Sydney W. Head (1913-1991): Remembering the Founder of Modern Broadcasting Studies.

More than any other single individual, Sydney W. Head created the modern academic field of electronic media teaching and research. Although many others wrote earlier textbooks or undertook important research, Head's (1956) Broadcasting in America provided a broader and lasting scholarly basis for the analysis of radio and television's development and impact. It appeared in the midst of his 1955 to 1957 term as the first president of the new Association for Professional Broadcasting Education (APBE), predecessor of today's Broadcast Education Association (BEA). His landmark book, which went through nine editions over 4 decades, was later joined by Head's other pathbreaking books in broadcast programming and international broadcasting.

An Active Life

Sydney Warren Head, the elder of two sons of Albert and Catherine Riley Head, was born in London on October 9, 1913. The family emigrated to the United States in 1920, and Head grew up and attended schools in Springville (outside of Sacramento) and then Palo Alto, California, where he graduated from high school. For 2 years he attended what is now San Jose State University. For a time during the depression of the 1930s, Head worked (first on a road crew and then as a fire lookout) in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal agency providing outdoor employment for young men.

A family friend financed his further education, and Head took both his undergraduate (1936) and master's (1937) degrees in theater at Stanford University. He began his long fascination with acting with the newly founded Palo Alto Community Theatre in 1933 and became lifelong friends with the director and his musician and choreographer wife. His M.A. thesis offered a textual history of Shakespeare's Henry IV (comparing the Quarto of 1600 with the Folio of 1623). After serving as technical director of the University of Colorado's theater in 1937-1938, Head took up duties teaching English, speech, and drama at the University of Miami in 1938, where he soon developed the school's first courses in radio broadcasting. Deciding to pursue an academic career, he began working toward a Ph.D. in theater and broadcasting at the University of Iowa in 1941-1942, but further study was interrupted by the coming of war.

Beginning in the fall of 1942, Head was trained as an Army enlisted signals intelligence specialist, based in Washington, DC. As he already understood German, he studied Serbo-Croatian and Japanese, eventually doing top-secret traffic analysis of enemy radio communications. In April 1945 he shipped out from Seattle to Honolulu on a ghastly troopship voyage (his vivid description of this trip survives). Later that year Head returned to his theatrical experience, serving as a director and actor with the Maurice Evans "soldier show" unit into early 1946, when he left the Army as a staff sergeant.

Head returned to the University of Miami to found one of the country's first freestanding departments of broadcasting in 1946, serving as well as director of broadcasting and film services for the university. He managed to find time to continue with some acting on the side. His teaching duties helped to focus his doctoral work and in 1952 he was granted his Ph.D. in mass communications at New York University, with a dissertation (under the supervision of Professor Charles A. Siepmann) on "Television and Social Norms: An Analysis of the Social Content of a Sample of Television Dramas." An article drawn from it--his first broadcasting-related publication--appeared in The Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television (Head, 1954).

Head continued his administrative and teaching duties at the University of Miami until 1960 when he was named to head a National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) three-man team studying the role and potential of educational radio services in the Sudan from 1961 to 1963, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Under a series of different grants and agencies (including a Fulbright award), Head remained in Africa for the rest of the decade, spending most of his time in Ethiopia, with some periods in Somalia, the Sudan, and Ghana. In 1976 he revisited Ghana on a Fulbright senior lectureship. Several journal articles resulted from these projects, as did some commercial consulting activity in Ethiopia (and some health problems, including malaria).

A few months after returning to the United States, in January 1971 Head joined the growing department of Radio-TV-Film at Temple University in Philadelphia, marking his resumption of academic life after a decade overseas. During his time there, he taught courses in broadcast law and policy, comparative broadcasting systems, and a survey course on broadcasting in America. Drawing on his long experience at Miami, he ran a distinctly tight ship during one semester as acting chair. He "retired" in 1980 to his Coral Gables, Florida, home and focused on his research and writing. Two years later he purchased his first home computer, which greatly aided in his many writing projects and correspondence. From 1982 to 1989, he taught as an adjunct faculty member in the University of Miami department (by then a full school) he had founded decades earlier. (In 2002 the school established the Sydney and Dorothy Head Reading Room in their new communications building as well as a Sydney Head Distinguished Lecture series.)

Head married the former Dorothy Brine of Boston in 1949 (they had no children). In the days before personal computers, she typed the manuscript copy for each of his books. In 1989 he moved to the coast of central California and died there on July 7, 1991, at the age of 77. Atypical for most academics, obituary notices appeared in many broadcast industry trade publications, attesting to the role he had played, and the influential industry leaders he had taught over the years.

Founding APBE/BEA

In a letter written shortly before his death, Head outlined his multiple reasons for helping to create APBE in 1955. Existing organizations simply did not fill the bill--he felt that the NAEB, for example, "was hopelessly unsuited to the task because its whole philosophy hinged on implacable opposition to the main sources of jobs for our graduates." The Association for Education in Journalism seemed to see "broadcasting as a minor adjunct to the newspaper press," although publishers actively supported journalism education--something few broadcasters did.

In a similar fashion, Head felt that existing academic departments (e.g., speech, English, political science, journalism, business, or electrical engineering) "dealt with broadcasting in too narrow a fashion, if they dealt with the subject matter at all." Along with a few others, he saw broadcasting as an emerging and exciting field of study in its own right. The scholarly work already accomplished had earned (and the growing field needed) its own academic association, as well as its own scholarly journal to record and lend credence to the research work being done.

Building on a failed earlier attempt to develop an accrediting body for emerging broadcast programs, Head thus helped to lead the effort to create APBE in 1955, working with supportive officers (especially Harold Fellows) of the National Association of Broadcasters. He coauthored an article on the "new era" in broadcast education in the inaugural issue of Journal of Broadcasting, while serving for 2 years as APBE's first president.

Landmark

In the early 1950s, Head was approached by Houghton Mifflin editors interested in developing a replacement for Judith Waller's Radio the Fifth Estate, a college text that had first been issued in 1946 and revised in 1950. The eventual result was a very different type of book, the first appearance of Broadcasting in America: A Survey of Television and Radio (Head, 1956). This landmark offered the first multifaceted scholarly analysis of the rise and role of U.S. broadcasting, both describing and critiquing an industry then in the midst of the radio-to-television upheaval. Head designed it to be more than an undergraduate textbook--he hoped (correctly as it turned out) it would have reference value to those teaching in the relatively new and growing field of broadcasting studies. Thus he sought to apply related areas of scholarly social science discourse (e.g., psychology) so the new discipline would have a stronger academic grounding. Unlike the books that had preceded it, Head's book purposely ignored hands-on production aspects of the field, focusing instead on broadcasting as a regulated business, an entertainment and news medium, and a social organization. This one book went a long way in helping to raise the academic status of the field, because other disciplines began to take the study of broadcasting more seriously.

That first edition of BIA (as it became known to many of us) would remain in print for more than 15 years, revered as "the bible" by teaching faculty and (although perhaps less so) by several generations of students--until they later realized what a gem it was. That the book had developed a central place in the field is evidenced in Encyclopedia Americana's invitation to Head to author its entry on television in 1966.