The DESA is awarded to an individual who has made a significant and lasting contribution to the American system of electronic media education.
In recognition of his decades of remarkable service to electronic media education, longtime professor and administrator Don Grady was named the 2022 recipient of Broadcast Education Association’s Distinguished Education Service Award. The award was presented during BEA’s annual convention awards ceremony in Las Vegas on April 23.
According to Paul Parsons, dean emeritus of Elon’s School of Communications, Grady has made an “immeasurable impact on electronic media education through national accreditation and through deep dives into media analytics.”
“During the almost two decades I worked alongside Don, he was central to building Elon’s School of Communications into a place of excellence for students and faculty,” Parsons said. “He did so through administrative leadership, student-centeredness, and being a fount of wisdom and integrity.”
According to a BEA news release, Grady has been a regular contributor to the organization’s events for nearly five decades. He first attended a BEA conference as an undergraduate student and has regularly participated in the organization since the early 1970s. More recently, he organized a 2018 panel on media analytics for the BEA Research Division. He also served as the 2018 BEA Research Symposium chair, for which he organized a day-long symposium on analytics. Subsequently, he served as editor and contributor of a BEA publication series book titled, “The Golden Age of Data: Media Analytics in Study & Practice.”
While Grady retired in late 2020 after 35-plus years of leadership at Elon, he returned to campus as an adjunct professor during the 2021-22 academic year.
Grady wasn’t the only Elon individual celebrated at the BEA conference this year. School of Communications students collected a total of nine awards in the 2022 Festival of Media Arts, including Elon’s first-ever first-place finish in the Narrative Category.