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Mowlana stepping aside, not fading away

Mowlana stepping aside, not fading away

BY MIKE UNGER

Make no mistake about it—Hamid Mowlana is not retiring. The School of International Service professor is merely stepping down after 37 years as director of the Division of International Communication, an entity he founded in a field he helped pioneer. Invigorated and as intellectually curious as ever, Mowlana is rededicating himself to teaching and writing. He’s looking forward to spending more time in the classroom and the library and less tied up in meetings.

“Thirty-seven years is enough,” said Mowlana, who was honored last Tuesday at the SIS alumni chapter fall dinner. “We need younger people. [But] I don’t think a professor can ever retire because a professor’s brain can never retire. Thinking is our profession.”

Mowlana came to AU in 1968, a year of transformation across the globe. In America, the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, riots in major cities, and the tumultuous Democratic National Convention in Chicago made clear that the nation’s social and political fabric was changing. Mowlana, a young Iranian who recently had earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD from Northwestern University, witnessed these events and ones in Europe. Mowlana was looking for a home for his ideas, and he found one at AU where he launched the international communication program, the first of its kind in the United States.

“It deals with the less tangible aspects of international relations and world politics,” Mowlana said from his office. “Soft power—communication, knowledge, belief systems, religion, ideology, ideas, attitudes, and opinions—as opposed to technology, hardware, the military. Until 1968 most of the international communications courses were either in the school of communication, department of political science, or even schools of business. I felt that the best place for this type of program was in the School of International Service. My next job was to mobilize the faculty both within the university as well as invite those outside it to join in my effort.”

Mowlana was the program’s only faculty member during its initial decade. Today, the program has 12 faculty, and has produced more than 1,000 MAs.

“I’m really thankful to American University and SIS because they provided me with the intellectual support,” he said. “Myself and my colleagues had the interest, passion, and love for making this a field in itself. You can have the love, but if you don’t have the support to go with it, it will go no place. After 37 years, SIS has become a model for other schools.”

That success is due in large part to scholars like Mowlana, Dean Lou Goodman said.

“Dr. Mowlana has been committed to innovative analysis of the role of international communication in international relations since he began teaching at the School of International Service,” Goodman said. “His theories of international communication and international relations have had wide impact among scholars worldwide. His passion for his subject matter has inspired his students.”

The grandson of a well known Iranian philosopher, Mowlana knew from a young age that he wanted to be a scholar. At age 20 he was chosen by the U.S. State Department for a prestigious program that allowed him to study in America.

After briefly returning to Iran to edit a newspaper, he settled into teaching positions, first at the University of Chicago and later at the University of Tennessee before heading to AU.

“I always wanted to come to teach in Washington because I always preached that if you want to study the patterns of world communication you have to be at the top of where this communication originates,” he said.

As he passes the reins of a program he loves, Mowlana looks back over the past nearly four decades and reflects on his proudest accomplishments.

“I travel quite frequently, and wherever I go, someone taps me on the shoulder and says, “Hello, Professor Mowlana,’” he said. “It speaks to the fact that my students are spread around the world.

“I have been able, with the help of my colleagues, to reshape or in some modest way to be the architect of this field that is making a difference in the world today.”