, Professor
Chair of the Print Department
Office phone: (406) 243-4008

Carol Van Valkenburg, who heads the Department of Print Journalism, has worked at the J-School for more than 25 years.

Carol earned her B.A. from UM in 1972 and worked 10 years at the Missoulian as a reporter, copy editor and editorial writer. After teaching a few courses as an adjunct, she was asked to fill at the J-School in January 1982 for a professor on leave. She’s been at UM ever since, including serving a stint as acting dean in 1998-99. Her master’s degree is in interdisciplinary studies, concentrating in history and political science. While studying for her master’s she became interested in the detention of Japanese and Italian aliens at Fort Missoula during World War II, a subject that she turned into a book, “An Alien Place.”

Carol teaches various reporting classes, including the Native News Honors Project in which teams of reporters and photographers cover in-depth stories from Montana’s seven Indian reservations. Students in the class have won dozens of national writing awards for their Native News stories, including the Robert F. Kennedy Award in 2005 and the SPJ National Mark of Excellence Award in 2006 for online in-depth journalism. In addition to her teaching and administrative duties, Carol is also adviser to the Montana Kaimin, the student daily. It’s her favorite assignment, though one that’s given her most of her gray hairs.

In 2000 the Freedom Forum honored her with a national teaching award.

She spent several summers on the features or the foreign/national copy desks at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Outside the classroom, her favorite pastime is fishing on one of Montana’s many splendid trout streams.

She’s married to Fred Van Valkenburg, the Missoula County attorney. Their son Kevin, a UM J-School grad, is a reporter at the Baltimore Sun, and their daughter Kristin is in graduate school in urban planning in Denver.

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