Paul Jalbert

Professor Emeritus

Department of Communication

About

Ph.D., Department of Sociology, Boston University, 1984

Associate Professor, Emeritus, Department of Communication, University of Connecticut

Dr. Jalbert arrived at UCONN/Stamford in the fall of 1986 and retired in June of 2016. During those 30 years, his passion was teaching students the intricacies of how the mass media operate and the structures of how conversations take place in everyday life. He published several papers on the logic and politics of the mass media and their consequences. His research was informed by the insights of the philosophers of language Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin and John Searle and by Ethnomethodologists Harold Garfinkel, Harvey Sacks and his mentor, Jeff Coulter. He brought the analytical power of these scholars’ groundbreaking work to the study of the mass media in order to unpack the ideological content of domestic and international news stories that purveyors report to the public, day after day.

He edited an anthology of analytical articles about international news stories in 1999 entitled MEDIA STUDIES: Ethnomethodological Approaches, University Press of America: Lantham.

As he practiced his work as a teacher and experienced the realities of education in the U.S., he decided to document the ills of his profession (and how to mitigate them) and, in 2018, published a monograph entitled LEFT BEHIND: The Public Education Crisis in the United States, Routledge: Abingdon/New York. The most salient finding in the study was/is a flagrantly ‘missing component’ in the curricula across the country, namely: a comprehensive program for the development of ‘critical thinking’. The most important teaching he did from 1996-2016 was to incorporate such a ‘comprehensive program’ of critical thinking into the introductory course ‘Process of Communication’.

He would like to be remembered as a compassionate teacher/coach, who connected in mutual respect with his students, from whom he learned much; not as only an incidental acquaintance.