Columbia Scholastic Press Association

Our honoree first attended CSPA conventions while a student at Glassboro High School in New Jersey “sometime in the late 1950s.” After graduating from college and beginning high school teaching and advising, she brought journalism students to CSPA conventions during the 1960s. In so many ways, she has been associated with conventions sponsored or cosponsored by the CSPA for most of her career.

When she moved into teaching at the community college level, she helped found, and served as its first president, the Community College Journalism Association. Later she became an officer with the organization now known as College Media Advisers, serving two terms as its president. During her presidency, both CMA and the CSPA combined two separate college student conventions in New York City into what is now CMA’s New York Convention. From 1982 through 2001, she served as program chair for that annual Convention, then cosponsored by the two organizations.

While working with these student and adviser organizations, she continued in a distinguished career as a journalism professor and associate dean at Florida International University in Miami. Not content with bettering the collaboration among student press and advisers groups, she took her organizing skills and leadership abilities into the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), eventually rising to its presidency. She also dedicated significant time and energy to the education work of the Society for Professional Journalists (formerly Sigma Delta Chi). In recognition of her accomplishments with them, SPJ awarded her its Wells Award, making her the second woman to have received that distinction since it was first given.

For her unswerving commitment to organizing the cooperation and collaboration of journalism education at all levels, the Columbia Scholastic Press Association is proud to honor Lillian L. Kopenhaver with its Joseph M. Murphy Award for Outstanding Service for 2003.

Given at Columbia University in the City of New York, March 22, 2003.

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This citation was written and presented by Edmund J. Sullivan, executive director of the Association.