The Armory houses CU’s new College of Media, Communication and Information. (Lee Pruitt/CU Independent)
CU’s College of Media, Communication and Information is already accepting students, and the ball is rolling toward the college’s official opening next fall.
It still doesn’t have a dean, but the list of potential candidates has been narrowed to five. Thomas Finholt, one of the candidates, held a public session Tuesday to explain his vision for the new college.
“We are a grand experiment and we want students to be engaged,” Finholt said. “Not everything is going to be perfect.”
Finholt said the dean has to be the point person for networking, as the new college doesn’t really have alumni yet. The new college will help usher in a new generation of students in communication fields, including journalism, he said.
“I don’t see anything in the college’s framework that is antithetical to journalistic principles,” Finholt said.
He said the school will work to find the paradigm that will become the future of journalism, replacing newspapers.
“If anyone is going to be poised to figure out what the successful paradigm is, it’s going to be the people in this college,” Finholt said. “We don’t know (what the paradigm is), but we can explore like crazy, and that’s about the best we can do.”
“The growth projections for the college range from ‘really exciting’ to ‘scary,’” Finholt said.
He also said that the new college gives students an opportunity to be a part of something greater than themselves.
“There is a grander upside than might be true of graduating in a traditional program,” Finholt said, when asked why prospective students would want to be a part of the new college. “You are pioneers. You are part of creating something that has never been seen…Undergraduates today understand that there have been seismic changes in the economy, and in careers and livelihoods and the ways that information is changing have a lot to do with that.”
He emphasized that a key to attracting talented people is to make sure they get to work with other talented people.
“This is where all the cool people are going to be,” Finholt said.
Finholt said the CMCI’s individual programs are spread out across campus, which makes it harder to communicate.
“Day one, I’d like to wave the magic wand and have a 150,000 square foot building emerge,” he said.
Finholt worries that students already admitted to the school might not be completely informed as to what the college is all about.
“I’m not sure those students know what they’re getting into,” he said. “In some sense, you’re not delivering the full potential, but start-ups are like that.”
Whatever the college’s focus, Finholt said support for moving forward is going to be key.
“If I go charging over the horizon and no one is behind me that’s a disaster,” Finholt said.
Contact CU Independent Breaking News Editor Sam Klomhaus at Samuel.Klomhaus@Colorado.edu.
