Mike Lewis Stricklin 

By Rob Logan (UI SJMC Ph.D., 1977)

Homem renascentista, Portuguese for a Renaissance person, encapsulates Mike Stricklin’s career and legacy (1944-2022). Stricklin, who began and finished his UI SJMC Ph.D. on the same days as the author, enriched and inspired students and peers for more than a half-century. 

Stricklin (Ph.D., 1977) was the Assistant Managing Editor of the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, the publisher of the Daily Iowan; the Hitchcock Chair at the U. of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) School of Journalism and Mass Communication; a Fulbright scholar/lecturer at the Federal University of Piaui in Brazil, bilingual in English and Portuguese; a devotee of international cooperation; an acknowledged expert in Q methodology; a Peace Corps volunteer; a software developer, communications philosopher, and father/grandfather to two children and three grandchildren. While few knew, Stricklin was also a skilled pianist and played French Horn with the San Angelo (TX.) Summer Symphony when he was a teenager. To put his talent in context, the vast acreage of West Texas (where Stricklin grew up) is not renowned for nurturing classical French Horn players.

Stricklin’s devotion to UI SJMC is evidenced by his shepherding of manuscripts written, co-written, or edited by Prof. Al Talbott after Talbott’s death in 2016. Stricklin often said Talbott “gave us room to grow” (qmethod.org, Obituary: Albert David Talbott, 2016).

 For more than a generation, colleagues and friends appreciated the Stricklin family’s splendid hospitality. For instance, a 1976 three-day summer party in Iowa City drew guests from multiple states and countries. The festivities featured perhaps the oddest combination of Brazilian/Texas beer and barbeque ever assembled. More personally, Stricklin introduced the author to high-end audio, Blossom Dearie, Waylon Jennings, J.R. Kantor, Warren Bennis, guarana fruit and drink, and terrible tasting toothpaste.

 Stricklin’s career zenith occurred in 2022 when he received the William Stephenson Award from the international academic/professional society devoted to Q Methodology (qmethod,org, Stephenson award, n.d.). Stephenson founded Q methodology, a mixed research method that assesses how attitudes and beliefs are structured (Wikipedia, William Stephenson, n.d.; Stephenson, 1953, 1967). The award’s dedication notes that Stricklin’s PCQ software liberated Q methodology analysis from mainframes at the dawn of the personal computer age. PCQ facilitated the analysis of Q data sets on PCs and advanced the assessment of Q data by providing varimax and judgmental factor rotation user options, which Stricklin learned from Stephenson and Talbott @ UI SJMC. (Stephenson was a UI SJMC visiting professor from 1974-77 - the era of Stricklin’s doctoral studies). 

Stricklin occasionally wrote about Q methodology with Brazilian colleague Prof. Gustavo Said. One of their contributions discusses collecting audience attitudes with minimal scholarly interference and inference (Said & Stricklin, 2014). Another joint work (in Portuguese) compares the similarities and differences between Stephenson and Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas (Said & Stricklin, 2013). Stricklin also advanced basic research about Q methodology by writing and lecturing about the subtle but significant judgments investigators make when they select among the quantitative options that undergird factor analysis (Stricklin, 2005). 

In his work with Said and others, Stricklin pioneered Q’s interdisciplinary use in Brazil. He also mentored Q devotees (regardless of their level of experience or geographical location) for more than 40 years. Overall, Stricklin mentored students and colleagues from four continents for five decades. UNL and the Federal University of Piaui lauded him for his pedagogical footprints (College of Journalism and Mass Communication, 2022). 

In addition, Stricklin established an educational and business partnership program between the State of Nebraska and the Brazilian State of Piaui that resulted in more than 400 international exchanges (College of Journalism and Mass Communication, 2022).

When he was the Hitchcock chair in journalism at UNL, Stricklin was prescient about the future of the newspaper business. By the late 1970s, Stricklin realized personal computing would transfigure the news media and eventually, undermine the business model of metropolitan, medium-sized, and smaller newspapers. As the Assistant Managing Editor of the Star-Telegram and at UNL, Stricklin lobbied newspaper executives to understand the socio-cultural and socio-economic revolution that digital media augured.

Among his recommended innovations advanced during the last two decades of the 20^th century, Stricklin encouraged daily newspapers to embrace websites, seek fiscal alternatives to traditional display advertising, and commit to increased community engagement. Together with UNL Prof. Wilma Crumley and others, aiming to assist Nebraska newspaper publishers, Stricklin interviewed hundreds of Nebraskans about their media use and preferences and suggested an array of innovations to generate and sustain newspaper readership (Engstrom & Stricklin, 1992).

While Stricklin told the author his foremost career disappointment was the apathy of his newspaper peers in the 1980s and 90s, Stricklin’s handiwork demonstrated his leadership and the visionary merits of UI SJMC’s doctoral program. 

References

College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Obituary: Michael Stricklin (2022). https://journalism.unl.edu/news/obituary-michael-stricklin. Retrieved March 16, 2024.

Engstrom, C., & Stricklin, M. (1992). Disabled persons and mass media usage: Deaf Nebraskans offer their viewpoints. News Computing Journal, 11(4).

Qmethod.org. Obituary: Albert David Talbott (2016). https://qmethod.org/2016/03/09/obituary-albert-david-talbott/. Retrieved March 17, 2024.

Qmethod.org. William Stephenson Award. (n.d.). https://qmethod.org/issss/the-william-stephenson-award/. Retrieved March 10, 2024. 

Said, G., & Stricklin, M. (2013). Comunicabilidade e dialogismo: Aproximações epistemológicas entre William Stephenson e Mikhail Bakhtin.  Questões Transversais – Revista deEpistemologias da Comunicação, 1(2), 115-124. https://revistas.unisinos.br/index.php/questoes/article/view/7664.

Said, G., & Stricklin, M. (2014). Dialogism: A philosophical contribution to understanding concourse and consciring. Operant Subjectivity, 37(3), 21-37.  https://ojs.library.okstate.edu/osu/index.php/osub/article/view/8750.

Stephenson, W. (1953). The study of behavior: Q technique and its methodology. University of Chicago Press. 

Stephenson W. (1967). The play theory of mass communication. University of Chicago Press. 

Stricklin, M. (2005). Eight quantum realities redux: Finding David Bohm. Operant Subjectivity, 28(3/4). https://ojs.library.okstate.edu/osu/index.php/osub/article/view/8858. 

Wikipedia, William Stephenson. (n.d.) Retrieved March 11, 2024.