From Redbug to Gamecock

by Dr. Debbie van Tuyll

I knew I was in the right place when the first person I met at the USC Journalism School turned out to be a Fordyce Redbug.

You’ve probably never heard of the Fordyce Redbugs, which isn’t surprising, considering that they’re the mascot for a small county high school in southeastern Arkansas. But to me, the fact that Dr. Ronald Farrar was a Redbug made him a known quantity. My daddy was a Fordyce Redbug. “Miss Pat,” the dean of students at the college where I had my first teaching job, was a Fordyce Redbug. Even Bear Bryant, that legendary football coach at the school where I did my master’s, had been a Fordyce Redbug.

In every instance, the Redbugs I’d known were men and women who had no guile. They played fair, they took their responsibilities to others seriously, and they were all good, decent people. If Dr. Farrar had grown up in Fordyce, I knew chances were better than average that he was a man of integrity and a man who would do his best to help me get the most out of my studies at USC.

Ever since I finished my master’s back in the dark ages (1980), I’d wanted to work on a Ph.D. The next 16 years, though, were consumed with a professional career that spanned newspapers, public relations and academic journals; a personal life that included marriage, putting a husband through a Ph.D. program, and the birth of a daughter; and the beginnings of a teaching career. Through most of that, I had never lived close enough to a Ph.D. program even to consider working on a degree. While we were at Texas A&M (where my husband completed a Ph.D. in history), the closest journalism program was at the University of Texas, which was two hours away. While we were at Union College in Kentucky, the closest program was the University of Tennessee, which was two hours away across treacherously curving mountain roads. When you’re working full time, two hours there and two hours back plus class time is daunting.

When we moved to Augusta, Ga., I was sure my time had finally come. So I took the GRE (ugh!) and filled out the application for the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism. At the time, the Georgia journalism school took only four doctoral students a year, and while I thought I had pretty good credentials, when you’re the one under scrutiny, you’re never confident. Well, several weeks later, the letter came. I got in! Not only that, they were offering me a lot of money – a really good assistantship and tuition assistance. It looked like I really could afford to quit the adjunct teaching I was doing at a couple of local colleges and enter the program as a full-time student.

I had so many questions about the program that I made an appointment with the graduate adviser. I anticipated a cordial meeting with a professor who would help me navigate the program, talk to me about opportunities for study and discuss possible dissertation ideas. But that’s not what I found. I found a nearly empty journalism building – no one seemed to be holding office hours. I found a graduate adviser who treated me like an annoyance. The more I thought about it after I got home, the more I decided Georgia just wasn’t the place for me. It didn’t matter that I’d wanted to go back to school forever. If I was going to invest that much time and money, I wanted to invest it someplace where I would have professors who weren’t bored with graduate students, who actually thought maybe graduate students added some value to an academic institution. After considerable agonizing, I declined Georgia’s offer, even though it meant I wouldn’t be going back to school after all.

A couple of years later, I was teaching part time at the University of South Carolina-Aiken. The women faculty there got together once a week for a brown-bag lunch, and at one of those lunches, a colleague asked if I knew anything about the new journalism Ph.D. in Columbia. I didn’t when she asked, but by the end of that day, an application and a catalog were on their way.

After my experience at Georgia, I was a tad anxious when I made an appointment to come visit the graduate adviser at South Carolina. Was the fellow in Athens an example of what graduate deans were like at communications schools? It wasn’t how I remembered Dean Melton or Dean Mullins from my Alabama days, but that had been nearly two decades before. Maybe journalism schools were different than they had been.

Dr. Farrar met me in the lobby of the Coliseum on the morning of my appointment and took me into his office – the one Dr. Erik Collins is in now, there in the center of the administrative suite. We chatted, and as we did, he told me something of his background, including the fact that he was from Fordyce, Ark. His father had owned a store down the block from where my Aunt Laura Mae’s dry-cleaning shop had been. The more we talked, the more I glimpsed of Dr. Farrar’s warmth and of his dedication not only to the USC School of Journalism, but also to those of us who would be fortunate enough to have the opportunity to study there. My experience at USC that day was so different from what I had encountered in Athens. I knew I had found the right place for me, and I was so glad I had waited.

I started my Ph.D. program in fall 1996, the same fall I started a brand-new tenure track position at Augusta State University. For the next four-and-a-half years, I worked harder than I’d ever worked in my life. In addition to the doctoral studies, I had a young child at home and a full-time teaching job. I maintained an active research program – my first book was published a semester before I graduated. I built friendships with the most diverse group of people – that was one of the things that made my experience at USC so outstanding. My cohort included people from every continent except Australia – Wim and Alexander from Europe; Yousef, Mohammed and Jomah from the Middle East; Juan Carlos from South America; Dao from Africa; Tai from Asia; and a whole bunch of us from North America.

There was such synergy in our classes. We came from such different places that no matter what theory or research method or issue we were discussing, there were always more new ideas than we had time to explore. The ethics class with Dr. Rick Stephens was probably the best example. We had teleologists, deontologists, utilitarians, Kantians, postmodernists. We had one fellow who did his presentations by candlelight with a towel over his head – I’m still trying to figure out what philosophical approach he was using. That class was the epitome of what a doctoral-level class should be.

And when we got interested in a topic, we found a way to learn about it together, even if it was outside of class. At the time I went through the program, we didn’t have a doctoral level international communications class, but with the cohort we had, interest in that topic was high. We asked the school to offer such a course, but that was impossible for a variety of reasons. So, the Doctoral Student Association sponsored a series of biweekly lectures on different topics in international communications. We even got a grant to bring in an outside speaker.

I am so glad I had the opportunity to study at USC. The faculty, the curriculum and the approach to graduate education were exactly what I was looking for and what I needed. The program and the faculty were both demanding and nurturing. It would not be an exaggeration to say that going through the Ph.D. program changed my life. It made me a better teacher, a better professional and a better citizen. It also gave me an even greater appreciation for Redbugs.

In addition to teaching and conducting research on what periodicals people in North Carolina were reading in the antebellum period, she is writing two books with USC faculty members. Van Tuyll, print sequence head Pat McNeely and retired professor Henry Schulte are working on a collection of biographies on Civil War-era Confederate correspondents. She also is working with USC’s Dr. Lynn Zoch and Dr. Mark Dolan (of the University of Mississippi), on a history of public relations in the age of Ivy Lee (1887-1934), considered by some to be the founder of modern public relations.

Van Tuyll is vice chairwoman and research chairwoman of the history division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication; board member for the American Journalism Historian Association; board member for the annual symposium of the 19th Century Press, the Civil War and Free Expression; member of the Society of Professional Journalists; a member of the communications honor society Kappa Tau Alpha; and a member of another academic group, Phi Kappa Phi.

She is married to Dr. Hubert van Tuyll, chair of the History Department at Augusta State University. They have one daughter, Laura, 15, and two dogs, Icicle and Dolly.