Newhouse School of Communications

David Rubin
Professor, COM
Communications

Office: Newhouse 1 Rm. 502
Telephone: (315) 443- 7388
Email: dmrubin@syr.edu

David M. Rubin was dean of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University from July 1990 to June 2008. 

During his tenure as dean he built a strong development and fund-raising operation. Among the gifts he helped to secure are $15 million from the Newhouse Foundation for Newhouse-3 (the third building in the complex which opened in August 2007); $1.5 million from the Knight Foundation for a Chair in Political Journalism; $250,000 from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to support new initiatives in the training of young journalists; $1 million from the Goldring Foundation to support the Goldring Arts Journalism program; $500,000 from Arthur Liu to support graduate multi-cultural fellowships; $3 million from the Tsairis Foundation to support a chair in Documentary Photography; a $1 million gift to start the Tully Free Speech Center; and more.

On his watch the School founded the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture; the Healthy Campus initiative (to study which health communications messages have resonance with a young audience), and the Institute for the Study of the Judiciary, Politics and the Media (in cooperation with the College of Law and the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs).

Working with the Syracuse Post-Standard and the Newhouse family, he founded the Newhouse Minority Fellows Program that has trained and placed nearly 100 minority-group members in newsrooms around the country.

He built a strong Career Development Center for the exclusive use of Newhouse Students, and he strengthened the School's alumni relations effort in part by building an active and prominent Board of Advisors, also new to the School.

He always teaches a section of the introductory freshman class (COM 107) each fall, and a section of First Amendment law to seniors each spring.

He is the moderator and host of "The Ivory Tower Half Hour," a popular local public affairs television program in Central New York. Appearing on WCNY-TV, the local public television station, the show features a regular panel of Central New York academicians talking about state, national and world affairs.

Rubin has twice served as a Pulitzer Prize juror. He headed the Task Force on the Public's Right to Know for the Presidential Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant, producing a detailed report on the flow of information during that accident.

He was on the faculty at NYU from 1971-1990 and was recruited from NYU to the position of Dean at Syracuse.

He holds a B.A. from Columbia College in New York City, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford.

He has written widely about media law and ethics, and about the business of classical music.

He lives in Fayetteville, NY with his wife Tina and their two highly talented shelties, Bobby and Ace, who have won numerous awards in agility competitions, thanks entirely to Tina.

Expertise:

• Ethics, Journalism
• Law (Communications, First Amendment)
• Media Ownership Patterns
• Writing for Media