Our Mission
Mission Statement
We educate students to have a critical understanding and comprehensive body of knowledge of the techniques, theories and social consequences of our complex national and global communications system. In our technologically intense fields in which method and form are major concerns, we educate students to become intellectual, artistic and ethical professional leaders in this rapidly changing information environment.
In the Jesuit tradition, we are committed to understanding and advancing social justice through service to our university, our communities and our disciplines. As scholars, staff, student and alumni, we value the media as social instruments and are committed to the ethical integration and application of communication skills, knowledge and values in the interconnected and diverse world around us.
Purpose
The faculty of the School of Mass Communication clearly recognize the responsibility implied in the Goals Statement: “Loyola is potentially strong in three areas that are in some significant way unique: communications, music and religion. By achieving excellence in these unique areas and sustaining its strong undergraduate departments, Loyola will be a significant force in higher education.”
The school strives for excellence primarily by participating in the university’s pursuit of truth within the context of the Christian faith and the Jesuit tradition. We particularly pursue truth about communications as work to be done and truth about the media as social instruments. In teaching mass communication as work to be done, the faculty teaches a set of courses in the techniques of mass communication, and those courses are designed to bring students to competence in that work. The faculty is concerned not solely with techniques as they are practiced in the field, however, but also with the principles, which underlie those practices – especially the “how” and the controlling “why” – so that graduates will be able to adapt to, even guide, the rapid changes in the field.
The school is intimately involved in the university’s mission to teach the liberal arts. The faculty sees it as essential that communicators be educated in the traditional areas, which forge a more common bond with others in order that they might more effectively communicate with others. In a technology-intense field such as ours, in which method and form are major concerns, the faculty are insistent that our emphasis as part of the university be placed upon content or matter lest we graduate individuals who are adept at the use of equipment but have little or nothing to communicate. It is the faculty’s hope that in studying the arts and sciences, students will come to see how technique depends upon content and will employ their humanistic knowledge in their communications exercises.
The School of Mass Communication, in line with the university’s educational goals, strives to produce a student who is both educated and trained, one who combines critical awareness, ability to make decisions, and technical and organizational competence. A solid basis in the techniques of the field is expected of our students, but we also stress a comprehensive view of the theory, the ethics and the social consequences of our complex national and global communications systems.
Our goal is to produce graduates who are both technically competent and also able to provide vision and leadership in the complex field of communications.