Wilbur Schramm

Wilbur Lang Schramm (August 5, 1907 – December 27, 1987) was an American scholar and "authority on mass communications". He founded the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1936 and served as its first director until 1941. Schramm was hugely influential in establishing communications as a field of study in the United States, and the establishing of departments of communication studies across U.S. universities. Wilbur Schramm is considered the founder of the field of Communication Studies. He was the first individual to identify himself as a communication scholar; he created the first academic degree-granting programs with communication in their name; and he trained the first generation of communication scholars. Schramm's mass communication program in the Iowa School of Journalism was a pilot project for the doctoral program and for the Institute of Communications Research, which he founded in 1947 at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, now housed in the UIUC College of Media. At Illinois, Wilbur Schramm set in motion the patterns of scholarly work in communication study that continue to this day. His father Arch Schramm played the violin, his mother Louise the piano, and Wilbur Schramm himself played the flute. His father was a lawyer in Marietta, Ohio. Schramm developed a severe stutter at age five due to an improperly performed tonsillectomy. from Marietta College, where he received a bachelor's degree in political science while working as a reporter and editor at The Marietta Daily Herald. When he graduated summa cum laude from Marietta College in history and political science in 1929, he did give a valedictory speech. In 1932, he received a Ph.D. in American literature from the University of Iowa where he studied under Norman Foerster and befriended Wallace Stegner. He wrote his dissertation on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha.

His own stories resulted in his award of the O. Henry Prize for fiction in 1942 for his short story "Windwagon Smith." His interests extended beyond the humanistic tradition, and some of his early work examined the economic conditions surrounding the publication of Chaucer's tales, and audience reactions to poetry written in different meters.

The outbreak of World War II led Schramm to join the Office of War Information in 1941 to investigate the nature of propaganda; it was during this time when he began employing behaviorist methodologies.

Later career (1943–1975) In 1943, Schramm returned to academia as director of the University of Iowa's School of Journalism. In 1947 he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign as director of the Institute of Communications Research, which he set up as a "flexible and non-territorial" organization unlike traditional academic departments.

In 1955 he moved to Stanford University to serve as founding director of the Institute for Communication Research until 1973. In 1961 he was appointed Janet M. Peck Professor of International Communication until he retired as professor emeritus in 1973. From 1959 to 1960 he served as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. From 1973 to 1975, Schramm served as Director of the East-West Center's Communication Institute in Honolulu, Hawaii, and later held the titles of director emeritus and Distinguished Senior Fellow.

In Mass Media and National Development (1964) Schramm said that mass media in developing countries needed to play three roles—those of watchdog, policy maker, and teacher for change and modernization.

Works He wrote 30 books. His most important product was undoubtedly the new Ph.D.s in communication who fanned out across the world after studying with Schramm at Stanford, to spread the concept of communication study.