Don Stewart has been chair of the Department of Mass Communication since July 2003, when the program became the 12th department is the College of Liberal Arts. At the time, he was serving as coordinator of the program in the Department of Fine Arts and Mass Communication.

Stewart came to Francis Marion in 1984 as the school’s first full-time mass communication professor. That was shortly after the Department of English established a minor. He came here from Dayton, Ohio, where he had worked for the Dayton Daily News for 11 years where he had been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting three different times.

After developing most of the academic courses which comprised the original minor, Stewart helped coordinate a cooperative program that allowed select Francis Marion students to complete a semester at the University of South Carolina’s school of journalism to finish a major. In 1995, the state Commission on Higher Education approved a proposal Stewart drafted that allowed Francis Marion to offer its own mass communication major.

As department chair, Stewart has created a Professional Advisory Committee that includes professionals working at newspapers, magazines, television stations and in public relations throughout the Carolinas. Some of the members are FMU graduates; all provide on-going advice to both faculty and students. Stewart has also implemented an honor code and honor pledge to maintain the media’s highest standards of academic and professional honesty.

He also created the course in “convergence journalism” and designed the track for that cutting edge area in professional practice.

A native of western Pennsylvania, Stewart won six major awards for his reporting and writing during his 15-year journalism career. He worked as a reporter and editor on seven newspapers in five states and was named “Ohio Sighted Person of the Year” by the American Federation of the Blind in recognition of his investigative series of articles.

Since 2000, Stewart has been editor of the South Carolina newsletter for the American Association of University Professors. Previously he worked as a writing coach for the staff of the Florence Morning News and has been interviewed repeatedly by members of the area media as a resource authority. He has also written articles that have appeared in various South Carolina publications.

Having worked the “court beat” for newspapers, Stewart developed the Media Law and Ethics course at Francis Marion. He was also been retained as an expert witness in numerous libel suits and served on the faculty of two continuing legal education programs held at the National Advocacy Center in Columbia.

Stewart is a 1965 graduate of Greenville College in Illinois, where he earned a B.A. degree with majors in Speech and English. He received an M.A. degree in journalism from Michigan State University in 1967. He subsequently taught at Roberts Wesleyan College in Rochester, New York and Sinclair Community College and the University of Dayton in Ohio.