ABSTRACT
ON APRIL 21, 1947, University of Illinois President George Stoddard wrote a letter to Wilbur Schramm, who had recently accepted an offer to serve as the founder and first director of the Institute of Communications Research at the university. “I have a feeling,” Stoddard wrote, acknowledging Schramm’s acceptance, “that historians of education will someday take note of this particular event.”2 Stoddard was perceptive to recognize that the institutionalization of communication study would constitute a significant influence on U.S. educational thought, and that historians of education would eventually come around to examining its origins and implications, ultimately attempting to place the founding of mass communications research in historical context, and trying to understand the objectives and ideological perspectives that undergirded the development of the field.
