Past West Chair Holders

The George R. West, Jr. Chair of Excellence in Communication and Public Affairs has had three holders since its establishment in 1986.

Tom Griscom

Tom Griscom was the first holder of the West Chair of Excellence in Communication and Public Affairs. He came to the position after a career in national politics and journalism that began in Chattanooga, where he started out as a newspaper reporter.

Griscom joined Senator Howard Baker’s staff as press secretary in 1978 and spent roughly a decade as one of Baker’s closest advisers. He later served as executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and from 1987 to 1988 as White House Communications Director under President Ronald Reagan, where he worked on the 1987 Berlin Wall address.

He returned to Chattanooga in 1999 as executive editor and publisher of the Chattanooga Times Free Press, a role he held until 2010. He continues to work as a communications consultant in Chattanooga.

David B. Sachsman (1991–2022)

David B. Sachsman held the West Chair for thirty-one years, the longest tenure in its history. A scholar of environmental journalism and of the nineteenth-century American press, he came to UTC in 1991 from California State University, Fullerton, where he had been the founding dean of the School of Communications. Before that he chaired the Department of Journalism and Mass Media at Rutgers University. He shaped the West Chair into a nationally visible program.

Beginning in 1993 he founded and directed the Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression, which brought scholars to Chattanooga each fall for three decades. He took particular pride in how the symposium drew in new scholars, many of whom first attended as graduate students and kept returning as their careers developed. Eight edited volumes came out of it under his editorship. He also edited the journal Applied Environmental Education and Communication, published by Routledge.

He regularly taught the department’s Senior Seminar and a course on public communication and environmental issues, and in thirty-one years he taught thousands of communication majors.

Dr. Sachsman died on October 4, 2022, at the age of 77. He is survived by his wife Judy, his daughter Suzanne, his son Jonathan, and four grandchildren.

He published twenty-three books and dozens of articles on journalism history, environmental communication, and mass communication, and was at work on a twenty-fourth. Among them are A Press Divided: Newspaper Coverage of the Civil War, The Antebellum Press: Setting the Stage for Civil War, The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Journalism, and Communicating Endangered Species: Extinction, News and Public Policy. His earlier work on environmental risk communication, including The Environmental Reporter’s Handbook, helped establish that field.

Dr. Sachsman received his B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University. He served as a Senior Fulbright-Hays Scholar in Nigeria in 1978–1979, received the Hazel Dicken-Garcia Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Journalism History in 2017, and saw the Symposium’s panel presentations recorded and aired on C-SPAN in 2020.