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Jack Hamilton came to Louisiana State
University in 1992 after more than 20 years as a journalist and public
servant. Most of that time he worked on foreign affairs. Before
assuming his current position at LSU, he was the founding dean of the
Manship School of Mass Communication.
Hamilton reported for the
Milwaukee Journal, the
Christian Science Monitor, and ABC radio, and he was a longtime
commentator for MarketPlace, broadcast nationally by Public Radio
International. His work also
has appeared in the New York Times,
Foreign Affairs, and
The Nation, among other
publications.
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In his government work, Hamilton oversaw nuclear non-proliferation
issues for the House Foreign Affairs Committee, advised the head of the
U.S. foreign aid program in Asia during the Carter administration, and
managed a World Bank program to educate Americans about economic
development. He served in Vietnam as a Marine Corps platoon commander
and subsequently as a reconnaissance company commander.
While Hamilton was dean of the Manship
School, it became a free-standing college-level unit. It added a
one-of-a-kind doctoral degree devoted to media and public affairs,
launched the Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs and a research
facility that carries out public opinion surveys and media effects
experiments, and assumed oversight of Student Media, which consists of
the daily newspaper, magazine, television and radio stations, and
university yearbook. The number of majors more than doubled as did the
size of the faculty and staff; the school’s endowment more than
quintupled to over $20 million. The school, which has the highest
admission standards on campus, was named a priority program on campus –
the only college-level unit so named.
In the course of his career, Hamilton has had assignments in more than
50 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America.
In addition to covering foreign news, Hamilton has written
extensively on foreign newsgathering and sought to improve it.
In the mid-1980s he created and directed a Society of
Professional Journalist’s project to develop techniques for local
reporting of foreign news, especially on relations with developing
countries. He later worked
on a similar project for the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
In the 1980s, the National Journal said Hamilton has shaped public opinion about the
complexity of U.S.-Third World relations “more than any other single
journalist.”
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Hamilton’s most recent book is Journalism’s Roving Eye: A
History of American Newsgathering Abroad, which won the Goldsmith
Prize from the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics & Public
Policy, the Book of the Year Award from the American Journalism
Historians Association, and the 2010 Tankard Award from the
Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication.
In addition he is author of Main Street America and the Third World;
Entangling Alliances: How The Third World Shapes Our Lives; Edgar
Snow: A Biography; Hold the Press: The Inside Story on Newspapers
(with co-author George Krimsky); and Casanova Was a Book Lover: And
Other Naked Truths and Provocative Curiosities About the Writing,
Selling, and Reading of Books. He is editor of the LSU Press
book series “From Our Correspondent.”
Hamilton serves on the boards of the
International Center for Journalists, of which he is treasurer, and
Lamar Corporation, listed on Nasdaq as the largest outdoor
advertising company in the U.S. as measured by number of displays.
He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Hamilton was named the Freedom Forum’s
Administrator of the Year Award in 2003.
His other awards include two Green Eyeshade Excellence in
Journalism Awards, the By-Line Award from Marquette University, and
an MLK Day diversity award from LSU.
Hamilton has had funding support from the Carnegie and Ford
Foundations, among others.
In 2002 he was a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University’s
Kennedy School of Government.
He has served as a Pulitzer Prize jurist.
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In addition to his administrative duties,
Hamilton holds the Hopkins P. Breazeale LSU Foundation
Professorship. He
enthusiastically teaches undergraduate and graduate classes, and
directs the research of numerous graduate students.
Hamilton earned his bachelor’s and master’s
degrees in journalism from Marquette and Boston Universities
respectively, and a doctorate in American Civilization from George
Washington University.
Louisiana State University LSU is the state’s flagship
institution of higher education.
It has nine senior colleges and three schools, in addition to
specialized centers and institutes.
It has an enrollment of 28,000 graduate and undergraduate
students, 1,300 faculty members, and 3,800 staff.
It is a Carnegie Research-Extensive University and one of
only twenty-one American universities designated as a land-grant,
sea-grant and space-grant research center. US News and World
Report's ranking of national universities lists LSU as a Tier 1
institution.
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