Communication
Welcome to the Communication Department. Throughout our teaching and learning, research and writing, and service and civic engagement, we welcome students from diverse economic, ethnic, gender, political, racial, religious, and sexual backgrounds. Our curriculum, faculty, and students are excited to explore communication in relation to justice, diversity, engagement, ethics and pluralism. Sound fun? Join us!
Who We Are
The Department of Communication is one of the largest and most popular departments on campus. We have approximately 300 majors and minors.
Our department offerings are unusually rich for a program our size. We offer over 40 courses that present considerable breadth and depth in the areas of speech, rhetoric, media studies, and interpersonal communication. We also provide a range of resources and programs for students including extracurricular activities, service learning, and internships. See the rest of our web site for more details.
Our Mission
Communication processes and events are simultaneously shaped by their physical and social environments, making the study of communication inherently dynamic. Over its history, the discipline of communication has evolved in its theoretical scope and content, reflecting change in the larger intellectual tradition. During the present century of significant social and cultural change, the study of communication has continued to expand to encompass the contexts of family, friendship, groups, organizations and mass media, in addition to those of politics and social policy upon which the tradition is built.
A sympathetic affinity between the study of communication and the community, which keeps theory symmetrically aligned with praxis, is essential to the vitality of the discipline and thus to those who seek a degree within it. With these assumptions in mind, the department sees its mission as educating students about the process of communication.
Among our goals are:
- To understand the role communication plays in the construct of knowledge;
- To develop a knowledge of and knowledge about the communication discipline;
- To critically evaluate communication;
- To study communication in order to make us more humane and to create a community of understanding;
- To develop imagination and creativity in our approach to the study of communication.