Did you know that Iowa is FAMOUS in the field of Communication? “Academic Famous” has a lot to do with theory and research.

Iowa = Communication Famous

Samuel L. Becker

It’s weird because it’s like we’ve heard word before… Becker…Becker…Becker…hmm. Oh right, it’s all over our building!

Becker was all iowa, all the time. He got his BA (1947), MA (1949), **and** PhD (1953) from the UofI, then returned as a professor. He actually started out as a dishwasher at Currier Hall during undergrad and ended up running our department (and other administrative things) and having a building named after him. Big flex, dude.

Not surprisingly, he was often called “Mr. University of Iowa.” You could recognize him by his signature bow tie and suspenders (perhaps now you know who I’m talking about? You’ve seen the portraits hanging in this building named: Becker). Back in Becker’s day, the earlier ones, our department (communication studies) was known as the Department of Speech and Dramatic Arts (before that, in 1920, because UI has a *serious* claim as one of the first “communication” departments, it was the Department of Speech).

Becker was appointed Full Professor in 1961 and chaired the Department of Speech and Dramatic Arts (now Communication Studies) from 1968 to 1982. He served as a member of the Board in Control of Athletics (appointed 1978) and was named Iowa’s faculty representative to the Big Ten Conference in 1982. During his departmental tenure, he served on more than 50 university committees, and you know what? It was probably more because once we get up into the double digits we lose track. Or maybe that’s just me. He even put off retirement when UI asked him to be the interim director of the School of Art and Art History and also to co-chair the committee searching for a permanent director (if I was ready to retire and they asked me to do that I would probably say no. Neither being interim chair nor leading a search committee is super fun). But when he DID retire in 1993 the UI put on a weekend-long “Celebrating Sam” party attended by over 300 colleagues, former students, friends, and family (will you all come to my retirement party?).

He was a Big Deal in our discipline. He wrote 10 books, 115 journal articles, and 6 textbooks, and is noted for defining 20th-century speech communication studies. He was at it for about 50 years. 2023 marked 20 years for me, including seven thousand years of graduate school, and I’m already exhausted. He wrote about a lot of things including he impact of mass media, televised presidential debates, speech and media pedagogy, persuasion variables, behavioral modification programs to prevent smoking, and rhetorical studies’ need to adapt to changing public life. Becker worked outward from the center of various fields by always asking what he referred to as “The Interesting Question: A Prescription for Vitality.”

He got bunches of awards from our national and international associations including distinguished service, distinguished scholar, distinguished communicator, the first Mentor to receive a mentoring award at NCA, another mentoring award at ICA (Fisher), fellow status at ICA, and the Andersch Award from Ohio University.

In his work, “Looking Forward/Looking Back,” Becker highlighted that one of the crucial next steps for the field of Communication Studies, following the determination of its core, is to engage with the challenge presented by technological evolution. He’s like “yo! Comm people! WE need to be the ones to decide what related to new means and media of communication should be taught. He asked scholars to question if the whole discipline should be reconfigured given these developments (and that was a LONG time ago, before tech changed every millisecond and before the invent of social media). You know that course Media and Society? Yup, the OG version was Becker’s creation.

I never met Dr. Becker, but all the scholars that I know who knew him say wonderful things about him! They say he “could not walk across a convention hotel lobby in less than half an hour” because he would be mobbed by people wanting to thank him for advice or information he had sent. And that tracks. In short, he’s a super famous dude and he’s one of our own – definitely someone who we can be proud was a Hawkeye, through and through.