Credit: Nancy Kranich

In addition to teaching at Rutgers, Jorge Reina Schement has held positions at Stanford University, the University of Texas at Austin, the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, and the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at UCLA.

Jorge Reina Schement, a renowned expert on communication and information policy, will become the new dean of the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies (SCILS) on July 1. Schement, most recently distinguished professor of telecommunications in the College of Communications at Penn State, replaces the retiring Gustav Friedrich, who has led SCILS since 1998.

Schement’s research and scholarship address issues in the areas of information policy, global telecommunications, the social aspects of the information age, Spanish-language media, and information-consumer behavior. More specifically, he has focused on the social and policy consequences of the production and consumption of information, with a special interest in policy as it relates to ethnic minorities.

At Penn State, Schement co-founded and co-directed the Institute for Information Policy, which is sponsored jointly by the College of Communications and the College of Information Sciences and Technology. He is a faculty fellow of the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information. He has served on the editorial boards of seven academic journals and is editor-in-chief of the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Communication and Information.

Schement has been an associate editor of The Information Society and an editor of the Annual Review of Technology for the Aspen Institute. He has held positions at Stanford University, the University of Texas at Austin, the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, and the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at UCLA. He has been a Ford Foundation Fellow and a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki.

In 1994, Schement served as the director of the Federal Communications Commission’s Information Policy Project. He has served on numerous national committees for such organizations as the National Academy of Sciences, the National Research Council, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress, and the United States Commission on Civil Rights. In addition, Schement is a member of the Minority Media Telecommunications Council and has been an adviser to the American Library Association, the Tomás Rivera Center, and the Center for Media Education. He is the author of the telecommunications policy agenda for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

A graduate of Southern Methodist University, Schement earned his doctorate in communication at Stanford University’s Institute for Communications Research and his master’s degree at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author or editor of 10 books, with two additional volumes in preparation, 100 articles and reports, multiple other papers and presentations, and a substantial list of corporate and foundation grants.

“I am excited to be returning to Rutgers to build on Gus Friedrich’s accomplishments,” Schement said. “SCILS scholars are trying to understand how information is developed, communicated, and preserved, and it’s hard to imagine work more essential to human progress than that.”