Letter from the Director: December 2025

This month I had the privilege of attending presentations by three teams from our J449 Account Planning and Strategy class, which took on the SJMC this semester as a client to consider how we ought to think about “the curriculum of the future.”

I was so impressed by the depth of their research and the keenness of their insights overall. But one moment struck me most. One team reported that their research revealed that SJMC helped students feel a strong sense of ambition, curiosity, empowerment and belonging.

I think a lot about what students pay to come to this university and what value we give them in return. We owe them the kind of education that delivers such solid skills as data analysis, interviewing, writing, message production, design, media planning and the like. We also need to help them build the alleged soft skills that help us relate to each other, such as being able to communicate and collaborate. I call them “alleged soft skills,” by the way, because in my experience, they’re usually the hardest to master.

But what I see embedded in that list is yet another category, and I’m not sure what to call it. SJMC is helping students build the skill of coming to believe in themselves.

When I started here 26 years ago, my director, Sharon Dunwoody, said I was hired “to train students for jobs that do not yet exist.” A daunting challenge, to be sure.

But that memorable line proved to be a valuable reminder to always return to adaptability as a core tenet of our curriculum. We do not know what is coming next, so we need to equip students with a basic set of essential skills and the confidence to deploy them in new ways, to adapt to changing media environments and audience needs.

Our classes should be about working hard, taking risks and trying new things. Students aren’t always going to get it right, so we should be well-versed in helping them get up off the mat when they get knocked down. There’s a reason we give 10 points for a fact error in our intro class instead of the dreaded zero some of our peers deliver. When you try and fail, learn from it and come back stronger.

So I found it incredibly heartening to see on that presentation screen that our students are feeling empowered. That they’re ambitious and curious. That they belong.

What could be more valuable than that?

On, Wisconsin!

Kathleen Bartzen Culver
Director, School of Journalism and Mass Communication