2000 Presidential address--Communication's relevance: Reflections on success

IN REVIEWING SOME SPEECHES OF FORMER PRESIDENTS, Bill Eadie, Bob Avery, Jolene Koester, Betsy Bach, and Peter Andersen, they challenged us to be better citizens, teachers, scholars and academics. While I am not above rising to a challenge or offering a few of my own, today I would like to offer words

of praise. As Celeste Condit (1985) pointed out, the epideictic functions of rhetoric are to understand, share, and display community. We know that children and colleagues flourish in an environment of praise. Today, I choose to praise certain of our values as a communication discipline and as Western States Communication Association. We can always improve on the practices of our values, but we must also stop at signposts and congratulate our accomplishments.

First, ours is a discipline with a growing sense and embrace of diversity. Let me use my own Department as a partial example. When I joined the speech faculty at Utah, our speech and journalism departments (now the Communication Department) had 15 tenure track positions. Of those fifteen positions, only one person was a woman and no one was a person of color. Today, we have 30 faculty. Fourteen of our faculty are women and 4 are people of color. My department is a microcosm of the embrace of diversity among faculty hires in the field of communication.