Annenberg School for Communication

Annenberg School for Communication. A Communications Powerhouse. , One day in 1954, 350 students arrived at USC to take a final exam. Most of them had never before set foot on campus or even seen their instructor in person. Housewives, truck drivers, doctors, businessmen, actors, schoolteachers and even farmers , all were enrolled in Southern California's first television course for college credit, "Shakespeare on Television," taught by Dr. Frank Baxter, a professor of English at USC. The course, a collaboration between the universty and the local CBS television station, KNXT, became a national phenomenon and was the first of many college courses that USC offered via TV. , "Shakespeare on Television" was USC's highest-profile foray into mass communications up to that time, but it was not its earliest. The university had emerged as a leader in broadcasting and mass communication 25 years before, when it begin offering college courses in radio for credit. Those courses , among the first of their kind in the nation , evolved into a department of radio, which, in turn, provided a foundation for television studies when that medium was in its infancy. , While academic programs formed the basis of USC's communications-related activities, it was the university's broadcasting projects that attracted national attention. In 1934, USC debuted its own educational radio program, "University of the Air," which aired weekday afternoons on the Columbia-Don Lee network. Four years later, when the Division of Radio-Television launched a series of university-produced telecasts over KHJ's short wave station, USC became the only university in the country writing and producing TV programs. In 1950, USC took over the "KFI-TV University" series, the first time that any university had an educational program on television five nights a week. The program won an Emmy award and was nominated for a Peabody award. , The Hancock Foundation Building, which opened its doors in 1940, added a radio stadio and an auditorium wired for radio pickup, which allowed USC to broadcast from campus. An AM station, KTRO, was established in the middle of the decade. On October 24, 1946, FM station KUSC went on the air, making USC the first private educational institution in America to own and operate its own radio station and the first to operate both AM and FM stations. In 1971, after Congress established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, KUSC was identified as the flagship station for National Public Radio in Los Angeles and became a professional radio station. In April 1973, it went all classical. Over the next decade, KUSC set the standard against which classical music radio was measured. , The 1970s brought other communications innovations to campus. In 1972, the interactive USC Instructional Television (ITV) Network debuted. One of the earliest distance learning programs in the country, USC ITV allowed USC to broadcast courses for credit to part-time students at their workplaces. When the university later acquired its own satellite system, USC became the only major university with the ability to broadcast courses to students at corporations anywhere in the contiguous United States. , Also in 1972, USC's history of excellence and innovation in communications across the board resulted in the interdisciplinary Annenberg School for Communication. Named for its principal benefactor, Walter Annenberg, the school was created to provide an intellectual bridge between the scholar and the communications professional. Its subsequent success, and USC's existing strengths in cinema-television, communication and engineering, led Ambassador Annenberg to give USC a $120 million gift to create the Annenberg Center for Communication in 1993. The center's mandate was ambitious: to become the world's foremost center for cutting-edge research in communication. But for USC, with its extraordinary record of communications innovation and excellence, the challenge was just business as usual.