Several months ago, a student paused before class to ask Dr. Julie Larson how she was feeling about her upcoming retirement. She laughed.
“I’m too busy to be sad,” she said.
But with the passage of time, the tears began to catch up. After what she’s described as a “marvelous forty years of teaching” in the communication department she helped to found, Larson is retiring from The Master’s University this month.
She described her career with a hint of wonder: “It’s a dream come true, and a fulfillment of my passion ever since I became a believer.”
The dream started during her last semester as an English student at the University of Southern California.
“I was sitting in the back row, just listening, and I said, ‘God, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to teach Christians at a Christian school how to think critically in order that they might be able to better evangelize for you.’”
Larson’s singular mission statement never changed. It brought her to TMU in 1983, where she was first tasked with teaching general education spoken communication courses. The school only had about 250 students, and the previous communication degree — an interdisciplinary program helmed by a single faculty member — had been discontinued.
But in 1985, Larson was hired full-time — the same year that Dr. John MacArthur came to head the college, which soon saw its enrollment numbers double and triple. Students began to ask for the resurrection of the communication major. Larson finally took the query up to Dr. John Stead, then vice president of academic affairs.
“What should I tell the students?” she asked.
She remembers that Stead remained quiet in thought for several minutes.
“Finally, he turns around, looks at me and says, ‘Well, the fastest way for us to do that is if you started it. Do you want to?’”
Larson, fresh off of earning a master’s degree in rhetoric and literature, didn’t have to think long. “I thought, ‘If he has enough confidence in me to start a program, then I’m going to give it a try.’”
Larson still calls Stead “one of the greatest mentors of my entire life.” With his support, she went on to develop the communication department from scratch. When the first students joined in 1986, there were three emphases: speech, writing, and electronic media.
Since then, the department has bounded from one milestone to the next, adding new emphases, faculty, and resources. Larson has worked with several department chairs in her tenure, even briefly chairing herself. But through the program’s expansion, she has vigilantly held to the national accreditation standards, a benchmark for student learning outcomes.
Larson is dedicated to preserving what she believes to be the crucial, classical foundation of academics: speech, writing, and critical thinking. Core courses she taught included heavy-hitters like Rhetorical Criticism, Argumentation and Debate, and Interpersonal Communication.
Pupils entering a Larson class for the first time often had to find their bearings when they encountered the intellectual demands of her coursework. Prof. Peter Shickle, assistant professor of communication at TMU, remembers sitting under her instruction as a TMC student two decades ago.
“She holds you to a higher level,” Shickle said. “She wants you to think for yourself. And I think that’s why her classes can seem to be a struggle, because people are not always used to being pushed that way.”
The fruits of Larson’s academic rigor are evident in the dozens of students who have transitioned from her classrooms into graduate schools and law programs across the country.
As she retires, Larson believes it is most important for the program to remain a training ground for the essentials: teaching students “how to write well, how to think critically, how to do research and cite sources accurately, how to deliver a good speech, and how to understand concepts and ideas.”
It’s that passion for helping young men and women communicate for Christ, semester after semester, that is perhaps Larson’s greatest legacy.
Shickle said simply, “I would not be where I am today without her.”
Learn more about TMU’s Communications department at masters.edu/communication.
