Wilbur Lang Schramm (August 5, 1907 – December 27, 1987) was a scholar and "authority on mass communications". He founded the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1935 and served as its first director until 1941. Schramm was hugely influential in establishing communications as a field of study in the United States, and the establishing of departments of communication studies across U.S. universities. Wilbur Schramm is considered the founder of the field of Communication Studies. He was the first individual to identify himself as a communication scholar; he created the first academic degree-granting programs with communication in their name; and he trained the first generation of communication scholars. Schramm's mass communication program in the Iowa School of Journalism was a pilot project for the doctoral program and for the Institute of Communications Research, which he founded in 1947 at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, now housed in the UIUC College of Media. At Illinois, Wilbur Schramm set in motion the patterns of scholarly work in communication study that continue to this day.
Early life and education
Schramm was born in Marietta, Ohio, to a musical, middle-class family whose ancestry hailed from Schrammburg, Germany. His father Arch Schramm played the violin, his mother Louise the piano, and Wilbur Schramm himself played the flute. His father was a lawyer in Marietta, Ohio. Due to their Teutonic name, his father's legal practice suffered. Wilbur Schramm "suffered from a stammer which at times severely hampered his speech, and which he never fully conquered". Schramm developed a severe stutter at age five due to an improperly performed tonsillectomy. Schramm's stutter was traumatic to him and he avoided speaking in public because of it. Instead of giving the valedictory address at his high school graduation, Schramm played the flute.
He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Marietta College, where he received a bachelor's degree in political science while working as a reporter and editor at The Marietta Daily Herald. When he graduated summa cum laude from Marietta College in history and political science in 1929, he did give a valedictory speech. He received a master's degree in American civilization from Harvard University, where he worked as a reporter for The Boston Herald.
He left Harvard for Iowa in 1930 (mainly because of Lee Edward Travis's stammering clinic in Iowa City). In 1932, he received a Ph.D. in American literature from the University of Iowa where he studied under Norman Foerster and befriended Wallace Stegner. He wrote his dissertation on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha. Under a National Research Scholarship, he worked with renowned physiological psychologist Carl Seashore and completed a two-year postdoctoral course in psychology and sociology.
Career
Early career (1930s) In 1935 he was hired as an assistant professor in the University of Iowa's English department (and was promoted to associate professor in 1939, full professor in 1941). In 1935, he founded a literary magazine called American Prefaces: A Journal of Critical and Imaginative Writing, named so because it sought to "provide a place where young American writers could write the 'prefaces' to their careers." In 1936 he founded the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
His own stories resulted in his award of the O. Henry Prize for fiction in 1942 for his short story "Windwagon Smith." His interests extended beyond the humanistic tradition, and some of his early work examined the economic conditions surrounding the publication of Chaucer's tales, and audience reactions to poetry written in different meters.
The outbreak of World War II led Schramm to join the Office of War Information in 1941 to investigate the nature of propaganda; it was during this time when he began employing behaviorist methodologies.
Later career (1943–1975) In 1943, Schramm returned to academia as director of the University of Iowa's School of Journalism. In 1947 he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign as director of the Institute of Communications Research, which he set up as a "flexible and non-territorial" organization unlike traditional academic departments.