Why did the UH effort to push through a merger of its communication areas fail? Was it because members of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, the body that determines the fates of such efforts, wanted to examine the issue thoroughly before voting on it? Could the Board members actually have wanted to make an informed choice?
Not according to UH's Robert Musburger, School of Communication director and leading proponent of the unified communication degree. He says the Board put off voting because "reporters" and "students" were "raising a red flag" to Board members.
You don't have to be as sharp as a tack to figure out who he's talking about. You don't even have to be as sharp as a stiletto heel. Musburger has done his best to obstruct The Daily Cougar's efforts at covering this subject since we started reporting on it.
Call us kooky, but we see a trend here. The director of the school tries to withhold information from the university newspaper when it attempts to report on the proposed amalgam of degrees. The same director voices displeasure when a governing body wants to examine the issue more thoroughly before voting.
Our question now is the same as it was two months ago: What does the school of communication not want us to know about this plan? Why all the secrecy and urgency? If this plan is such a good one, why not make all the facts and components of it plain?
The Coordinating Board apparently wants to gauge the potential effect on students this plan would have before voting on whether to approve its passage. What's so bad about that?
Aren't students the ones whom entities such as the School of Communication are supposed to be serving? The School of Communication seems not to think so. Rather, its director implies, scheduling goals are a higher priority than assurances students will benefit from a proposed change.
Maybe student concerns are worth waiting for. Maybe addressing the issue of whether student needs would be met by combining journalism, RTV and speech communication degrees into a unified "communication" degree is more important than strong-arming the Coordinating Board into rubber-stamping its approval.