As far back as 2012, the Schieffer School of Journalism, the precursor to the present Department of Journalism at Texas Christian University, assigned a committee to study and create a diversity plan that will guide the department in the years ahead.
The department believes that those who produce the news or teach journalists should reflect the diverse audiences they serve. In keeping with the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics, the department teaches the principle that reporting cannot be fair and accurate unless it tells the “story of the diversity and the magnitude of the human experience.”
The Department of Journalism therefore believes that its faculty, staff and student body should be made up of people from diverse backgrounds, including race, color, gender, creed, ethnicity, nationality, class, sexual orientation, age, religion, learning styles, ideologies and disabilities. We also believe that commitment to diversity will create the necessary culture where individual differences will be appreciated, valued and celebrated.
Our Reality
Statistics from our TCU Office of Institutional Research (Fall 2022) show that the reality of our situation from an ethnic perspective, which is a prominent component of diversity, is that from Fall 2019 to Fall 2022 White students constitute 64.4% to 67.2% of our university’s student population, while the population of Hispanic/Latino is between 14.2% and 16.6%, and that of Black/African Americans is 4.9% to 5.8%. The figures are slightly higher in our department, with the populations ranging from 61.1% to 65.5% for Whites, 14.7% to 19% for Hispanics/Latino, and 7.1% to 12.4% for Blacks/African American students in the same period. Students from other ethnicities are fewer in number.
Given our situation, the Department of Journalism encourages and supports efforts to achieve, sustain and value diversity through a variety of efforts, especially those that:
- Celebrate the rich contributions of women and men from diverse backgrounds to the professions represented in the department.
- Create a culture in which no individual is given or denied opportunity because of any aspect of diversity.
- Maintain a diverse faculty, staff and student body.
- Emphasize creative and innovative ways to encourage a healthy culture in the faculty, on student media, in student organizations and in the classroom; and
- Recognize that diversity is an economic, legal, moral, ethical, social and political issue.
Our Goals & Objectives
The following are the overarching goals of the Department of Journalism’s Diversity Plan. These goals shall be updated as necessary:
- Nurture a culture and environment of diversity and inclusiveness in the department.
- Increase the quality and quantity of curricular activities for students.
- Maintain programs and procedures to increase student, faculty, staff and administrator diversity in the department.
- Continue to encourage training for staff and faculty.
Strategies & Tactics
- Use and explore recruitment opportunities to address diversity imbalances in faculty composition.
- Encourage students in our newsroom to use diverse news sources.
- Use department funding to bring speakers of diverse backgrounds to our classrooms to share experiences with our students.
- Assist students in joining diverse journalism groups, including National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ), National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) and NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists.
- Encourage the development of new courses that recognize the contributions of under-represented groups.
- Create a classroom environment where students are comfortable speaking about under-represented groups.
- Collaborate with other TCU departments that are pedagogically working to achieve similar goals, such as language and women’s studies departments.
- Work with the TCU Admissions to recruit historically under-represented minority students.