Overview of the CMCI Program

Statement of Core Skills, Competencies and Scholarly and Creative Initiatives

Given its mission, CMCI attracts students, faculty and industry and creative professionals from across the closely related fields of media, communication and information. All of those either rostered in or affiliated with the new college accordingly share a set of skills, competencies and scholarly and creative interests that form a common core. This core is expressed at all levels of the college, from undergraduate curriculum and graduate training to the research and creative work of its faculty and both internal and external affiliates.

The Undergraduate Experience

Thus all undergraduates enrolled in CMCI take as part of their experience a Core Curriculum designed to provide the broad intellectual framework common to each of the individual disciplines in which students eventually major. In addition to conveying the conceptual tools and perspectives all students in the college need, the Core Curriculum supplies the shared body of knowledge, exemplars and ideas required to build a coherent intellectual and creative community. Distinctive features of CMCI’s Core Curriculum are therefore its economy and simplicity, aiming thereby to instill a common sense of focus and purpose in its students.

Undergraduates enrolled in CMCI also acquire the technical and computational skills needed to thrive in today’s networked media environment. While training in these skills will form part of students’ shared experience, instruction is nonetheless integrated in each student’s chosen field of emphasis as part of the set of requirements needed to complete any given major. In keeping with the culture of collaboration the new college fosters, the courses that enable students to meet these shared technical and computational requirements come from a variety of sources—for instance, as CMCI courses offered by faculty in one of the college’s own academic units, or as courses taught within the framework of the Technology, Arts and Media (TAM) program currently administered by the Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society (ATLAS). So while contributing to each student’s core experience, these courses form part of rather than an addition to their chosen majors, ensuring efficient progress toward the degree.

What is true of the core experience of CMCI’s undergraduates is equally true of their more advanced and specialized work. Each academic unit, of whatever kind, has a curriculum of its own, expressed as a set of requirements determined by its faculty and fulfilled by the courses that faculty design. However, precisely because the faculty of the college’s various departments, centers and programs share many interests and forms of expertise, courses offered by one unit may fulfill requirements in another. In addition, then, to making it possible to economize instructional effort by creating potential efficiencies through overlapping lower-level (1000–2000) and upper-level (3000–4000) undergraduate requirements, faculty’s common scholarly and creative interests introduce a growing degree of interdisciplinary collaboration as students advance toward their degrees. Thanks to these efficiencies the college enjoys greater flexibility in encouraging team teaching both within and across departments and programs. CMCI thus exploits its inherent interdisciplinarity in such a way as to deepen students’ interdisciplinary experience still more.

The Graduate Experience and Faculty Research and Creative Work

CMCI’s collaborative character is even more visible at the graduate level and in terms of its faculty’s scholarly and creative work. A prime example is the Doctoral Program in Media Research and Practice, which offers three PhD tracks, each lodged in a different yet related department: the first in Strategic Communication, taught by the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Media Design; the second in Journalism Studies, taught by the Department of Journalism; and the third in the Department of Media Studies. In addition to creating efficiencies by combining resources, the program underscores the shared technical and intellectual as well as logistical needs of the three units involved, turning streamlined administration into scholarly and creative synergy. CMCI’s signature spirit of collaboration is further reflected in the various centers the college contains: the Center for Environmental Journalism (CEJ); the Center for Media, Religion and Culture (CMRC); and the Center for the Study of Conflict, Collaboration and Creative Governance (3CG). It is also reflected in the close relations the new college hopes to entertain with centers elsewhere on campus—for example, with the Center for Humanities and the Arts (CHA); the Center for Media, Arts and Performance (CMAP); and the Stan Brakhage Center.

Journalists learn from information scholars about the nature and uses of big data while sharing with them their skills in narrative and communication. Members of the communication faculty deepen colleagues’ insights into the underlying forms and principles of organizational, interpersonal and public conversation that structure the worlds in which advertising and strategic communication operate while gaining access from colleagues in these areas to problems and case studies they might have overlooked. Meanwhile, faculty in media studies benefit from direct exposure to the technologies and creative processes explored by media production faculty, offering in return a deeper historical, social and theoretical insight into the way media shape, even as they are shaped by, the wider society they serve. Centers like CMRC, CEJ and 3CG already harness CU’s exceptional multidisciplinary resources in everything from cultural studies to environmental science and from journalism to media design in focused collaborative initiatives of all sorts. By bringing practitioners in all of these areas together with artists and researchers in information science, media production and intermedia art, writing and performance, CMCI provides the environment for many more such common enterprises in the future.