The Magical Mister Matt: Matt Haught on his first year as Department Chair of Journalism and Strategic Media

Haught received his undergraduate and graduate degree at Marshall University, and his PhD at University of South Carolina. During the interview, he never missed an opportunity to be a storyteller through vivid language or engaging narrative. With joyful eyes, he explained his love of helping and encouraging both students and faculty, despite the struggles of an incredibly demanding job.

As department chair, he represents the journalism school for the University, has to cater to both the overall needs of the University and the needs of the students and faculty, produce research, teach classes, and advise students and faculty.

In an exceedingly demanding position, he still finds time to sit with students and show he cares about their education. He describes the act of learning and imparting knowledge as magic, a trick he performs often. Looking at the past year and the next few years to come, he has helped orchestrate some big changes in the department, including a new master’s degree, the launch of a PhD program, and contributing to the new “research culture” of an R1 research institution.

Can you say you are and what you do here?

My name is Matt Haught, I am the Department Chair of Journalism and Strategic Media at the University of Memphis.

How and when did you get to the University of Memphis?

I came to the University of Memphis as a faculty member, as an assistant professor, in 2013. So, apparently, my great aunt worked here, or went to school here, or something. I think she maybe went to school here, a lifetime ago, in the 70s, maybe, or 60s. She had a math PhD. You know, it's always funny, like it seems like everyone at Memphis has a Memphis connection through a person in some way, and I guess my great aunt is mine, even though, you know, we were not that close.

I interviewed here on election day in 2012, and that was the first time I'd ever been to Memphis, but I knew several people who'd worked here. And then I arrived in 2013 as an assistant professor, and this is the only place I have worked since I got my doctorate. I became chair May 13, 2024.

Do you like it?

The correct answer here is yes. Do I like having to deal with drama and headaches and stuff? No, that's not exactly fun, but it's also one of those things like “this is what you signed up for,” and that's what my mantra is: “this is what you signed up for. You are doing things that are hard things that aren't necessarily fun things but are meaningful in other ways.”

You know, the job of department chair, it’s not about you. It's about helping those around you to succeed. And that's what makes me happy is being able to do something for my colleagues, and for our students, and seeing them succeed in seeing them grow. I like being able to move the pieces. I like seeing the big picture and playing the game to make things work for other people. In some ways, it feels like it's a magic trick.

Did you ever think that you would go into the academic side of journalism? Like, was there a time where you thought you would be a bonafide journalist? And how did you switch over?

I would never call myself a bonafide journalist. I had a six-year career in newspapers and magazines, but I never felt like I was a journalist- I was a creative working in a journalism space. I was a designer for all of my years; my job was mostly designing and copy editing. I also did headline writing and story editing, so I had to know my grammar backward and forward and I had to know the elements of good journalism, the elements of good writing.

But no, no, I didn't set out to do this. I set out my career goal was to be a job that no longer exists- I wanted to be Associate Managing Editor for visuals at a top 25 circulation daily newspaper in the US. I graduated undergrad in 2007, and I was really getting started with the 2008 recession hit. That was also of the time period when newspapers, as an industry, were really starting to feel the hard effects, a lot of newspaper revenue at that time was driven by classified ad sales, ad sales for real estate, and real estate listings. Of course, if a real estate market dries up, then in effect, the newspaper advertising market dries up. So I had applied and gotten interviews and was a finalist for all these jobs at really good newspapers. I had the portfolio, I had all the work, and I kept getting phone call after phone call from managing editor or executive editor or AME for visuals, and they're like “I was calling to offer you a job that I am now calling to tell you that it's been eliminated.” And that happened and kept happening, and I said, “well, it's obvious that this isn't gonna work.”

I was always a good student, but I was also good at school. So I thought “well, I’ll go back to school.” So, I went back, I was on assistantship. I ran the computer lab and then I taught, and it was great, and I loved it. I was sitting in class, in the first or second week of my master's program, and the professor was like, ‘how many do you want to go onto an academic career and get your PhD?’ I raised my hand, and I was like “what are you doing? What are you thinking? Have you lost your mind?”

I ended up…I got my master's degree out of spite. Someone I knew in a different master’s program, I didn't think he was very smart, and I was like “this man can't have a master's degree and I don't have one.” So, I went to school out of spite, and you're going to school because the world around you is kind of melting down, and finances don't make sense, and you're not sure your career is gonna work and you think, I've made terrible choices and I've got to do something to make this work.

So, I taught and once I got in front of the classroom, I really liked it. I really liked teaching. I really liked explaining things and the look that that comes into your student's eyes when they get it. That look always makes me just so excited, so energized, so jazzed for life. Whenever students get it, it's like you're just the coolest person in the world because you made them learn something. And often it’s not like teaching someone to change a tire, where they follow instructions and achieve a desired result. But when you make them realize something, and they just put together a little bit of how the world works, that's the cool thing. It's like you've just opened up their mind to something.

That's the cool part of a graduate degree. You know, undergraduate degrees, you're teaching them how to change the tire, because they got to learn that, they get a little bit of enlightenment, but mostly it's how to change a tire. Graduate school, it's all enlightenment. And, you know, you got kids who earned 4.0 the whole way through undergrad, kids who are good at school, kids who have always been brilliant, and now they're realizing how much they don't know. And that's the magic.

I don't think that there's anyone who even encounters you once that doesn't know how much you care about this. I also think there's a lot of stories out there about teachers who love it and administrators who love it and stuff, but I kind of wanna circle back to when you got your master's degree out of spite because the world was crumbling, and nothing really made sense. Is that what you're still feeling now? I think that's how a lot of students feel, and a lot of grad students feel. Do you still feel that in this new position?

I believe education is the solution to all of our societal problems. I think the people who make policies, and the people who make decisions, make them, hopefully, with a pure heart, and a clear head, and are doing what their conscience tells them and directs them to what's right. I mean, you hope that, right? But how does that sense of ethics get built? How does that conscience get built? How does that gut get built? It's education. You make decisions about things, and you inform yourself about that before you make that decision.

The world is changing rapidly, from politics, to society, to things like AI and social media, just the nature of the world is changing so much. I was born in 1986, I'm a very classic millennial, so I can't look at a time since I was in high school to now and think like, “gee, the world is just a completely settled place.” We have seen dramatic liberal social movements, we've seen dramatic conservative social movements, we've seen the fall of empires, and then the creation and rise of the Internet and what that means, the democratization that comes with the Internet, all these things are huge and they're all happening all at once. What does that mean?

It's very easy to not know what's going on or to just get lost in it all. Education's the key. Listen, learn, develop your critical thinking skills, be able to discern those things for yourself, be able to make an informed decision. Those are the critical things that you need to be a citizen in this modern world. That's why education is so important. If you aren't informed, and you aren't aware of how to be informed and how to make decisions, it's really tough to exist and have a meaningful opinion, and be able to take a stand, be able to say something. Higher education is a way to achieve that. It's not the only way, but it's the way that I've chosen and the way that I'm helping others to choose.

So, to pivot, what have we done as a department this year? Can I have the highlights on what happened since you took over? Maybe the top four most important things.

The first thing to state is that we have not achieved a single thing under my leadership in the department that was not started with Dr. Arant as chair of the department. That isn't to say that I didn't play a significant role, it's just the fact that many of these processes are things that take three and four years to do.

So the highlights of things that have happened this year: we got this grant from The Scripps Howard Foundation for $300,000 to launch an Open-Source Investigative Reporting master's program. Super proud of that. That was work that we started in 2023 that Dr. Byrd and Marc Perrusquia took the lead on, Dr. Arant and I helped.

We launched the PhD program. It’s a comprehensive online PhD program in Journalism and Strategic Media. We became a regionally accredited university through the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. We started that project in 2019.

We also managed to continue big things. We continue our Germany study abroad program, we continue our work with the Institute of Public Service Reporting, we continue our graduate program. We continue our student engagement events, our student organizations.

So, we're not dropping the ball on our standards. But I think the biggest thing that I can point to is that the University, the college, and the department, are going through a culture shift. The University of Memphis became a Carnegie Research One University in 2021, and it was renewed this year. It's the highest level of research productivity a university can achieve. It's based on your funding and your output. To be an R1, and now to be an R1 with a doctoral program, is a completely different mindset.

What are we looking towards? What's going down in the next couple of years for you?

So, the first thing is that we are up for our accreditation by ACEJMC in the fall. ACEJMC stands for Accrediting Council on Education and Journalism and Mass Communications. ACEJMC is the recognized body that accredits programs like ours across the world. There are 119 programs accredited and 109, I believe, are in the United States.

We're up for our six-year review, so, you know, it's go time. Getting us through our accreditation review is the first step, launching this PhD program and watching it grow, launching this Open-Source Investigative Reporting Master’s program and getting it to grow, and then growing our research culture are the next big “to-dos” on the agenda.

How do you balance? Because you teach you are the department chair, you also are like a human man that has a life outside of here. Not to do the boring old “work/life balance” question, but you have like three jobs inside the one job, which I assume makes the work/life balance even worse.

I was a sick kid growing up and I missed out on a lot of opportunities in my childhood. Because of that, I have never taken for granted that I can do so much now. I never felt like saying no was something I wanted to do. I always wanted to do the thing. I've got big main character energy. As much as I kind of hate being the center of attention, I like to be in the center of the action. I don't want the spotlight to be on me, but I want to be right next to it making all the magic happen. Even when I am not here, I am always thinking and moving and doing. So, I guess I don’t find balance, but I am happy and that is the important part.