David M. Rubin
Critical Issues

David M. Rubin was Dean of the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University from July 1, 1990 to June 30, 2008. He is now a member of the full-time faculty of the school. Prior to his service at Syracuse he was, for 19 years, a member of the faculty and chair of the Department of Journalism at New York University.

He holds a B.A. degree from Columbia in American history, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in communication from Stanford. His teaching specialties are Media and Society, Communications Law, and Arts Journalism.

As Dean at Newhouse he oversaw construction of a third building in the Newhouse complex at a cost of $32 million. The building provides a state-of-the-art experimental lab for new approaches to online news delivery. It also houses offices for student services, new classrooms, a dining center, a research center, and a new career center. Designed by the New York City firm Polshek Partners, the building has won a variety of awards and is best-known for having the entire First Amendment etched in its glass ribbon.

During David Rubin&rsqou;s tenure he established an office of external relations that has developed a highly successful career center, an alumni relations operation that now actively involves more than 3,500 graduates, and a development program that has significantly increased annual fund giving to the School. Among the gifts he brought to the School were $15 million from the Newhouse Foundation to construct Newhouse-3; a $10 million Development Fund gift from the Newhouse Foundation to guarantee the future health of the School; $500,000 from Arthur Liu to establish the Liu Scholarships in multicultural communications at the graduate level; and $1.5 million from the Knight Foundation for a Knight Chair in Political Reporting. He also assisted Professor Robert Thompson to create the Center for the Study of Popular Television.

He is currently the host (and co-creator) of "The Ivory Tower Half Hour," a regular round-table discussion of public affairs that airs on WCNY-TV every Friday at 8 p.m. It is the highest rated public affairs show, exclusive of news broadcasts, in the central New York television market. The show has been on the air since September of 2002.

In 1979 he headed the Task Force on the Public&rsqou;s Right to Know for the President&rsqou;s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island. This task force produced a 300-page report to President Carter that assisted electric utilities in preparing a communications disaster plan to address future nuclear power plant accidents. The report was requested by the Office of Emergency Management in New York City in late 2002 to help emergency planning in the post-9/11 environment.

In both 1998 and 1999 he served as a Pulitzer Prize judge. In 1998 he judged “Explanatory Journalism,” and in 1999 he judged “Public Service Journalism.”

He is married to the former broadcast journalist Tina Press. They live in Fayetteville, NY with their two shelties, Bobby and Ace, both of whom are masters-level agility competition dogs.

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