Philip Merrill College of Journalism | University of Maryland

UM Giver Seeks Best School of Journalism Publisher donates $10 million to add faculty, scholarships

From the Feb. 10, 2001 edition of The Baltimore Sun, page 1A

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – A $10 million gift from Philip Merrill announced yesterday will put his name on the University of Maryland, College Park's College of Journalism. School officials hope it will also help elevate the program to the best in the country.

"This is one of the schools where we actually can be the best in the nation. It is within our grasp," says C. D. "Dan" Mote Jr., UMCP president. "That's not true in, say, engineering. We're not going to knock off M.I.T. anytime soon. But it is true in journalism."

Merrill, publisher of the Annapolis Capital newspaper and Washingtonian magazine, says that is his ambition.

"When I look at the leadership, when I look at the faculty, we really do have the capacity to go to No. 1," he says. "I'd like to back that up."

Merrill specified that the gift be spent over the next 15 to 18 years endowing three new faculty chairs, supporting students with scholarships and fellowships and improving equipment.

"The nature of a university is that it takes time to ramp things up," says Merrill, 66. "I know these things can't be done in the next three months, but I did not want this money to go into endowment because I want this done now, not 100 years from now.

"I'm an entrepreneur," he says. "I see an opportunity here to take this school to where it is the very best. I can't resist that kind of investment. It's not an investment for a return of capital; it's an investment for a return of excellence."

By all accounts, Merrill is investing in a school that has been on the rise for the past 20 years since Reese Cleghorn became its dean. Cleghorn retired as dean last year but remains on the faculty. He was replaced by Tom Kunkel.

"Reese Cleghorn put the Maryland journalism school on track to becoming the best in the country," says Eugene Patterson, retired editor and publisher of the St. Petersburg Times. "Now, with this gift, there is no reason that Tom Kunkel won't finish that job."

Kunkel accepts the challenge.

"Everybody wants to be No. 1," Kunkel says. "In our case, it actually is an attainable goal largely because the program has come so far in the last 20 years, and that's largely because of my predecessor."

Patterson says Maryland's journalism program is talked about with the traditional leaders in the field - those at Columbia University, Northwestern University and the University of Missouri.

"I think in some ways it is not only playing in that league, it is beyond it," he says. "That's because Reese brought in the values a great journalism school needs."

Cleghorn is credited with taking a risk in making the school smaller, focusing it entirely on journalism, shedding first a major in advertising and, more recently, public relations.

"There were some tensions when the public relations department was here," says Gene Roberts, former top editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer and managing editor of the New York Times who joined the Maryland faculty 10 years ago. "But I think now everyone is united in building the strongest journalism program we know how to build."

Roberts, who oversaw a staff that won 17 Pulitzer prizes at the Inquirer, former CBS White House correspondent Lee Thornton and Haynes Johnson, who won a Pulitzer at the Washington Post, are among the faculty. They will be joined next year by another Pulitzer winner from the Washington Post, David Broder.

This is a far cry from what Cleghorn found when he arrived from the Detroit Free Press in 1981, when the school's accreditation was subject to probation.

"It was in pretty sad condition. There were some good people here, but there were too many students."

At the time, any student who wanted to major in journalism could do so. About 1,200 signed up. "There were some very good students at the top of the class, but in the bottom were some that shouldn't have been in the building," he says.

Carl Sessions Stepp joined the faculty in 1983. "When I first got here, I had students who just could not keep up because they were not able to do the work," he says. "That's not the case anymore."

Cleghorn sliced the number of majors in half by making admission to the school selective.

"That told me the university was serious about improving the program," he says. "Schools are always looking for tuition, but I was allowed to cut enrollment."

Now, Cleghorn says, the school gets five applicants for every slot. It continues to reduce its numbers and accepts only 87 majors from each freshman class.

Early in his tenure, Cleghorn attracted foundation grants and put together a Board of Visitors - which included Merrill's wife, Ellen - to garner more donations. The school began getting attention in Washington and in 1988 was listed among the top 11 in the country by the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University.

"That was the breakthrough in terms of reputation," Cleghorn says.

It is difficult to compare journalism programs because no two are exactly alike. Columbia, for instance, is focused on the master's degree and has no undergraduates. Some programs emphasize academics, turning out professors, while others are purely practical, training reporters and editors.

And some, Cleghorn says, "play the numbers game," trying to attract large numbers of students to communications programs that mix journalism with the types of departments he shed - advertising, public relations and such.

UMCP's program offers only journalism, but three degrees - bachelor's, master's and doctorate - in both professional and academic tracks.

Cleghorn says he tried to hire top scholars as well as top journalists. Still, he made sure the school emphasized the basics of the profession - its history and its ethics.

"Since we are all journalists, I get to preach the gospel, go to the freshmen and tell them we are the only profession mentioned in the Constitution, that we have a unique responsibility and our democratic government depends on it," he says.

The school also has what many call its "unfair advantage" - a location inside the beltway of Washington, one of the major news centers of the world.

"It's like being next to Rome in the year 1," Merrill says.

Says Kunkel: "Washington is the confluence of the media and political worlds, ground zero of where they intersect. Reese built on that and made Maryland the place to go to learn about public affairs reporting."

It allows students access to internships and the school access to some of the country's best working journalists.

"In middle America, it's a big deal if a big journalist from Washington comes in for two days," says Cleghorn. "I'd walk out of my office here and see a big name Washington journalist leaving the building that I didn't even know was coming."

The school has also attracted a variety of associates - the Knight Center, which offers seminars on specialized journalism; the Casey Center for journalists covering family issues; the Humphrey fellowships, which bring in international journalists; and the National Association of Black Journalists, now headquartered in College Park.

"Everywhere you turn there is a kind of journalistic ferment," Roberts says.

Stepp says Cleghorn was able to attract programs even during the recession of the early 1990s when state funds were drying up.

"You had a steady sense that good things were happening even though other parts of the university were in retreat," he says.

The school also publishes the highly regarded American Journalism Review.

"I go into at least 15 newsrooms a year all over the country and there is not one that doesn't recognize AJR and associate it with Maryland," says Stepp, a senior editor of the magazine. Kunkel says the school's next challenge is getting students ready for "media convergence" - being able to report in newspapers, on television and on the Web. The school produces a half-hour nightly newscast for local cable systems. Its Annapolis news bureau reports state government news on TV and in print.

Along with the Merrill gift, Kunkel announced the start of a campaign to raise an additional $20 million, with part of that earmarked to help pay for a new building to replace its 1957 facility.

The school becomes the third at UMCP to be named for a donor, joining the Robert H. Smith School of Business and the A. James Clark School of Engineering. Both of those came after $15 million donations, but UMCP officials say that on a per capita basis, the journalism school, with fewer than 600 undergraduates and 70 graduate students, is making out better with $10 million.

"This is the number I suggested for what we wanted to do," says Mote. "This wasn't a case of someone cruising around the campus looking for a few square feet to put his name on and wondering how much it would cost."

Merrill, a graduate of Cornell, says higher education is one of his passions, along with the Chesapeake Bay. He gave $7.5 million to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation for its new building, which also will be named after him.

"I don't see any reason not to give it away," he says, explaining his philanthropy. "I don't need it. We have enough.

"My three children have been educated and are all independent. We've got a place to live. I've got a 41-foot boat, and I don't need an 80-foot boat," he says. "It's payback time. The money was made basically in this state, and I want to put it back in the state."