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	Blueprints - September 2003 Edition
Homepage Back Archives	Blueprints - September 2003 Edition

		Cutting edge graduate Certificate in Strategic Communication: Bridging the gap between practice and theory By Kathleen Lamb’04 A new graduate certificate in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences will be offered this fall under the direction of Dr. Susan Mackey-Kallis. The graduate certificate program includes classes such as: strategic communication theory, qualitative research in communication, and quantitative research in communication as well as choice electives from the communication department and other graduate departments all taught by extensively published professors. “What’s particularly stand out about the program,” explained Dr. Mackey-Kallis, “is the way it grounds students in the fundamentals of strategic communication and ethical considerations for expressing ideas within different mediums, while also offering them the ability to tailor their coursework to meet specific career interests and needs. Students can take classes on either a part-time or full-time basis, allowing working professionals the flexibility to take one class per semester, or full-time students to finish the certificate in as little as one semester and one summer.” This program, designed to prepare students for the real world of communication, uses theoretical communication as a base and implements that knowledge into practice. In the new graduate certificate program, students will prep for real world communication situations through an interdisciplinary communication approach linking all aspects of communication into one framework, because as chair of communication, Dr. Terry Nance said, “In the real world there are no neat boundaries between rhetoric and mass media. We don’t have those linear lines of distinction, everything merges together.” Nance and Mackey-Kallis have great expectations for this new program and believe that it will create a closer link between graduate and undergraduate studies. Nance expects that, it will not only make her faculty sharper, but also implement concepts taught in Villanova’s undergraduate classes into an over-arching framework of communication. Exceptional undergraduate students will have access to communication graduate classes offered by the new program and graduate students will be able to transform a bachelor’s degree in communication into a master’s degree. Mackey-Kallis stressed, “We think one particularly attractive quality of the certificate in Strategic Communication will be the ability of the certificate to students, if they so chose, to apply for the full masters, and if accepted, simply ‘rollover’ their certificate into a masters in communication by taking 15 additional credits.” True to Augustinian values and beliefs, the new communication program recognizes the power of rhetoric in accordance with what Augustine termed the summas bonum or good life. Augustine himself was a passionate rhetorician. In 383 A.D., Augustine established his own school of rhetoric in Rome and trained rhetoricians in Carthage. “In his, shall we say, earlier days, Augustine was a sophist, he was a rhetorician, selling the quick and easy way,” Nance explained. After Augustine’s conversion, however, he decided that rhetoric is too much of a valuable tool for the forces of evil and vowed to reclaim rhetoric for the good, a very powerful statement, as Nance pointed out and quoted a section from Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine: “For since by means of the art of rhetoric both truth and falsehood are urged, who would dare to say that truth should stand in the person of its defenders unarmed against lying, so that they who wish to urge falsehoods may know how to make their listeners benevolent, or attentive, or docile in their presentation, while the defenders of truth are ignorant of that art?” Communication for Augustine is an extremely powerful tool that should be used for the sake of truth. At an Augustinian University, considering Augustine’s view on the power of the spoken word, rhetorical opportunities should be made available to all those who pass through Villanova’s stone halls. It is essential that a strategic understanding of this great tool should be accessible. As Nance described, rhetoric’s historical past in America ironically involved a “two tiered reality,” that the components of rhetoric were divided between what Nance called the “leadership class” and the “merchant class.” Nance explained, “There was a notion that to be strategic, to be clever, to use rhetoric in its entirety, would only exist for the leadership class.” When rhetoric was made obtainable to the merchant class through practical types of courses such as speech work, Nance said, “Thinking and logic were eliminated from the delivery.” Villanova, a school initiated, not for the elite in Philadelphia, but for working class Catholics in the mid 1800’s, breaks this binary division, offering courses that are not only practical, but theoretical, full of logos. Augustine in On Christian Doctrine also advocated unity between rhetoric and logic or as he referred to them: form and substance, influential in our University’s foundational tenets. Today, Villanova remembers its roots, linking the practical and the theoretical in strategic communication, the integration of these two elements within rhetoric aiding student’s pursuits in not only career goals, but more importantly to an understanding of any framework in life. From public relations to business management Nance stressed that, “In any act of communication we should not forget what the great thinkers like Augustine and Aristotle wrote about rhetoric…because believe it or not it’s still applicable,” emphasizing that communication should be understood from all angles, instead of condensing binary segments of the art. Just as there are many sides to communication, there are also many sides to a person. As Nance described, “You are not a ‘just,’ and that’s what communicators are, well rounded. And to communicate in a planned systematic fashion, that’s strategic communication.” As the new certificate gives students opportunities to expand their rhetorical frameworks and apply that knowledge to any area of life, such an interdisciplinary approach lends itself to an appreciation of the well rounded curriculum that Villanova offers. Nance remarked on the anticipated impact of the department’s inclusive strategic communication certificate: “When I think about a masters degree in strategic communication, I see it as this incredible, wonderful unity, it really is what communication is about, because I believe that no practitioner can be fully effective, if he or she does not have a strong understanding of the theory and concepts of audience, of persuasion, of ethical communication and that’s what we are striving to do in our program.” The Communication Department also looks forward to a potential masters program anticipated for induction in 2005.