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Photo by Mike Conway

Marilyn Schultz and NBC"s Brian Williams talked at an event in 2006. Schultz died Jan. 11.

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Alumna Marilyn Schultz died Monday in Austin, Texas, where she was a faculty member at St. Edward’s University. She was 64.

Schultz earned her bachelor’s in radio-television in 1967 and worked as on air and as a researcher in broadcast, including years at NBC. In the 1970s, Schultz helped lead a class action suit against the network and its affiliates to gain equal opportunity and pay for women. The suit took more than seven years to settle.

Schultz returned to IU to earn her master’s degree in telecommunications in 1990 and a Ph.D. at the School of Journalism in 1993. In her second career in academia, she led the broadcast journalism department at the University of Texas before joining St. Edwards in 2002.

“Marilyn Schultz was a groundbreaking television journalist with strong Hoosier roots," said assistant professor Mike Conway, who, as a graduate student, was a teaching assistant for Schultz at UT. "She forced NBC and the other networks to consider the idea of equal pay and opportunities for women through her class action discrimination lawsuit. But she would say her favorite career was teaching students, which she was doing until the day she died.”

• Read her obituary and student tributes at St. Edwards’ Hilltop Views online.
• Read about Schultz’s and assistant professor Mike Conway’s attendance at the 50th anniversary of the Huntley-Brinkley Report in 2006.

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