The childhood lessons I still use as dean
Dear Media School community,
I grew up with a psychoanalyst and a professor of psychiatry as a father. He taught me about psychology and mental health, about the pain the average person feels, and the good that can come from trying to heal that pain. He was also a movie buff and had a collection of over 7,000 DVDs, laserdiscs, and VHSs, and sparked in me a love of all things media.
My mom was a magazine editor, but also aspiring novelist, poet, and painter, who didn’t feel constrained by a particular medium. From her, I learned to follow your muse to where it leads to you. She also taught me to put unexpected ideas and things together.
I followed my muse, and my winding career took me from music composition, to screenplay writing, to documentary production, to academia.
Pedagogically, I’m especially interested in how combined disciplines or people in different disciplines lead to the best conversations and learning. When I was first introduced to The Media School, I was excited by the potential to bring disciplines together in a way I had not seen done before. That’s one of the main reasons I took this job as dean.
A key question I am always asking as dean is: What can The Media School do to model the best practices in media? Drawing from the lessons from my father, I also ask: What can we do to address mental health?
We can use media to change the conversation about mental health. But our own students and faculty have shared their mental health concerns with me — especially those working in journalism, because of the fraught nature of the world and the state of the industry.
So the most critical question is: How do we address the specific mental health concerns of our student journalists?
This question is key in our plan to reimagine student media, which we presented last week. Initiatives in this area include:
- semester-long courses on media and mental health, and trauma-informed reporting
- Story Lab sessions on journalistic self-care and trauma reporting
- an annual, non-credit self-care and trauma reporting workshop
- a plan to protect student journalists against threats to their physical and emotional safety
Thanks to professor of practice Tom French for leading that effort.
The plan presents opportunities to create something amazing by having different media interact. To think about words, sound, and visuals all together. And to think about the business of media and what constitute the best models — maintaining core values such as editorial independence, but experimenting with an open mind. It’s about content, business, and a desire to look at all in a fresh and exciting way.
I have high hopes for our plan — yes, it will be hard and require ingenuity, but I believe in our students, faculty, and staff, and the alumni industry leaders on our Dean’s Council who are committed to helping our students accomplish all.
The Media School is knee-deep in our strategic planning in association with our 10-year anniversary. We will see what ideas emerge from that process, but I expect they will underscore our core, unchanging values:
Ethics.
Fact-based reporting.
A belief in the conversation among the past, present, and future, whether it to be technology, distribution systems, or particular works of media.
The power of media to change the conversation around mental health.
And the power of bringing disciplines together in new ways, whether it’s in the sphere of journalism, communication, film, game design, or any of the other disciplines we represent.
I can’t wait.
Sincerely,
David Tolchinsky
Dean
The Media School at Indiana University