Karla Kennedy, FIU’s Only Black Journalism Professor, Paves the Way for Students of Color

Karla Kennedy, the daughter of educators and community organizers, grew up in Miami's Liberty City neighborhood in the late '60s and early '70s, knocking on doors and asking residents to sign petitions and get involved with local issues. It was this freedom to advocate for people that drew Kennedy to journalism and, eventually, journalism education.

"Stuff wasn’t going to change in your community unless you said something," Kennedy tells New Times. "I want to be an agent of change. Education is addictive. Every time you affect 20 [students], they go out and affect 100 more."

Kennedy now works as a journalism professor and director of distance learning at Florida International University's (FIU) College of Communication, Architecture + The Arts, where she once again aims to bring about change.

To that end, she founded FIU’s first-ever official affiliate student chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), which held its inaugural meeting last month. But she's concerned about the lack of diversity in FIU’s Journalism and Media Department: Of the 15 faculty members, Kennedy is the only one who's Black. To put that into perspective, of the department's 782 students, 12.4 percent identify as Black. Kennedy wishes the school would do more to diversify its faculty for the sake of the school's aspiring Black journalists.

"What Black students need is connection, and to create a space where you don’t feel like you’re an alien," she asserts. "FIU really needs to be real with themselves. I mean, they really need to look at the perspective and lens that minorities look at them through. It’s what I feel should be happening, but what I know isn’t happening."

Brian Schriner, dean of the FIU College of Communication, Architecture + The Arts, oversees hiring within the college and consults with search committees and journalism department chair Susan Jacobson. He notes school partnerships with the Black Professionals Network and the Miami Times, which provide mentors to journalism students and the school’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Task Force, which was formed in the fall of 2020 to "come up with concrete actions and strategies to increase diversity, equity and inclusion" at the school.

But he admits the school can do better. 

"Ensuring we have diverse faculty that represents our communities that we serve and our student body is one of our goals," Schriner tells New Times. "I'm aware and it's something we work very hard on now in a positive sense. I realize we do need to diversify our faculty, both part-time and full-time."

Donovan Campbell, a local WSVN sportscaster, FIU alum, and NABJ South Florida vice president, worries that some workplaces aren’t doing enough.

"Let’s be honest: Sometimes people are just more comfortable with someone that looks and sounds like them, it’s just a fact," Campbell says. "I’m not going to say it’s unique to just FIU, but I think overall, every news station would have to say they’re guilty of not having enough diversity in higher roles."

Campbell stresses the importance of fostering camaraderie and mentorship among aspiring Black journalists — a crucial component in finding, telling, and uplifting Black voices in the newsroom.

"You’d want to think that any story can be covered by anybody. However, a lot of people aren’t honest about that," Campbell says. "I think an African-American person or someone of color will kind of understand certain things in certain communities better than someone who's non-Black." A sense of community has always been important to Kennedy. Growing up, not only was she involved with local issues, but she knew her neighbors and classmates. That's what piqued her interest in attending a historically Black college or university (HBCU) — but her mother had other plans.

"We were told that we had to go to schools that she was not allowed to go to," Kennedy explains. "These people have lived through segregation and Jim Crow, so if your kids can go somewhere that’s not a segregated school, you’re going to say, 'That’s where I want you to go.'"

Kennedy studied telecommunications at the University of Florida — one of the top schools for journalism in the state — and later transferred to the University of Miami to be closer to family. She initially wanted to pursue a career as a news reporter but was drawn to educating and mentoring aspiring journalists. She earned her master's degree in Advising Student Media from FIU's School of Journalism and Mass Communication in 2004, and her Ph.D. in Mass Communication from the University of Florida in 2011.

After graduating, Kennedy moved to the opposite corner of the U.S. to work as the University of Oregon's scholastic journalism outreach coordinator in 2012. Because the state's and school's student body are overwhelmingly white, she wasn't surprised to find she was one of only four Black professors in the journalism department. She especially valued the school's continued efforts to improve recruiting and maintaining a diverse staff.

"The good thing about the University of Oregon is they purposefully hired me. They knew they wanted to diversify. They were accountable, accommodating, and real," Kennedy says. "They kind of let me build the position the way I wanted to. They knew they needed somebody that was going to be powerful enough to ask the hard questions, go out into the community, and do the recruiting."

During her time in Oregon, Kennedy received the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Diversity Award in 2015 for her outreach.

That same year, she moved back home to South Florida after experiencing a series of hardships: Her best friend from elementary school died, the love of her life died, and her sister became very ill.

"There was a lot going on," Kennedy says. "Mom was the one who told me, 'No, you need to go to campus and get yourself back into things,' because she could see me going the other way."

Kennedy began working at FIU: first as a visiting professor, and then was appointed co-associate chair of the journalism and media department in 2019.

Kennedy hopes her position at FIU will inspire Black students to feel represented — and a sense of belonging.

"Students need to know they’re supported. So I’m going to do what I can to help," she says. "I'm going to use my voice as much as I possibly can and call things out when I think they’re wrong. I have to keep doing it."

She also calls on individuals with more privilege and those in higher positions than hers to increase resources for people of color at FIU and beyond. Black people should not be the only ones focusing on Black issues, she argues.

"Choosing to be an ally with your power speaks a lot," Kennedy notes. "As my mother would say, 'If you look at the March on Washington from 1964, it wasn’t just Black people in the crowd."