Upon 50th Anniversary, Fletcher's Edward R. Murrow Center Undergoes Revitalization

In 1965, the Edward R. Murrow Center of Public Diplomacy was established at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy to honor the famed journalist and to further Fletcher's program of "public diplomacy." 50 years later, through additional course offerings and initiatives, the Center’s leaders hope to reinvigorate an institution that forms an enduring part of the school’s mission and Murrow’s legacy.

An award-winning journalist that came to prominence during WWII, Edward R. Murrow revolutionized the field of broadcast journalism and produced a famous critique of Senator McCarthy’s Communist witch-hunt. He also served as director of the United States Information Agency between 1961 and 1964, as he helped transform the agency from one that focused on cultural programming to an organization of public diplomacy.

"The Edward R. Murrow Center was established in 1965 in memory of the man whose distinguished reporting and analysis of world news and imaginative leadership of the United States Information Agency set a standard of excellence," the Center's website said.

Murrow’s career was particularly relevant to the Fletcher School in terms of "public diplomacy" - “the influence of public attitudes on the formation and execution of foreign policies," a term coined by Dean Edmund A. Gullion at the time of the center’s installation.

Thus began the connection between the life and works of Murrow and the Fletcher School. The physical part of the center includes Murrow’s library, papers, and audio and visual recording, which reside in The Fletcher School and in the University Archives.

Vice Chairman of the Board of the Fletcher School Hans Binnendijk (F'69) said that when he and fellow alumni were students at the Fletcher School in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was a vibrant place for scholarship and learning.

“We all tremendously benefited from the Murrow Center during that period,” he said, referring to himself and two other alumni, current Murrow Center Director Edward Schumacher-Matos (F'72) and Richard Weintraub (F'12).

“We were all shaped in our early thinking by the Murrow Center as it was in the 60s, early 70s,” Binnendijk said. “I was a research assistant at the Murrow Center in the late 60s and did some publishing there. It taught several courses on public diplomacy and journalism.”

However, as the Center approached its half-century birthday, alumni started to worry that it has started to lose this vitality.

“We all were concerned that the Murrow Center was becoming moribund,” Binnendijk said. “It didn’t have an adequate funding. Its web page ... was way out of date. It was not active in the school. It wasn’t holding programs and conferences. Student enrollment seemed to be in decline...”

Schumacher-Matos agreed that the Murrow center suffered from monetary problems.

“What was lacking was money,” Schumacher-Matos said. “The Murrow center has always had a lot of one-off programs and a few courses attached to it ... but little in the way of an ongoing research initiative, ongoing programs.”

Since 2014, these three alumni, in conjunction with Dean of the Fletcher School James Stavridis, board members, professors, and other members of the Fletcher community have been working to revamp the Center. According to an e-mail from Binnendijk to the Daily, they submitted a proposal to Stavridis for the revitalization of the Murrow Center on March 1, 2014. One of the new initiatives is to ensure the Center can prepare students to respond to current public diplomacy issues.

“[There] would be study of media and particularly social media and information flows on global affairs,” Binnendijk said. “The Murrow Center and Fletcher and Tufts would become a place where….the theory of international communications would be taught.”

Additionally, the Center would ideally help students learn certain skills of the journalism profession, such as public speaking and analytical writing, in order to apply it to their future careers.

“This is what we call professional development," Binnendijk said. "There would be not just journalism courses on how to be a good international journalist but also how to have impact with these tools: blogging, using video footage, tweeting.”

This emphasis is highlighted in several Fletcher courses being offered now.

“I’m teaching a course on how to influence the Global Debate,” Schumacher-Matos said. “That’s kind of a writing course, writing news and analysis. We’re teaching another course about how to use video to have international impact.”

Another course offered is "the Arts of Communication," a course on public speaking and facing the media, its lecturer Mihir Mankad said. While the course was not originally designed under the auspices of the Center, Schumacher-Matos and Binnendijk both said it serves to advance the goals of the Center.

Another goal is to use the Center to increase the publicity of faculty research. This initiative has produced several new projects. First, a new television studio was created in 2015 so that news channels such as CNN or China Central Television (CCTV) can directly connect with Fletcher experts, without professors having to go to an off-site studio.

“It enhances the Fletcher name," Binnendijk said. "It gets the expertise of Fletcher faculty out there in mainstream thinking.”

With this new lab, a program has been developed where Mankad meets with professors who often speak with the media, and gives them two one-hour training sessions on how the studio works and how to be interviewed on camera.

This initiative also ties in with a $1 million Carnegie Corporation grant to help academics better communicate their research with policymakers and the media.

“The goal of that grant is to bridge the academic policy divide.” Mankad said. "I’m advising them on using media, video, [and] social media to simply to simplify their message and make it more accessible and exciting, for policy makers.”

While the grant was awarded to the Fletcher School and not specifically the Murrow Center, the School hopes to use the Murrow Center resources to accomplish the grant’s goals, according to a statement from Fletcher on the grant.

Additionally, last year, Mankad started the Fletcher Ideas Exchange, a TEDx style event which featured Fletcher professors, students and alumni discussing a topic. Last year, the Ideas Exchange focused on media and technology, and according to Mankad, this event will continue next year and hopefully for years to come.

On the other hand, Schumacher-Matos said that the Center could perhaps work to solve the problems he sees with U.S.'s current international communications.

“The government could be better communicating its values and intentions and therefore furthering America,” he said.

Schumacher-Matos described an American public diplomacy model based on the Cold War that was unable to respond and utilize new forms of communications, such as social media, and lacks international perspective.

“Too often, we come to think the debate in Washington is the global debate, and it’s not,” he said.

Thus, a final initiative of the Murrow Center is to produce scholarship that can help America address these issues.

“It will put Fletcher and Tufts at the forefront of the intellectual and academic endeavor to understand the impact of new forms of international communications on international affairs,” Binnendijk said, referring to his goal for the Center.

Schumacher-Matos said he has several ideas for how these ideas will be generated. First, he said he and his colleagues at the Fletcher School are trying to get funding for a series of workshops to discuss these ideas.

“We’re trying to create a national series of workshops with a mix of both Washington hands and Silicon Valley type to totally redesign the American government’s international communication effort,” Schumacher-Matos said, listing several potential partners including the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the International Policy Studies program at Stanford.

Second, he hopes to create a publishing platform where scholars from around the world could contribute articles about international affairs.

“Think Quartz, think Foreign Policy, think Foreign Affairs, but international, comparative," Shumacher-Matos said. "All of those are very American oriented. This would be an attempt to try to be global, to try to be international. There is not an international publication today.”

He has already hired a project manager to assist with this project, and hopes for it to compete with existing media outlets.

Mankad noted that this initiative will take a lot of time to get off the ground. However, he hopes to get more involved in helping this project when his schedule frees up in the spring.

“It’s a grand initiative," he said. "It requires resources and a lot of attention and just as the academic year starts it’s been difficult to focus people.”

Furthermore, Schumacher-Matos hopes for more collaboration between the Murrow Center and other departments at Tufts on scholarship in these areas. He listed the Tisch College, Computer Science department, and journalism scholars as potential partners.

“There are a lot of people here thinking about the rest of the world both in terms of International relations and what’s going on with technology," he said. "There’s so much talent at Tufts and it would be stupid to not take advantage [of it].”

Ultimately, the goal of this revitalization is to use the legacy of Murrow to bring the Center into the 21^st century.

“If Murrow were alive today he would do something different," Schumacher-Matos said. "He would focus on today’s environment which is a much more digital environment. The government’s public diplomacy efforts have also evolved to do very different things. So we want to reposition the Murrow Center for the new world.”