April 26, 1999 Volume 21, No. 15

Park School Names Associate Dean A veteran reporter, researcher, teacher, and administrator has been named associate dean of the Roy H. Park School of Communications. Virginia Mansfield-Richardson, who is currently an associate professor of communications at Pennsylvania State University, will be joining the Park School on July 1. Among other duties in her new position, Mansfield-Richardson will take part in formulating, implementing, and evaluating school, department, program, and cocurricular policies, procedures, and operations; supervising student academic affairs; facilitating curriculum development; coordinating activities of the school’s cocurricular managers; and supervising the internship program. She holds a B.A. degree in political science and Ph.D. in mass communication from Ohio University, as well as a master of public administration degree from George Mason University. Since 1995 Mansfield-Richardson has taught courses in such topics as media ethics, news reporting, and world media systems in the College of Communications at Penn State. She also served for two years as director of the Multicultural High School Journalism Workshop at the college. She previously taught at Ohio University and American University, serving in 1990–91 as assistant director, internship coordinator, and instructor in the American University study-abroad program in Brussels, Belgium. From 1979 to 1990 Mansfield-Richardson worked at the Washington Post as a staff writer, copy editor, and editorial aide. She covered government, education, finance, development, science, lifestyles, and religion, and for five years wrote a weekly political column. She has also been a writer and/or editor for the Potomac News, Journal of the U.S. House of Representatives, and DVM: The Newsmagazine of Veterinary Medicine. Mansfield-Richardson is currently writing three books: Asian Americans and the Mass Media for Garland Publishing, and How Leading U.S. Newspapers Cover Asian Americans and Asian Americans and the U.S. Media: An Historical Analysis for Greenwood Publishing Group. She wrote an entry in History of Mass Media in the United States: An Encyclopedia, and her articles have appeared in News Coverage of U.S. Racial Minorities, 1934–94: A Sourcebook and Media Ethics: Developing Values in Mass Communication, among others. A member of Penn State’s Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity, Mansfield-Richardson is also a fellow of the university’s Institute for Information Policy. Her professional memberships include the American Association for Higher Education, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Asian American Journalists Association, Chinese Communication Association, and Association for Asian American Studies.