2008 PROCEEDINGS - Public Relations Society of America

umbrella. This arrangement more closely mirrors advertising than it does public relations, in
which practitioners often focus efforts on internal audiences and non-consumer publics. Yet,
respondents from both groups tended to agree that employers are now demanding IMC skills
from graduates that their sequences do not cover.
Griffin and Pasadeos also discovered that faculty attitudes toward IMC can vary
according to age. For example, fewer respondents with six to 10 years of experience, when
compared to those with one to five years of experience, tended to agree that teaching of
advertising and public relations should be combined at the graduate level. The researchers
theorized that a greater number of younger educators are coming from doctoral programs that
stress IMC, and that they may be more familiar with IMC through literature and trade
publications.
Concerns about faculty teaching qualifications may pose further challenges to integration.
Pasadeos (2000) writes that not everyone assigned to teach IMC is necessarily qualified to do so.
He observed that while many new advertising and public relations faculty show great enthusiasm
for it, the reality of restructuring entire courses often proves to be too difficult. Too often
“integration” means an occasional PR lecture in an advertising class, or vice versa.
For programs unable to make the leap to total curricular integration, Pasadeos emphasizes
the utility of a limited approach. He suggests that for tactical coursework such as writing,
students can take separate advertising and public relations courses. However, upper-level,
strategy-based courses should be structured in a more integrated manner. In cases where no
single faculty member is qualified to teach an integrated class, a team-teaching approach could
be utilized. Such an effort requires good rapport and coordination between instructors.
According to Pasadeos, making integration work ultimately requires new staffing practices,
including hiring, and better graduate training in IMC. The best way to get more qualified faculty,
he writes, is to build stronger graduate programs in IMC.
A 2006 study by Larsen and Len-Rios built upon the work of Griffin and Pasadeos by
further exploring the status of curriculum integration from the perspective of the educator. Here,
the researchers established a strong association between educators’ attitudes toward integration
and the current level of integration at their institutions. The researchers also discovered a
similarity of perception between advertising and public relations educators about what skills are
most important to teach students.
Addressing industry demands, Duncan and Mulhern (2004) underscored the urgent need
among clients, agencies and students to find academics and university programs with a solid
understanding of IMC to teach more of it at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
However, they write that academicians have not yet provided a sufficient theoretical foundation
for IMC that will allow it to be recognized for what it can do. They conclude with the advice that
integrating courses in advertising and promotion is certainly more challenging, yet necessary if
students are to understand concepts such as relationship and brand building.
Curricular and Marketplace Issues
Several studies conducted during the 1990s advanced the importance of IMC-related
course offerings in the public relations curriculum. The 1993 Integrated Communication Task
Force (Duncan, Caywood and Newsom, 1993) recommended that advertising and public
relations students be offered an integrated communication program to include: (a) a strong
emphasis on the liberal arts; (b) training in written, oral and visual communication; (c) solid
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