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Irving Rein earned his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh and is currently a Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. His primary research and teaching interests are popular culture, crisis management, and place marketing. He is also the author of many books on effective communication strategies, and currently researching the distribution and content changes affecting popular culture.

Can you tell us a bit about the founding of the MSC Program?

In 1984 there was a company out in Naperville, Illinois, and they asked Professor Paul Arnston and I whether we would be interested in creating a custom technical communication program for their company. We were interested so we went out to Naperville to talk about it. But one thing led to another and they told us they couldn’t do the program anymore. So Paul and I drove home. On the way we stopped at a restaurant, and sat around and decided to go ahead and start the program ourselves.

What was the idea behind the program?

The program was modelled off of the Kellogg Executive Management program, and the idea of the program was to be a communication version of an MBA. The fundamental question then was this: what did these students need to know? They needed to know how to write well, as well as understand audiences and who they’re communicating with. What’s interesting is you go into nonprofit and for profit companies, and they still don’t know how to do these things. Through our experiences, we saw the need for good fundamental communication skills and a lack of cultural awareness everywhere we went.

So that’s basically what we do here. We tell students how to write a message, present it, adapt it to an audience, distribute it, how to get to stakeholders, and more. Whatever field it’s in, we should ask ourselves, ‘Do I understand the audience and who the producers of the audience are? What are the takeaways and what will they remember?’ When I do my own consulting work I face these issues all the time. These are all fundamental and timeless questions.

The room we are sitting in right now is the original MSC room. This was where the very first class happened in September 1984 with 12 students. That was 32 years ago. The core idea of the program actually has not changed from my perspective. The fundamental program is still there and these same questions are just as relevant today.

Can you talk about the class you teach for MSC and what you want students to take away from your class?

I usually teach a Crisis Communication seminar. I cover how crisis began, the importance of public presentation, types of arguments, audiences, and talk about things I’ve experienced not in literature. I also make sure students have accounted for interpersonal relationships as a very important part to crisis communication.
Because the MSC students are mainly working people, they have more theoretical and practical experience than the undergraduates I teach, so I need to adapt my teaching. There is an immediacy in the graduate market, and it is more focused on real world experience. We — faculty and students– are  people who look at the communication environment and we sort it out. We help make decisions, help with clarity, make the ideas work. We bring an organizational aspect to processes that others may have not thought about. For example, in any business, I want make sure my students have a way of looking at crisis situations so they can accumulate information and use it quickly. I’ve been in situations where there is a lot at stake and a mistake could cost a lot. Sometimes I tell people to do nothing. One of the conventional wisdoms is to move quickly during crises, but sometimes that is not the best strategy. You have a group of students in various states, and in six months to a year from now they will be faced with these communication issues. The key thing for them is, can they apply choices? I may not know the answers, but my job is to give them the choices. I find a never ending need for this.This Crisis Communication workshop was open to the public this past December.

What makes Northwestern MSC different from other Masters in Communications programs?

The offer you can’t get anywhere else is top notch quality professors who not only know what’s going on in the field, but also do the original research. We really wanted people who could tell stories but also talk about theories and principles, and took theories and applied them to actual events. This way, when students walk out of here, they understand why they are doing something. Alumni come back and say, during a crisis where I had to explain something, I was the one who was able to apply this theory and do this. We offer a broad-based communication degree, not a specialized degree. We are not just social media or internet based. We are a program that covers a wide base of skills and understanding so you can apply it anywhere. Finally, Northwestern itself is also a very fine institution with a lot of resources. We want these people to go out and do well for themselves and represent Northwestern well, so we help them.

Any generally interesting or unique research or projects that you specifically have been working on through the program that alumni or prospective students might like to know about?

I’m working on a book about the influence of popular culture. We are looking at music, television, film, all the texts, comics, fashion. We are looking at how our communication strategies affect our behavior. I would take the position that all communication is culturally based. The book is targeted at people in communication. If you don’t know what’s going on it’s hard to be a communication specialist. I look at music as strategy and at culture as strategy. I’m looking at how it works with a broader lens. I believe a lot of great communication is embedded in music and comedy, not just speeches.

Michael Roloff received his Ph.D. in Communication from Michigan State University. He joined the faculty at Northwestern in 1978.Michael Roloff’s research and teaching interests center around interpersonal influence. He has published articles and offers courses focused on persuasion, interpersonal compliance-gaining, conflict management, organizational change, and bargaining and negotiation. His current research is focused on conflict avoidance and serial arguing in intimate relationships, the interpretation and construction of persuasive messages, and the effects of planning and alternatives on negotiation processes. This is his 33rd year teaching for MSC and 38th year teaching at Northwestern.

How are MSC students different from your other students?

Their motivation. For undergraduates, class is usually their first exposure to anything in depth. So when it comes to things like organizational change, you can only make them more familiar. When you go to PhD level, most students just want to do research. MSC students, however, are very interested in application and how they can use this stuff. They have a wealth of background because they are out there working on the experiential level. They want to know what they can do on the job that can make a difference. They have the knowledge base and the broader interest, which is lacking at the PhD and undergraduate level.

Was this new to you?

I expected it because when I was in graduate school, I took a job teaching army recruiters. They wanted to know about applied persuasion and how to get someone to join the army. Thus, I knew going into teaching for MSC that there were people out there who didn’t exist in university settings and who were interested in ideas that worked and were applicable to their context. It was refreshing when I got back into teaching.

Can you talk a little bit about the class you teach for MSC and the main takeaways for your students?

I teach Change Management. It’s basically organizational change. In the first part of the course I work on persuasion, attitude change, and bargaining negotiation. In the second half of the course, I talk about change strategies, reactions employees have to change, and how people can resist change. In terms of my goals, I want students to get important research based information they can use. I also want to make it entertaining. The course is incredibly cathartic, and I get a chance to rant and rave about the injustice in the workplace and they get a chance to rant the same way to me. There’s a tension in organizational change. Organizations obviously have problems, but the problem is change agents approach it in an unrealistic way. Anything you do has costs to it, and one problem is we don’t always look at the costs of change, but just its benefits.

Plus another problem I try to stress with students is that there aren’t that many new ideas. Every generation suffers from the problem of thinking that they’re doing something new. We’ve been such change oriented and addicted. Organizational change and innovation has such a positive connotation. If we’re not doing something, it’s because we’ve already done it. What has happened is people change the titles and labels. If you’re an old buffalo, it’s easy to detect if a bad idea is coming back. If you don’t have the experience, you can’t recognize it’s a camouflaged pack.

So I do a lot of stuff like that. It’s really me just trying to be grounded. It’s not all dark. Almost any organizational change structure will work in the right circumstances. The challenge is figuring out what those circumstances are.

I have done some consulting with corporations and I’ve read a lot of papers about failed organizational change. Some of what I teach is based on direct experience, some is vicarious, and some is just my own research. My research is generally focused on how you influence people, persuasion research, bargaining and negotiation research, and conflict research. But I am not solely interested in organizational change.

All the assignments are applied, so students write two papers and ask them to take a failed organizational change that they’ve heard about, experienced, or have been in charge of. They take some aspect of the perspectives we talk about and devise a plan that would’ve worked. I take a very pragmatic approach. I want to know what their goals were, why they were trying to create the change, what they did wrong, what class indicates they should’ve done better, and how they know whether it would work.

One of the best comments I’ve ever gotten from a student at our last class last year was: “When I came in here, I thought anyone who opposed change was just a curmudgeon, or some old nasty person. After spending 10 weeks in your class, I’m beginning to wonder if the people who are promoting change are just in it for themselves. These are the people we should be especially concerned about.” I immediately went, “I’ve accomplished my goal! I’ve made you even handed.” Because that’s my ultimate goal for my students: they’ve got to learn how to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of both sides when thinking about change.

What makes Northwestern MSC different from other Masters in Communications programs?

Many programs are very narrow in their focus. There was a time when many communication departments were eclectic. Yet, over the last 10 to 15 years, departments have become more narrowly focused. I believe this is under the change mantra: if you can’t do everything well, do one thing well.

The MSC program is the one program where we haven’t gotten that narrow. It is more eclectic. It’s the one program where various faculty members work together when they normally don’t work together outside of MSC. It’s truly interdisciplinary. I have MSC colleagues who don’t do anything like my research, but we can put together something that works.

We also have very broad programming, so we get a combination of people in various markets. All our students are smart, willing to put in extra time to get things done, and very interested in application.

Any generally interesting or unique research or projects that you specifically have been working on through the program that alumni or prospective students might like to know about?

I just finished directing dissertations. We’ve done a lot of studies focused on serial arguing: the tendency of people in relationships to argue about same things over and over again. A lot of the research is focused on how it makes them physically sick, and how conflict can adversely hurt your health. For example, it takes longer for a cut to heal if you just had an argument with your significant other versus a pleasant experience.

For organizational change at the undergraduate level, we also look at how organizational stress and health problems emerge. We explore presenteeism, and the problem of sick employees dragging themselves to work instead of staying home. Organizations are put in positions to convince employees it would be a good idea to not come into work sick.