Past West Chair Holders

David B. Sachsman (1991–2022)

The George R. West, Jr. Chair of Excellence has been held by two scholars since its establishment in 1986. David B. Sachsman held the George R. West, Jr. Chair of Excellence for thirty-one years, the longest tenure in the chair’s 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.

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.

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 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.

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.