The Graduate Program

Organized within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Department of Speech Communication has a graduate faculty of 28 persons and offers B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in the major areas of study and research within speech communication. The size of the department's graduate program is held constant, with about 75 graduate students in residence. At roughly 3 students per graduate faculty member, Illinois has what is probably the lowest student-faculty ratio among major graduate programs in the field, ensuring students access to deep and varied faculty resources.

The department's faculty is a professionally active group of highly productive scholars. A 2005 study found that the Illinois faculty rank second in the nation in number of publications in national and regional communication journals, and fourth in the number of times those papers were cited by other scholars. The quality of faculty scholarship has been recognized by a number of awards received by members of the current faculty, including research awards from national scholarly associations, and Fulbright, Rockefeller, NEH, and other external fellowships. In addition, faculty research has been funded by grants from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Rand Corporation, and the William T. Grant Foundation. Outstanding contributions to the study of communication have caused many of the present faculty to be sought for such responsibilities as editorships and memberships on editorial boards of scholarly journals. Currently, faculty members hold 45 positions on the editorial boards of scholarly journals. In addition, faculty have been elected to head subject-matter divisions concerned with their research specialties in the International Communication Association and the National Communication Association. Faculty in health, technologies, and media also regularly consult with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation.

Many faculty members have achieved international stature. In recent years members of the department have accepted more than 100 invitations to present their work at universities and research conferences abroad. Recent destinations have included Australia , Austria , Canada , Denmark , Finland , France , Germany , India , Israel , Italy , Japan , The Netherlands, Poland , South Africa , Spain , Sweden , Taiwan , and the United Kingdom .

The Illinois Department of Speech Communication has a tradition of leadership in the field. From its beginnings, the study of speech communication has borne the imprint of Illinois faculty and graduates. Three of the seventeen founders of speech communication's national learned society were members of the Illinois faculty. Illinois faculty and graduates regularly have been called to leadership as presidents of national and regional associations and as editors of scholarly journals. Illinois faculty and graduates have been elected seven times to the presidencies of the National Communication Association and the International Communication Association; fourteen editors of the field's most prestigious scholarly journals have come from their ranks. Six faculty members and graduates have received the National Communication Association's highest honor, the Distinguished Scholar Award, and two of that association's most prestigious awards for scholarship bear the names of former Illinois faculty members. In addition, a member of our faculty has received the International Communication Association's Outstanding Young Scholar Award.

Our faculty members and graduate students are also recognized for their teaching. In 2005, over half of the faculty and nearly half of our teaching assistants placed in the top 20% of the student evaluation (ICES) ratings for the entire campus. Our faculty includes four recipients of campus and/or college teaching awards. Much of our instructional activity is devoted to our large undergraduate population, which numbers approximately 500 students.

The Illinois department's historically high standing in the field continues in the present. The latest survey of doctoral program reputations, conducted by the National Communication Association, ranked Illinois among the top six comprehensive communication departments. (Departments were considered “comprehensive” if they offered graduate work in five or more of nine specialty areas.) In separate rankings of specialties, the department was ranked 2nd in the area of interpersonal communication, 3rd in communication technology, 4th in health communication, and 5th in organizational communication. Like other recently published studies, this survey confirms that, by almost any standard, the Department of Speech Communication at Urbana-Champaign ranks among the most distinguished in the nation.

Graduate Education at Illinois: An Overview

Illinois has for many years conducted one of the nation's major programs of graduate education in speech communication. The traditional focus of this program has been on preparing students to teach and conduct research in academic settings. Graduates of the program have compiled an enviable record. Two recently published studies, for example, found that Illinois graduates rank among the top five nationally in their publication in national and regional speech communication journals and in their membership on editorial boards of these journals. A 1992 study reported that Illinois led the nation in the number of its women graduates who ranked among the 25 most prolific female scholars publishing in communication journals. The quality of Illinois graduates has been recognized in many ways. In the National Communication Association, for instance, Illinois graduates have received the Winans/Wichelns Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address, the Wallace Award for Scholarship in Rhetoric, the Charles H. Woolbert Research Award, the Douglas H. Ehninger Rhetorical Scholar Award, Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Awards, and Golden Anniversary Fund Monograph Awards.

In recent years, efforts have been made to broaden the graduate program's objectives with additional emphases for students who contemplate employment as communication specialists in non-academic settings. For example, several faculty teach and conduct research in organizational communication and communication technology, serving graduate students who seek non-academic employment upon completion of M.A. degrees as well as students who seek doctoral-level training.

While the Illinois graduate program thus evolves in ways that reflect the changing contours of the field and needs of students, it continues to be committed to the principles that have long been its hallmark: providing students the flexibility to pursue a wide range of interests and career goals, making available to students the opportunities for growth and development that only a large and active graduate faculty can provide, and preparing students to function as responsible, superbly educated professionals in their chosen vocations.

Some Distinctive Features of Graduate Education at Illinois

The Department of Speech Communication's graduate program has several distinctive features that contribute to its quality and the success of its graduates. One such feature is the comparatively large number of graduate faculty members teaching and working in the core areas of speech communication study. At Illinois, professional training in journalism and broadcasting, speech and hearing science, theatre, and other allied fields is provided in other units on campus, not in the Department of Speech Communication. Consequently, the Department is free to concentrate all its resources on the major domains of study within speech communication itself. This means that graduate students in most of the major divisions of speech communication study at Illinois are able to work with several faculty members who share their interests. The faculty thus provides unusual depth, and students are not forced by the lack of alternatives to become excessively dependent upon any particular faculty member.

A second unusual feature of graduate education at Illinois is the very wide range of different programs of study that can be pursued. There are no specific courses required of all students, and no institutionalized “tracks” or subdivisions; hence it is possible for a student (working in conjunction with a faculty adviser and a program planning committee selected by the student) to design a program of study that is tailored specifically to the student's own goals. In designing programs, students may draw upon a broad array of resources, both inside the department and in other related units on campus. The large size of the graduate faculty at Illinois, for example, means that more different interests and varieties of expertise are represented on the faculty than is the case in many graduate programs in the field. By combining these resources creatively, students are able to construct more different kinds of programs of study than is usual. Students can design programs that lead to broad, general education in speech communication as well as programs that focus more narrowly and in great depth on particular research areas. With the resources that are available to students, the number of areas that may be studied is very great and the possibilities for designing innovative programs of study are almost without limit.

Speech Communication graduate students at Illinois also benefit from access to an array of strong supporting departments and faculty in cognate areas and from flexibility in program planning that encourages students to take advantage of offerings in supporting areas. Included among these supporting units are nationally ranked programs in such areas as psychology, linguistics, commerce and business administration, and education, as well as unique programs in such fields as criticism and interpretive theory, the study of writing, and the study of reading.