As the fall semester begins, a women’s college in Boston, Massachusetts, has retooled its media-related curriculum to best reflect the ideals of the school’s namesake, the late journalist Gwen Ifill.
Simmons University announced it would relaunch the media school as the Gwen Ifill School of Media, Humanities and Social Sciences. A search committee also named media scholar Ammina Kothari as the new dean.
The Ifill School’s new structure expands its media curriculum to include humanities and social sciences. The attributes that defined Ifill also shape a new, holistic approach, “An unwavering commitment to accuracy and objectivity, a nuanced understanding of social and historical context and a compassion-based appreciation of policymaking’s real-world implications,” according to a Simmons press release.
“Folks here are very proud of Gwen’s legacy and want to honor it in many different ways,” said Bert Ifill, Gwen’s brother and a longtime university administrator.
A crucial component of the Ifill School is its emphasis on communications, a field Gwen excelled in, Bert told VOA.
After graduating from Simmons in 1977, she had long careers in both print and television journalism, working for The Baltimore Evening Sun, The Washington Post, The New York Times, NBC and PBS. She covered seven presidential campaigns and died in 2016 at age 61.
Ifill was the first African American woman to moderate a vice presidential debate and to coanchor a national newscast, “PBS NewsHour.”
“Gwen valued storytelling, and she was an amazing journalist,” Kothari, the school’s new dean, told VOA. “But she also worked really hard to raise awareness about important social issues and to highlight underrepresented voices.”
Abigail Meyers, a current junior at the Ifill School, admires the journalist’s “groundbreaking work” in both journalism and racial justice, she told VOA. Raised near Baltimore, Maryland, Meyers feels a special connection to Ifill’s work for the Baltimore Evening Sun newspaper.
The school has been instrumental in supporting Meyers’ aspirations to become a professional journalist, she told VOA.
“The support that you get from the faculty and alumni is unlike really any other journalism program,” she said.
Being a double major in communications and political science, Meyers appreciates the new curriculum’s flexibility, as she is able to take classes across different disciplines.
This flexibility will help prime Simmons’ students to achieve success, Kothari said. She believes interdisciplinary training leads to stronger leaders in the world.
“As we think about communications or media, including journalism or social sciences, we need a strong foundation in humanities to understand the historical context for what we see happening today,” Kothari said.
The school’s increased focus on humanities “couldn’t be more timely,” according to the press release. Nearly three of four Americans believe media literacy is an important skill in today’s news landscape, a 2023 Boston University survey found.
However, humanities-focused degree programs like the Ifill School’s receive little recognition. Of all the bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2020, humanities degrees made up less than 10%, a number that has only been decreasing, according to a 2022 MIT study. Meanwhile, science, technology, engineering and math degrees, or STEM, have grown exponentially.
But humanities and STEM shouldn’t be seen as opposites, Kothari said.
She cited the COVID-19 pandemic response as an example. Many precautionary measures such as social distancing were grounded in “amazing scientific research,” but weren’t effectively communicated to the public, she said.
“As we have new knowledge being produced, we also need journalists,” Kothari said. “We need communicators who are able to translate very complex information to the audience so they can see, ‘How does it matter to me? What is the effect for me?’”
Ifill’s legacy is not only celebrated within her namesake school, but also through press freedom organizations around the world.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, a press freedom nonprofit, honors Ifill with the annual Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award, which is presented to individuals who have “shown extraordinary and sustained achievement in the cause of press freedom,” according to CPJ’s website.
Christophe Deloire, the late director of international media freedom organization Reporters Without Borders, or RSF, received the 2024 Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award.
“Christophe was one of journalism’s greatest-ever champions,” RSF Executive Director Clayton Weimers told VOA in an email. “There was hardly a fight or an advance in press freedom in the past decade that he wasn’t a part of, if not leading.”
As Ifill’s legacy spreads, there is one person who couldn’t be prouder: her brother, Bert. He told VOA it often seems as though his full-time job is “to talk nicely about Gwen.”
“It’s always a great pleasure and honor for me to talk about her and to talk about her legacy, not only as obviously a very skilled journalist, but as an extraordinary mentor and confidant,” he said.
