Message from the Dean

Spring 2025 Dean’s Welcome

Dear Annenberg Community,

As I’m sure you know from the endless news reports, this is a very difficult time for higher education. Each day, we hear about new efforts to reshape or diminish the important work that all of us do here at Annenberg, at Penn and at all other universities. Attempts to erase the role of universities as spaces for imagination, innovation, and public good are discouraging and even despairing.

But as often happens in times of crisis, our school comes together to remind ourselves of the incredible work we do and what we have built as a school. As Dean, I remain committed to fostering a community centered on care, compassion, and joy, even in a time of extreme uncertainty around the future of research, teaching, and public engagement. We are committed to creating an environment of belonging. As always, our goal at Annenberg is to continue to expand our capacity for important inquiries to be made and to be able to continue to extend that work to people at every scale.

The challenges we face today have also led me to reflect on another moment in history: the period when Annenberg was established in 1958. It was also a fraught time in the U.S. and the world, a period marked by efforts to stifle academic freedom and inquiry. It was also an era shaped by incredible advancements in media and communication technologies. Annenberg led the way, exploring the many ways in which communication would transform our society, culture, and politics, establishing entire fields of study along the way.

This is the work Annenberg is committed to continuing. As a part of that, I’ve sought to catalyze efforts to tell this story of Annenberg — the many ways we have tackled pressing societal concerns, applied insights to real-world problems, posed new questions, and developed new research methods — so that our school’s history is better understood and our future better supported.

We tell this story in our new annual magazine, Connections: A Year at Annenberg, which offers a glimpse of the extensive research, collaborative work, teaching, and community building our school is engaged in.

In its pages, you will read stories about the extensive collaborations, both local and global, that Annenberg convenes and partners in and the groundbreaking research of our faculty, students, alumni, and centers in the key areas of health communication, cultural inquiry, politics, policy, and institutions, computational social science, and climate communication.

We share our story through various multimodal formats, including videos highlighting our significant work, podcasts like “Annenberg Conversations,” where I discuss research with Annenberg faculty, and exhibitions accompanied by engaging symposia.

So, we continue as we always have: we lead with the values of Annenberg, our commitment to research that makes a difference in the world, and our dedication to our community.  We tell our stories, and we share our work. We collaborate and build a culture of belonging and inclusion because these are our foundational principles. They are written into Ambassador Annenberg’s mission for the school: “the right to free communication carries with it a responsibility to respect the dignity of others and to be a service to all people.” Welcome to Spring 2025.

Warmly,

Sarah 

Sarah Banet-Weiser, Ph.D.
Walter H. Annenberg Dean
Lauren Berlant Professor of Communication, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania
Research Professor, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California