After 33 years, SIPA is still alive and well and living in South Carolina

By Dr. Kay Phillips

Creative juices flow when delegates arrive each spring for the Southern Interscholastic Press Association Convention.

In 1973 more than 250 students poured into Capstone Dormitory at the University of South Carolina in Columbia and learned their first assignment was to turn gallons of ice cream and chocolate syrup, pounds of fruit, whipped cream, and oodles of toppings into mouth-watering banana splits.

“We loved it!” Delegate Diane Daniel from Henderson, N.C., said 33 years later. “It was so unexpected and made us feel special. Those banana splits let us know we were in for a learning experience we’d never forget.”

That convention was SIPA’s first in South Carolina and the first planned by new Assistant Director Beth Dickey. But word passed from student to student, and they came to expect Dickey-designed, three-day educations they would always remember.

The 2006 convention will mark a sea change for SIPA: Dickey, the heart and soul of the association’s year-round work and the crafter of its convention programs, will retire in June.

The organization, which had thrived so well at Washington and Lee in Virginia since 1925 that it had outgrown its home there, was described in only its third year after moving to the University of Georgia at Athens as “rather moribund,” and having “no real assets.” However, when SIPA moved to USC-Columbia in 1973, Dean of the College of Journalism Albert T. Scroggins Jr. had definite plans for improvement.

SIPA Finds a New Home

“We launched SIPA,” he said, “under the slogan: ‘SIPA is alive and well and living in South Carolina.’”

Although the move was not unanimously approved by the College of Journalism faculty, Dr. Scroggins was excited by the possibilities of the university’s being home to an active group of young journalists. His reasoning: “As dean, I had the authority to make the final decision, and I decided we should acquire SIPA, and we did.”

Not wanting to burden the current faculty with extra work and wanting to assure SIPA the financial, moral and educational support it deserved, he also decided the school’s dean should shoulder the director’s position. That system continues today.

His next step was to see that the school funded a new, full-time journalism position, only one-third of which could be for an assistant director for SIPA. Recognizing that the association’s survival was already in jeopardy and that the association’s work was “both labor intensive and time consuming,” he must select just the right enthusiastic, dedicated worker to handle its everyday affairs.

“We hired Beth as assistant director, one of the best decisions we ever made,” Dr. Scroggins said. She would devote the rest of her time to teaching newswriting, advertising and public relations and performing faculty duties in the college.

With no secretary, a few hours of time each day and only two or three boxes of records retrieved from the University of Georgia, Dickey and dedicated SIPA advisers set out to re-create what Dean Scroggins called “this great and much-beloved association.”

Dickey’s banana splits in May 1973 at the first USC SIPA convention celebrated the success of that early group. She dived into SIPA work and has rarely come up for air in the 33 years since.

In the late ’80s, SIPA’s Executive Committee changed Dickey’s title from assistant to associate director, and in the late ’90s to executive director to more accurately reflect her growing SIPA responsibilities.

That first year, 1973, was also the 50th anniversary of USC’s College of Journalism, and she had much to accomplish for SIPA’s convention to be part of that celebration. Her need for at least a part-time secretary and for office equipment was apparent immediately.

Working with Dean Scroggins, Dickey soon reorganized SIPA’s system of duplication and mailing. She immediately secured convention facilities, a task she has perfected through the years, working with Columbia hotels and, in the 1980s, Myrtle Beach hotels to provide the perfect meeting places, lodging, and banquet and auditorium venues.

A Labor of Love

A skilled listener, Dickey begins each year’s convention by paying close attention to the Executive Committee’s wishes during its fall planning meeting. Before that meeting she has carefully selected its site for two conditions: Is it conducive to clear-minded planning, and does it reflect SIPA’s appreciation for the committee members’ donating their time and paying their own ways to this planning session? The latter condition is indicative of the value Dickey places on people, a strong factor in her success.

Following that meeting, she and her staff of student helpers implement as many of the Executive Committee’s recommendations as possible. All the while Dickey continues regular office work: calling and writing prospective speakers, locating those charismatic teachers who will change attendees’ publications and lives, managing the mailing list, publishing newsletters, and, since the mid-‘90s, tending to the needs of SIPA’s summer workshop, the Carolina Journalism Institute.

Inspired by fellow journalists and by aspiring journalism students, Dickey’s love for her work results in total dedication to it, and with that dedication has come local, regional and national recognition of her skills and successes.

Among many honors for her work with scholastic journalism, she holds the SIPA Distinguished Service Award, the Columbia Scholastic Press Association Gold Key and James F. Paschal Award, the National Scholastic Press Association Pioneer Award and the S.C. Scholastic Press Association Albert T. Scroggins Award.

She was selected to present the Honors Lecture for the Scholastic Journalism Division of AEJMC at the 2003 convention in Kansas City.

She has also been listed in Marquis Who’s Who in the Media and Communications, Who’s Who in American Women, Who’s Who in American Education and Who’s Who in America. She was also listed in the Dictionary of International Biography, National Register’s Who’s Who in Executives and Professionals, and as the Meeting Professional to Watch in 2003 by Convention South Magazine.

A Fitting Finale

For the theme of Dickey’s last convention as SIPA’s executive director, “Freedom First” is most fitting. In her quiet but commanding way, Dickey has spent most of her life championing the cause of free speech for everyone. As an irrepressible advocate for First Amendment rights, she respects and supports responsible students who work daily to claim those freedoms for themselves. She lives this year’s convention theme.

During her own high school years, when she edited the school’s newspaper, Dickey says an indelible memory is “‘My principal let me do it.’” A major influence in her life -- her secondary school principal – encouraged her and other students “to take risks, to learn to deal with challenges…to be curious, to question things that didn’t seem right….”

Another indelible and inspiring memory for Dickey involves a 1969 student free speech case at Troy State (Alabama) University. When the university censored an editorial the campus newspaper editor wrote, the young man took the case to court and won. That student editor, Gary Dickey, became Beth’s husband. Together they have continued their crusade to free captive student voices, contributing two free spirits of their own to help the cause: their son and daughter, Drew and Erin.

After more than three decades of Beth’s leadership, the Southern Interscholastic Press Association has the model and experience to ride out the sea change of her June 2006 retirement.