Dean of the College of Media & Communication at Texas Tech University

David D. Perlmutter is a professor in and dean of the College of Media & Communication (CoMC) at Texas Tech University. He received his BA (‘85) and MA (‘91) from the University of Pennsylvania and his Ph.D. (‘96) from the University of Minnesota. The son of two professors and born into a long line of teachers on one side of the family and military officers on the other, he has spent twenty-five years as a scholar, teacher, and administrator in higher education in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Louisiana, Kansas, Iowa (as director of a school), and now Texas.

Administration

As an administrator, Perlmutter is nationally known for his expertise on fundraising through his writings and raising support for and launching the nation’s first undergraduate certificate program to train development officers. He has helped start several Ph.D. programs and directly supervised professional and thesis-track MA programs, both on campus and at distance locations. At Texas Tech, his college has seen unprecedented growth in all metrics, including fundraising, undergraduate and graduate enrollment, offsite and online offerings, retention and graduation rates, grant applications, multidisciplinary research partnerships, and risk management. The online master’s program that CoMC started under his direction became the fastest growing graduate program in the history of Texas Tech. He secured the creation of a new Communication Training Center charged with working with HSTEM faculty to improve visual and oral communication to students and the public. He is consistently rated among the highest performing deans in the university by his faculty. He also chaired the TTU search committees for successful hires of Provost, Dean of Visual & Performing Arts, and Dean of Libraries.

Author and Editor

Perlmutter is the author or editor of ten books on political communication, new media technologies, and higher education published by, among others, Palgrave, Oxford, and Harvard University Press. He has written several dozen research articles for academic journals as well as more than 400 essays for U.S. and international newspapers and magazines such as Campaigns & Elections, Christian Science Monitor, Editor & Publisher, Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer,and USA Today. He has edited a book series and served on the editorial boards of several major journals and publishing concerns.

Some of Perlmutter’s titles include: Photojournalism and Foreign Policy: Framing Icons of Outrage in International Crises (Praeger, 1998); Visions of War: Picturing Warfare from the Stone Age to the Cyberage (St. Martin’s, 1999); (ed.) The Manship School Guide to Political Communication (LSU Press, 1999);Policing the Media: Street Cops and Public Perceptions of Law Enforcement (Sage, 2000); Picturing China in the American Press: The Visual Portrayal of Sino-American Relations in Time Magazine, 1949-1973 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); (ed., with John Hamilton) From Pigeons to News Portals: Foreign Reporting and the Challenge of New Technology (LSU Press, 2007); Blogwars: The New Political Battleground (Oxford, 2008); Promotion & Tenure Confidential: The People, Politics and Philosophy of Career Advancement in Academia (Harvard, 2010); (ed., with Robert Mann) Political Communication (LSU Press, 2011); and(ed., with Thomas J. Johnson), New Media, Campaigning and the 2008 Facebook Election (Routledge, 2011).

Perlmutter has been described as a “household name among American professors” because of the widespread readership of some sixteen years of his writings on academic careers and the future of higher education. He writes two regular columns: “Career Confidential,” addressing careers in higher education for the Chronicle of Higher Education; and “Managing with Millennials,”dealing with generational challenges in the workplace for a business magazine. He ran several prominent programs at the Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas. He served on the board of two book presses. He was co-principal investigator for about $800,000 in grants through the Kansas Transportation Institute. At Louisiana State University he edited a political communication book series and won two faculty awards including the main campus-wide award for research, teaching, and service.

Media Appearances

Perlmutter has been interviewed by most major news networks and newspapers, from the New York Times to CNN, ABC, and “The Daily Show.” He regularly speaks at industry, academic, and government meetings and runs workshops on personal and institutional branding via social media, visual persuasion, and higher education issues including fundraising. As part of his role as dean he regularly engages business, government, and non-profit groups and individuals. He has been twice elected to chair the research committee of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. In 2017, he was elected Vice President of the organization, and thus will accordingly be installed as president in 2019.

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