Parsons and new president Peter Bhatia, who is editor of The Cincinnati Enquirer, will begin their roles in September.
ACEJMC, established in 1945, is the accrediting agency formally recognized by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation for journalism and mass communications programs at both the undergraduate and professional graduate levels. Accreditation is a benchmark of program quality in the discipline.
Overall, 120 JMC programs are accredited in the United States, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Chile, New Zealand, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Elon’s School of Communications has successfully gone through two accreditation cycles, and both the undergraduate program and the M.A. in Interactive Media program are accredited.
Parsons has chaired 14 ACEJMC site teams since 2008, including at Michigan State, Missouri, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Georgia, Iowa State, TCU and at institutions in Mexico, Puerto Rico and the United Arab Emirates. He first was elected to the 30-member Accrediting Council in 2004 as a representative of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). He is now in his fifth year as an elected representative of the administrators group, the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication (ASJMC).
As vice president, Parsons succeeds Doug Anderson, who retired from Penn State in 2014 after 15 years as dean of the College of Communications and now is a senior research professor at the Cronkite School at Arizona State.
Parsons and new Council president Peter Bhatia, who is editor of The Cincinnati Enquirer, will begin their roles effective with the Sept. 2 Council meeting in Chicago. Bhatia previously served seven years as Council president when he was editor of The Oregonian in Portland. Traditionally, the Council president is a professional while the vice president is an academic.