Hoyt finishes tenure on Athletic Board

Fullfilling a dream, Athletic Board chair Jim Hoyt takes the Zamboni for a spin across the hockey ice at the Kohl Center.

A model of Camp Randall Stadium sits on Professor James L. Hoyt’s table in his Vilas Hall office, standing apart from other mementos more closely tied to his career in media and academia.

Hoyt is well known as a School of Journalism and Mass Communication professor (and former director), consultant on broadcast news, and expert on ethics and cameras in the courts. But the model hints at another side of Hoyt’s career, his current and past involvement in Wisconsin athletics.

As an undergraduate at UW–Madison, Hoyt played in the 1963 Rose Bowl – as a tuba player in the marching band. And he attended the 2000 Rose Bowl in quite a different capacity – as a member of the Big Ten Conference delegation. For 10 years, he’s served as a faculty representative on the Athletic Board. For nine of those years, he has been board chair and faculty athletics representative to the Big Ten and other national athletics associations. He’s stepping down from those posts July. 1.

“It’s been like having two full-time jobs,” Hoyt says. “The toughest part of being chairman has been to improve the competitiveness of the athletic program while retaining Wisconsin’s traditional academic principles.”

Hoyt says he joined the Athletic Board because Donna Shalala, former UW–Madison chancellor, asked him. “She was a very persuasive person,” he notes. The position has kept his interest for 10 years because the issues were always changing.

This past year has been a glorious one for the Badgers, with yet another Rose Bowl appearance, a championship for women’s basketball, a Final Four appearance for men’s basketball, and team and individual student athletic achievements in other sports. But Hoyt also served back when the Badgers were in the basement, and the program was losing money.

Yet Hoyt says overseeing a winning program brings a different kind of pressure to bear: “In many ways, dealing with success is more challenging than dealing with failure because the expectations are so high.”

As faculty athletic representative, Hoyt says he serves on a number of committees of the Big Ten Conference of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and the Western Collegiate Hockey Association.

“Jim’s leadership and guidance have been so valuable to our department in recent years,” says UW Associate Athletic Director Vince Sweeney. “During his term as board chairman, he has assisted us in our efforts to deal with the fast-changing and ever-challenging world of college athletics. He’s been a loyal, dedicated board chairman whose positive influence will have an impact on us for many years. We will miss his involvement, but we are thankful for the significant contribution that he has made.”

Once finished with his Athletic Board stint, Hoyt will be focusing full attention once again on his life’s work, study of the media. During 27 years at UW–Madison, Hoyt estimates he’s taught about 16,000 students in Journalism 201, “Introduction to Mass Communications.” Although 201 is a prerequisite to other classes in journalism, Hoyt says the class is also taken by many non-journalism majors.

Hoyt received his undergraduate and graduate degrees at UW–Madison between 1965 and 1970. After completing his undergraduate degree, he worked in Milwaukee as a television news reporter, but covered the anti-war movement and other Madison stories. Eventually he moved to Madison, earned a master’s degree, then obtained a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. But he returned to Madison to get a Ph.D. “I’m like a yo-yo, I’ve come and I’ve gone,” Hoyt recalls.

Hoyt taught at Indiana University between 1970-73, and worked for NBC News in Washington, D.C. In 1974 a job opened at UW–Madison in the broadcast news sequence.

Hoyt still consults with local news departments and NBC News regarding the organization and formats of newscasts and the quality of writing. “With NBC News, I have conducted research that led to reformatting ‘The Today Show’ and restructuring the support staff for ‘NBC News with Tom Brokaw.'”

Naturally, that work brings Hoyt in contact with broadcasting heavyweights. Hoyt has met cable TV mogul Ted Turner and former TV anchor Walter Cronkite, among many others.

Yet Hoyt is known more for scholarship than celebrity, and his research has helped open courtrooms to television, access that TV viewers take for granted today. He not only served on the committee that authored the policies that direct the use of cameras in the Wisconsin courts, but he’s made presentations in other states to help their courts develop similar policies.

“Since that time, the presence of cameras in courtrooms has become much more common and the ‘fear of the unknown’ phenomenon has all but disappeared,” Hoyt says.

Despite these responsibilities, Hoyt remains closely involved with students, working to establish a student-run radio station that is now closer to airtime than ever before, Hoyt believes.

Hoyt has received a sabbatical for 2000-01 and plans to spend most of it working in the television industry to get himself “up to speed in the new High Definition digital age,” so his teaching will be as current as possible when he returns full time to the classroom in fall 2001.