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Scott M. Cutlip

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Scott M. Cutlip was a renowned teacher in the newly developing field that he helped define at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.  He spent 29 years on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where he introduced the study of public relations to the undergraduate and graduate journalism school.  In 1952, he cowrote Effective Public Relations with Allen H. Center. The tenth edition of the book was published in 2008 as Cutlip and Center's Effective Public Relations (10th Edition) by Glen Broom, who had joined the original authors. The book was the number one textbook in the field for decades.  At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, his grateful students named the new chapter of the Public Relations Students’ Society of America for him in 1968. 

Scott Cutlip was responsible for the collection of valuable papers from Arthur W. Page of Bell Telephone for the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. He was the strongest advocate of historical research and wrote the definitive history of the field of PR.   His book The Unseen Power: Public Relations: A History was published in 1994 and forms the basis for the summary he prepared in 1996 for this his student, who is the editor of the 1997 and 2011 editions of this Handbook.

The Navy's graduate-level program came to the University of Wisconsin, where over many years, 165 Navy officers received advanced education and training in public information.  Scott Cutlip later served as dean of the University of Georgia's Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication from 1976 to 1983. He received many honors, including the lifetime achievement award from the A.W. Page Society as the “Architect of Modern Army Public Relations." He passed away August 18, 2000, in Madison, Wisconsin.