Paul Parsons, professor and journalism head in the Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kan., has been named dean of the Elon School of Communications. The appointment was made by Gerald Francis, provost and vice president for academic affairs at Elon College, following a nationwide search.
As dean, Parsons will lead a program with about 700 majors, the second-largest academic program at Elon. The School of Communications, which moved into a newly-renovated 48,000-square-foot facility in fall 2000, offers concentrations in broadcast and corporate communications, journalism and film studies.
Parsons joined the Kansas State faculty in 1985, serving as associate director of the Miller School from 1989 to 1997 and then as journalism head within the School. He received a Fulbright professorship to the China School of Journalism in Beijing in 1992-1993 and also served as a visiting professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in 1999-2000.
Parsons received the Outstanding Teaching Award from the Kansas State College of Arts & Sciences in 1989 and earned the Stamey Teaching Award in 1991 and 1997.
In addition to his teaching credentials, Parsons has 10 years of professional media experience. He covered Arkansas state politics for United Press International from 1975-1980 and the Associated Press from 1980-1982. As state broadcast editor for the AP, Parsons covered a variety of news stories, including the gubernatorial administration of Bill Clinton.
Parsons has written two books and dozens of journal articles and publications, and is an active researcher on China-U.S. comparative media studies, libel and copyright law, and scholarly book publishing. He is an editorial board member for the Mass Communication and Society journal and was re-elected this year to the national Teaching Standards Committee for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC).
Parsons has a doctorate from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, a master’s degree from the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, and a bachelor’s degree from Baylor University, Waco, Texas. In 1983 he was selected for a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1995 he served a summer residency in the newsroom of the Winston-Salem Journal through an American Society of Newspaper Editors fellowship.