Fredrick Yu

From Profiles in Communication, Max McElwain

The world that awaited Frederick Yu and his wife that icy November night when they climbed off the Rock Island train in Iowa City in 1947 was so shocking that even now he remembers the precise date and time of arrival. After all Fred Yu had been through fighting Chinese bureaucracy for two years to get permission for travel to America-staring down an empty railroad track in Iowa seven days after climbing off a boat from Shanghai was indeed shocking.

"I can remember vividly the Rock Island Line arriving from San Francisco at 4:23 a.m. on November 7," he said. 'When I tried to book a train in San Francisco, the ticket agent didn't know where Iowa City was. I thought everyone knew where Iowa City was. In China, the universities are in big cities. I had also read that Iowa City was the state capital.

'We got off the train and stared down the track. It was quite cold, and we sat in the depot, people looking at us and we, at them. At 8 a.m. we asked directions to the university and walked straight into the president's office. There, we were introduced to Richard Sweitzer, the adviser to foreign students. Sweitzer was nothing less than fantastic, and he found us a place to live. Still, with the initial shock of our arrival, we didn't sleep for two days."

Frederick Yu became shock resistant. He had to be. After accepting that he was living amid cornfields rather than in a metropolis, Yu discovered that Wilbur Schramm was gone. Schramm had designed the doctoral program in mass communication at Iowa, the program that lured Fred Yu all the way from China.

''William Fenn, the head of the English Department when I was at the University of Nanking, and Schramm earned the first interdepartmental degrees from the School of Letters at Iowa," said Yu. "Fenn directed me towards Schramm's program. But I couldn't come in 1945, and two years later Schramm was at Illinois."

Yu nevertheless enrolled in the graduate program in November 1947signing up for three classes-half the normal course work. Two days later, Les Moeller administered the midterm in his reporting class.

"He wasn't expecting me to take it, but I stayed up the entire night before reading the text," said Yu. "I got a C-minus. 'Grad students need a B for a grade,' Les told me. I thought that-was the end of me. 'That wasn't bad!' Les told me. 'Some of the students flunked."'

Yu also took an innovative class called "World News Channels"where he was soon helping out as a teaching assistant. In the fall of 1949, after he'd earned a master's and was starting work on a doctorate the journalism school director, Les Moeller, called Yu into his office. "I want you to help out again in World News Channels," Moeller told Yu. 

"You're going to teach it," Moeller said.

It was Fred Yu's first American teaching job. And when he finished his doctorate in 1951, he became the first non-American student in the nation to earn a Ph.D. in mass communication. 

When Yu finally returned to Asia to work in 1965, he was an American citizen hired to design and implement a program in journalism education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

And when he visited Iowa City in 1983, he was an international specialist in the training of foreign correspondents and Third-World journalists, the author of five books and vice dean and CBS Professor of International Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. This time around, Iowa City was not so shocking.

"I walked around the campus, visiting the journalism building for only the second time," he said. "I looked for East Hall and couldn't find it. Then I walked by the house kitty-corner from Currier Hall where my pregnant wife and I lived, and by the president's house where Virgil Hancher lived.

"It was a sentimental journey," said Fred Yu. "After all, this is where I got started.

Frederick Teh Chi Yu graduated from the University of Nanking in 1944 with a degree in English literature, a field of study he chose largely because it was under the wing of Iowa-educated William Fenn.

"The University of Nanking was one of 13 American church-supported missionary colleges in China," said Yu. "It was also a private school with high tuition that was a little like an Ivy League college. It had one of the first agriculture departments in a Chinese university, started by Pearl Buck's husband. When I decided to go to America, Fenn advised me to enter either Hamilton College in New York or Iowa. He finally settled on Iowa, trying to keep me away from the big city."

Yu's plans to travel abroad had to wait because Chinese regulations wouldn't let him leave. So he spent two years - 1944-1946 - as the chief translation and news editor of the China Division of the U.S. Office of War Information. Yu spent another year teaching English at a Chinese university before the voyage from Shanghai in 1947.

Although he started the fall term halfway into the semester, Yu received his master's degree in 1948 on completing his thesis, "How Selected American Editors View U.S. Postwar Policy Toward China." Yu discovered that 65 percent of the editors believed they weren't getting adequate information on China, and 79 percent felt that Chiang Kai-shek's government was corrupt. "In perspective, the thesis doesn't seem like much," he said. "But at the time there were no computers to work with and statistics were done by hand. It was painful."

After earning his master's degree, Fred Yu, who originally intended to stay only one year in the United States, considered returning to China to teach or practice radio journalism. He was also thinking about an American doctoral program when the ghost of Wilbur Schramm popped up again. Yu had written him about enrolling at Illinois, where Schramm was-teaching, and Schramm wrote back advising him to enroll in the mass communications program he had started at Iowa. Fred Yu followed the advice of the man he had never met.

When he wasn't teaching World News Channels, Yu was working on his doctoral dissertation, "The Treatment of China in Four Chicago Daily Newspapers." The year was 1949, and Fred Yu's thesis would have an uncanny timeliness. Mao's People's Republic would soon change the face of China, Suddenly Yu, who'd had such a hard time leaving China, couldn't go home if he had wanted to.

"It was very traumatic being a student here while the Communists had. taken over China," he said. "There were almost 4,000 Chinese students like myself in America, and to keep my visa, I had to keep my dissertation going to maintain student status. Then Congress passed legislation that permitted us to stay and seek gainful employment."

With the establishment of the People's Republic, Yu's content analysis of Chicago newspapers did not lack news stories. "In the 1940s content analyses were new and controversial. I wanted to use the local editions of the Chicago papers and use the libraries, so I went to Chicago and worked," he said.

Yu finished his doctoral work in spring of 1951. As at Yu's earlier crossroads, Wilbur Schramm gave directions. This time, Schramm got the job done in person.

"I had never met this great man. In 1951 I was passing near the University of Illinois, so I stopped to meet him," said Yu. "He took me lunch and said, 'You know, Fred, there is a job...' That's all he said. We said goodbye, and two days later I got a telegram from the University of

Southern California offering me a job. The title was research associate and lecturer, and they offered lots of money. They wanted someone to study Chinese communications, and I took it.”

Yu and Schramm made up for lost time later. After first visiting Schramm' s East-West Center in Hawaii as a senior specialist in 1964, Yu spent most summers, beginning in 1975, as a visiting and senior fellow in Honolulu. "I grew very close to Schramm," he said. "A lot of people thought I was his student."

Yu spent three years at Southern California, then sped off on a trans-American academic and professional tour that included stops at Stetson University in Florida and seven years (1955-1962) at Montana State University. In the summers Yu could be found at the world desk of the Washington Post or the Times-Herald, or the editorial desk of the Springfield News-Sun in Ohio. He spent 1958 at Harvard and MIT as a Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellow.

Then in 1962 Yu joined the faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York - the city William Fenn had steered him away from 20 years earlier. He was named a full professor in 1967, the year revolution again played an unexpected role in Yu's life. This was revolution American-style, and it happened in his own administrative office.

A year after his arrival, Yu had been named director of research in the graduate school at Columbia. When Columbia anti-war activists focused world attention on their school, Fred Yu was named to the faculty steering committee that served as a buffer between administration and students. It was not a pleasant time to be initiated into administrative duties.

"I was involved day in and day out," said Yu. "I remember trying to cross a barricade and having a student ask me, 'Who the hell are you?’

"'I have to eat,' I said. The students were mostly nice though. Our journalism students were paid by Life to shoot photographs collectively of the strike, and they did a good job."

Yu escaped the heat in 1968 by going to the Chinese University in Hong Kong as a visiting chair at the journalism program, which he had designed and launched in the summer of 1965. He spent most of the 1970s as an associate dean at Columbia. He was promoted to vice dean of the graduate school of journalism in 1979. When William Paley and the CBS Foundation donated $1 million for a CBS Professorship of International Journalism at Columbia in 1980, Fred Yu became the first recipient. 

"It has to be one of the best jobs in the U.S.A.," said Yu. "I may be at Columbia, but the seed of my interest in international journalism was at the University of Iowa. That's where I took my first class."