American Magazine: August 2014

From
Aristotelian
times to
the age
of Twitter,
people have
educated,
entertained,
and
enlightened
humankind
through
stories.
American University began teaching
journalism in the 1920s, when pen,
paper, and film were the primary tools
of the trade. Nearly a century later, the
School of Communication’s new home
in the McKinley Building features mindblowing
technology like a Sony 4K cinema
projector (one of only five deployed in
North America) in the 144-seat Michael
Forman Theatre and state-of-the-art
television and audio studios in a gleaming
2,500-square-foot media innovation lab.
You can’t walk through the halls
without seeing students pecking at their
phones or swiping pages on their tablets.
Laptops are rendering desktops obsolete,
and digital cameras have made darkrooms
feel like relics of the dark ages.
In the world of communication,
technology seems to evolve as quickly as
breaking news. But yet, at its core, SOC’s
mission hasn’t wavered.
“Things change all the time, but
for us, what has been fairly solid is
good storytelling,” says professor John
Douglass, director of the film and media
arts division. He’s been at AU since
1978. “How you use [technology] really
depends on your vision and the stories
you’re telling. We need to prepare our
students to tell their stories in whatever
medium is best suited for the story
and for the audience that they’re
reaching out to.”
But stories don’t exist in a vacuum.
Like a tree falling in that hard-to-wrapyour-head-around
forest with no one in
it, they must be heard (or read or seen)
to exist at all.
“Story is a platform for engagement,”
Dean Jeffrey Rutenbeck says. “It’s
a construct, a narrative strategy.
Engagement is ultimately the concept
that unites all the pieces of the school.
We are engaging people through the
journalism that we do, through the films
we make, the campaigns we develop, and
eventually the games we make. We’re
not just telling stories to do one thing.
We seek not just to entertain but to
inform, to transform; we seek to revise,
to reinforce. There are a lot of verbs that
come along with storytelling.”
SOC’s January move into historic
McKinley, whose cornerstone was laid
by President Theodore Roosevelt in
1902, is the latest chapter in SOC’s story.
Ever since being granted independence
in 1984 (prior to that it was housed
in the College of Arts and Sciences),
it’s been a nomadic unit, its faculty,
classrooms, and centers headquartered
on the cramped third floor of the Mary
Graydon Center but also scattered
throughout campus. The relocation
to McKinley, which underwent a $24
million renovation that preserved its
classic architecture while adding a
sleek, modern expansion, was in one
sense a reunification.
“By occupying such a prominent,
historic place on campus, it reaffirms
the role that communication plays in
the structure and life of the university,”
Rutenbeck says. “It’s a promotion of sorts.
You go from a smattering of spaces and
places to a powerful physical presence.”
To celebrate
SOC’s new
home—and to
contextualize
it—we asked
faculty, alumni,
and current
students to
share with us
a story that
impacted
them in some
meaningful way.
It didn’t have to be an article that won
a Pulitzer or a film that took home an
Oscar (though an Oscar winner is among
our storytellers), we said, rather, just a
tale that for some reason made a lasting
difference in your life.
In The Art of Storytelling, Nancy
Mellon writes that “because there is a
natural storytelling urge and ability in all
human beings, even just a little nurturing
of this impulse can bring about astonishing
and delightful results.”
We think she’s right. We hope you
do, too.
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