In the summer of 2008, KSU Provost Chapman came to consult with Barnes. His school, he told her, wanted to start a journalism program. Would she be willing to advise him and his colleagues on what was required? Barnes agreed, although she was uncertain about what exactly that would involve.

University of Kentucky . Both UK and KSU were land grant universities, which meant that the agricultural arms of each school received federal funding earmarked for the state’s agricultural sector, with an emphasis on economic, educational, and social problems. However, the similarities stopped there. The UK campus in Lexington was the state’s premier university and in the midst of trying to satisfy a state mandate to become a national Top 20 public research institution. The campus was home to over 2,000 faculty and 27,000 students. It consisted of 16 colleges, 66 doctoral programs, and 93 undergraduate programs . The School of Journalism and Telecommunications was part of a larger College of Communications and Information Studies within the university. The journalism program, which had gone through numerous permutations, dated its founding to 1914 and was one of only 114 fully accredited journalism schools in the country and abroad. Some 10 fulltime faculty taught 250 journalism students in print or broadcast reporting and on subjects ranging from media law to ethics. Students could gain practical experience at a handful of student publications and broadcast outlets.

Kentucky State . Kentucky State University , on the other hand, was a far smaller school with three colleges, 2,800 students, and 155 fulltime faculty—and a more focused social mission. It was first chartered in 1886 to serve Kentucky ’s black community and shortly afterwards was designated a land grant university. The school still proudly distinguished itself by these two animating missions. In the fall of 2009, 57 percent of the student body was African American, and 20 percent of the school’s budget was directed to the land grant arm of the school. The school offered only a couple of journalism courses through its English department.

Barnes and Chapman were as different as their schools. Barnes, a communications scholar who specialized in advertising, had devoted her career to journalism school administration and education. She had worked for several years as a department chair and dean at Syracuse ’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication before UK hired her to direct their journalism school. She had accepted the Kentucky job because it gave her significant ability to shape the journalism school’s mission and outreach in addition to working nationally as a journalism accreditation consultant. Her favorite part of administration was finding ways to implement ambitious new ideas, which translated to an informal and digressive conversational style that drew in faculty and students alike. However, she had limited power to enact large-scale projects like the proposed bureau because she had no university-wide budgetary discretion.

Chapman, on the other hand, with his clipped white hair, suit, and carefully appointed office, had a more formal bearing. He was a career administrator with a doctorate in higher education and two master’s degrees, one in Classics and the other in Student Personnel. He had worked for 27 years at UK , where he had risen to assistant chancellor. Then he had gone on to guide the University of Alaska at Anchorage , Eastern Kentucky University , and KSU through university-wide accreditation processes. As KSU’s provost, he oversaw the school’s academic budget.

Chapman seemed serious about launching a journalism program and, shortly after his initial approach to Barnes, he hired Billy Reed, a prominent Kentucky sports journalist and former writer for Sports Illustrated , to draft a strategic blueprint for doing so. Reed set up an office at KSU’s Cooperative Extension Facility, the building which housed the university’s land grant programs, and arranged interviews with Barnes and several other administrators and faculty from the region’s top journalism schools about how to build a program.