Communications Teachers, Postsecondary

• Elocution manuals1879–1920

  Elocution manuals and the speaking body (pre-electronic pedagogy)

  The founding technology of the communications teaching profession was the printed elocution manual combined with the professor's own body as demonstration instrument. Texts like Samuel Silas Curry's "The Province of Expression" (1891) and James Rush's earlier "The Philosophy of the Human Voice" (1827) gave instructors a written foundation; the classroom was a space for vocal drills, gesture training, and the performance of set pieces. The blackboard was the only classroom technology. Teaching was entirely experiential: you watched the professor demonstrate a rhetorical figure, you practiced it, you were critiqued. Assessment was public recitation. The professor's primary qualification was mastery of the performing arts of oratory and elocution.

• Radio broadcasting1920–1950

  Radio broadcasting and the first mass media lab (KDKA 1920 through early TV era)

  Commercial radio broadcasting launched with KDKA Pittsburgh on November 2, 1920, and within a decade universities with communication programs were running on-campus broadcast studios for teaching purposes. The University of Wisconsin's WHA Radio (1917, licensed 1922) was among the first. For communications faculty, radio introduced a genuinely new pedagogical object: students had to learn not just to speak persuasively in person but to perform for an invisible, distributed audience, projecting personality and information through a microphone. The Wisconsin faculty (whose Department of Public Speaking became the Department of Speech in 1920) were among the first to integrate broadcast media into a speech curriculum. By the late 1940s, with television beginning its commercial expansion, communications programs were adding broadcast production to their course offerings and confronting the question of what it meant to teach visual media alongside oral performance.

• Social science research methods1947–1970

  Social science research methods and the "four founders" model (Lazarsfeld, Lewin, Hovland, Lasswell)

  The institutionalization of communication as an empirical social science was driven by four scholars whose wartime work transformed how the discipline understood itself. Paul Lazarsfeld (Bureau of Applied Social Research, Columbia, 1944), Kurt Lewin (group dynamics), Carl Hovland (persuasion research), and Harold Lasswell (political communication) collectively introduced survey research, content analysis, and experimental methodology into communication departments alongside the older speech pedagogy tradition. Wilbur Schramm founded the Institute for Communications Research at Illinois in 1947, the model for subsequent academic research centers. For communications faculty, this era introduced a profound identity division: were they training practitioners (speech teachers, journalists, broadcasters) or conducting social scientific research? The departmental name changes of the era (from "Speech" toward "Speech Communication" or "Journalism and Communication") reflected this ambivalence. Faculty hired in this era needed both rhetorical knowledge and social science methods.

• Video production suites1970–1995

  Video production suites and the journalism lab (professional-grade cameras, editing bays)

  The 1970s broadcast television expansion created massive demand for trained journalists, producers, and PR professionals, and communications programs responded by building professional-grade campus newsrooms and broadcast labs. Facilities with ENG (electronic news gathering) cameras, editing suites, and student-run campus TV stations became the defining capital investment of a communications program's credibility in this era. The Missouri Method, with its student newspaper and later its broadcast station, became the template many programs followed: teach through professional production, not just classroom theory. For faculty, this meant that a research publication record was no longer sufficient preparation for teaching broadcast production courses; the dual-track hiring pattern (research faculty versus industry-professional lecturers) became common in journalism and broadcast programs and has persisted to the present.

• World Wide Web1993–2010

  World Wide Web and digital newsroom tools (Mosaic 1993, online journalism labs, HTML/CMS platforms)

  The introduction of Mosaic in 1993 and the subsequent explosive growth of the commercial web forced communications faculty to add digital media literacy to a curriculum that was already carrying speech, journalism, broadcasting, and public relations. The first "online journalism" courses appeared at major programs in the mid-1990s; by the early 2000s most journalism programs had added a digital reporting track alongside print and broadcast. Content management systems (WordPress launched 2003), blogging, and the collapse of the traditional news business model (accelerated by Craigslist's disruption of newspaper classified advertising from about 2000) created a period of intense curricular pressure and existential debate. The Chronicle of Higher Education covered this era as "the death of the journalism school"; in practice, programs expanded rather than contracted because communication as an undergraduate major grew during the internet era, even as journalism program enrollment fell.

  Effect on the work

  Communication programs experienced divergent enrollment trends in this era: journalism programs saw enrollment declines as students questioned the career prospects in a contracting newspaper industry, while communication studies, PR, and media studies programs grew strongly. Total bachelor's degrees in communication and journalism grew from roughly 50,000 per year in 1993 to over 65,000 by 2010 (NCES).

• Social media2007–2020

  Social media and mobile platforms (Facebook 2004, Twitter 2006, iPhone 2007, Instagram 2010)

  The smartphone and social media era transformed communications pedagogy more comprehensively than any prior technology. Every sub-field of the discipline was affected: journalism faculty added social media reporting and verification to syllabi; PR faculty added social media strategy and crisis communication on digital platforms; speech communication faculty added digital self-presentation and online persuasion; organizational communication faculty added computer-mediated communication theory. Yoodli (AI speech coaching, founded 2021 but reflecting a trend that began with YouTube as a rehearsal tool) emerged from this era. Communications faculty faced the dual challenge of keeping their professional-practice content current (the tools changed every two to three years) while maintaining the theoretical depth that distinguished academic instruction from professional training. The proliferation of communication-adjacent content on YouTube, podcasts, and social media created the first era where students arrived with significant self-taught media production skills, raising the bar for what classroom instruction had to add.

• Generative AI2022–present

  Generative AI and synthetic media (ChatGPT Nov 2022, Midjourney 2022, deepfake proliferation)

  The November 2022 public release of ChatGPT marked the beginning of the most disruptive technology transition in the history of communications education because it struck at the discipline's core subject matter: what it means to produce, verify, and evaluate human communication. Generative AI can write news stories, produce press releases, generate persuasive speeches, and create photorealistic images and deepfake video at a quality indistinguishable to untrained audiences. This is not a tool that augments the communications professor's administrative work (though it does that too); it is a technology that makes the object of study, authentic human communication, harder to define, verify, and teach. AEJMC's 2025 survey found that 73% of communications faculty had already revised course learning outcomes, the highest revision rate of any discipline-specific survey in the research base. The NCA published a white paper in 2025 on "Artificial Intelligence and the Communication Discipline" making the case that AI "transforms what it means to communicate authentically." Yoodli AI speech coaching (500,000+ users by 2024-25, deployed at Oregon State, ASU, and Michigan) demonstrated the augmentation path for the speech communication sub-field. Reality Defender's deployment at NBC News and Reuters for deepfake detection established a new professional competency that communications faculty became the primary educators responsible for teaching.

  Effect on the work

  Employment projections for 25-1122 in the BLS 2024-2034 cycle show modest growth (+2.1%), suggesting the AI disruption has not (yet) translated into headcount reductions. The more significant near-term effect has been on the composition and content of the work: faculty spend more time redesigning assessments, revising learning outcomes, and engaging with AI ethics debates, and less time delivering static lecture content.

What's changing in your day

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.