Polsgrove, Ogan retire

Christine Ogan Read her bio

The School of Journalism says goodbye to two longtime faculty members this month as professors Christine Ogan and Carol Polsgrove retire.

The two have close to 50 years at the school between them. Ogan joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 1981; Polsgrove came to IU in 1989. While the professors have spent their careers focused on different issues – Ogan on communication technology and international communication and Polsgrove on publishing history and the interaction between magazines and politics and culture – both will miss the same thing when they leave.

“The students. I won’t miss going to class regularly,” Polsgrove laughed in a phone interview. “But I’ve really enjoyed many of my students and I hear from some of them. I hope to hear from more of them, I like to know how they’re doing.”

Carol Polsgrove Read her bio

For Ogan, who was one of the first women to attain the rank of full professor in the school, it’s the students she’s finding hardest to leave behind.

“I’ll miss the graduate students,” Ogan said. “I’ve gotten to be pretty close to many of them. When you’re teaching undergrads, you have them for a semester and then they move on. You get to know graduate students for a longer time; they stick with you longer. If they’re doctoral students and they finish, you run into
them at conferences and workshops. You build real relationships with them.”

Student reflections

And for many of their students the feeling is mutual.

Photo by Abby Tonsing

Professor Carol Polsgrove talked to grad student Greg Ruhland during a trip to the Statehouse.

Doctoral student Manaf Bashir took Ogan’s J514 International Communication and J614 Communication and National Development classes this school year. He said the open environment Ogan created in both, an environment that allowed students to discuss their perspectives on a variety of issues, helped those in the classes grow intellectually.

“She adds this critical thinking into the classroom where we as students think and look at issues through different lenses,” Bashir said. “We end up with variety of perspectives that have enhanced our understanding of different phenomena in the world.”

Graduate student Charli Wyatt, who will head back home to Tennessee when she finishes this June, took J501 Public Affairs Reporting with Polsgrove spring semester. If she could, Wyatt said, she’d take Polsgrove with her when she goes.

“Polsgrove’s the editor I wish I could take with me on every story - skeptical, insightful, engaged, empathetic,” Wyatt said. “In her classroom, it’s OK for journalism to be a passionate pursuit, and she expects us to leave it all on the page.”

Transitions

Ogan and Polsgrove leave the School of Journalism at time of transition. Several more faculty members are expected to retire in the next few years and Dean Bradley Hamm said finding people to fill the vacancies is difficult.

“You don’t replace someone with a perfect match; that’s never really possible, especially for people who have accomplished so much,” Hamm said in a phone interview. “You try to find people who excel in teaching and scholarship and service. It’s not as if you’re losing and accountant and can fill that position with another accountant. Usually people who are professors have broad and specialized areas.”

Working with those professors has been another aspect of her time at the School of Journalism Ogan has enjoyed and will miss.

“One of the great things about this school is the people. So many of them go back to the 1970s,” Ogan said. “Lots of people came here and stayed. You don’t have that at many other universities. I’m really glad that happened. I have a group of colleagues I respect. Where else could you work near so many smart people?”

New projects

Courtesy photo

Professor Chris Ogan, seated in the center with her students, spent three months teaching a communications theory course at Hong Kong Baptist University in 2006.

Ogan won’t be leaving academia entirely, however. In the fall she’ll be spending time at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, working with a researcher there on migrant and media issues. Ogan also will continue her own work on Turkish migrants, this time using data she gathered in Amsterdam. And she’s on the committees for several doctoral students, so her workload won’t be slowing down anytime soon.

Polsgrove has been involved in several book projects over the years,. She edited Reporting Civil Rights and wrote Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement and It Wasn’t Pretty, Folks, But Didn’t We Have Fun? Esquire in the Sixties. IU, Polsgrove said, gave her the freedom to work on those projects and it’s one of the things she appreciates most about the school.

“IU has been very supportive of me as a writer. I’ve finished three books and have been able to take time off to work on them,” Polsgrove said. “It’s just been really important to me to have that support.”

Polsgrove is in the midst of work on a fourth book, Ending British Rule in Africa; Writing in a Common Cause, which is slated for publication next year. After that, Polsgrove’s not sure what she’ll do.

“I hope I’m not working too much,” Polsgrove said, laughing. “I paid off my mortgage and put my daughter through college. I’d like to travel. But, you know, I’ve been a writer for years, I’m sure I’ll be doing some of that, but on my own time. I hope I’m not working for anybody.”




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This entry was posted on May 14, 2008 at 8:29 am and is filed under Alumni News:, News. You can trackback from your own site.