the single current speech course has been tremendously popular with students, attracting up to 300 requests for the sixty-four total seats available in its four sections.
Though the college doesn’t expect to offer a major in communication in the foreseeable future, Ross said the expansion of communication courses could eventually lead to availability of an academic concentration in that area.
Turner has received several awards as a top teacher in her academic career, which she says reflect her enthusiasm for the subject. “The joy of studying communication is exploring how it helps us make sense of our world, and how it gives us a better understanding of other people coming from different perspectives,” she said. “As Marshall McLuhan suggested,in this age of electronic media we aren’t going to be one big happy global village. We’ll always be more like an Ann Landers column writ large. But communication studies help greatly to understand how we interact with others, and the effects of that.”
During her tenure at Queens University, Turner created a department of communication for both undergraduate and graduate education through curriculum revision and the merger of three existing programs. Her decision to work for Davidson was spurred in part by the opportunity to build a program from scratch. “This is a rare opportunity,” she said. “I’m impressed that Davidson has made the commitment to the faculty position and speech center. It speaks volumes about the college’s intentions in this direction.”
Turner categorizes herself as “a rhetorical analyst who combines history, criticism, and theory to study communication as a process of social influence, particularly in the areas of media, popular culture, politics, women, and organizations.”
She has worked in communication since her undergraduate years at the University of Kansas, where she graduated summa cum laude. She earned her master’s degree and Ph.D. degree from Purdue University, writing theses for those two degrees on subjects that were of major public concern at the time—“”A Rhetorical History of the Contemporary Feminist Movement,” and “The Effect of Presidential-Press Interaction on Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam War Rhetoric.”
She has published more than a dozen articles and delivered scores of lectures. She expanded her Ph.D. dissertation on LBJ into a 1985 book entitled, Lyndon Johnson’s Dual War: Vietnam and the Press, which was the first book in the area of communication ever published by the University of Chicago Press. She also authored an edited volume entitled Doing Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases in 1998, and is currently working on a book about the history of women in comic strips. “My favorite heroine is Ella Cinders, a character in the 1920s and 1930s,” she said. “It was a fractured Cinderalla story, but combined wonderful use of language and inventive graphics.”
She pays particular attention to the messages people receive from the media, and is currently working on a study of product placement in television shows and movies. She noted that the increasing occurrence of labeled products in shows is really nothing new. “It’s a throw-back to TV in the 1950s when we had John Cameron Swazey in the ‘Camel News Caravan’ puffing away on a Camel as he delivered headlines from around the world. A sense of history can give us a sense of perspective,” she said.
She tries to keep up with all forms of media, watching television, reading a variety of magazines, and exploring Web sites. But her profession makes it difficult to observe without forming a critique. She admits a guilty indulgence of soap operas, and adoration of the TV show, “West Wing.” But even there she can’t completely shed her academic inclination—she has written papers on both the soaps and “West Wing.”
Turner was also attracted to Davidson to work on the same campus as her husband, Professor Ray Sprague, the chair of Davidson’s music program and choral director. The couple has been married since 1981.
Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,600 students. Since its establishment in 1837, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently ranked in the top ten liberal arts colleges in the country by U.S. News and World Report magazine. Davidson is engaged in “Let Learning Be Cherished,” a $250 million campaign in support of student financial assistance, academic resources, and community life.
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