Wayne Wanta, a University of Missouri journalism professor, will become AEJMC president Friday.

Wanta has a long history with AEJMC, joining as a graduate student to present his thesis in 1986. He has only missed one convention in two decades.

“I have been with the organization for 21 years now, and I’ve done a lot of different things with AEJMC,” Wanta said. “I wanted to take on a leadership position.”

In the next year, Wanta plans to address growing concerns about the future of doctoral education.

Before becoming president, Wanta served on the Elected Standing Committee on Teaching Standards for six years, was the chair of the Communication Theory and Methodology Committee, and served as the AEJMC vice president and president-elect.

AEJMC’s Doctoral Education Summit raised questions Tuesday about ratings the National Research Council will soon apply to journalism and mass communication programs.

The NRC’s assessment of research doctorate programs ranks the quality of graduate programs in dozens of disciplines, according to a 2005 analysis by InsideHigherEd.com.

The assessment has been conducted twice before, in 1995 and 1983. The next version, expanded to include journalism and mass communication schools, will be released in 2007. Programs will be measured based on a set of quantitative data rather than scholars’ ratings of their peers, according to InsideHigherEd.

“People are worried that these questionable criteria might not just rate programs, but would also be used to rank programs,” Wanta said. That means for a program to gain good standing, the institution would have to emphasize the NRC’s criteria.

“There is enough concern among Ph.D.s that this could be a very volatile issue,” Wanta said.

Wanta is beginning his sixth year as a professor at Missouri, where he also is the executive director of the Center for the Digital Globe.

The Center for the Digital Globe is an interdepartmental institute consisting of faculty from the journalism, business, law and human and environmental sciences. The center
offers a graduate-level certificate in digitization and globalization of technology, focusing especially on the Internet.