Ph.D. Conferred, University of Minnesota

Lauren E. Ekroth received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota at the fall quarter commencement on Saturday evening, December 16, 1967, in Northrop Auditorium on the Minneapolis campus. University President Malcolm Moos conferred the degrees; following the ceremony, graduates and their families attended a reception at Coffman Union. The Duluth News Tribune reported on the 58 area students among the 1,260 graduates, listing Ekroth — hometown given as Superior, Wisconsin — among six Ph.D. recipients from the Duluth-Superior area.

The degree represented the completion of a graduate career interrupted twice over eleven years. Ekroth had entered UMN graduate study in the fall of 1956, earned his M.A. by 1957, then was drafted into the Army in October 1958. After two years of military service in Vicenza, Italy, he spent five more years teaching for the University of Maryland University College at overseas postings in Europe and North Africa before returning to Minnesota in 1965 as an instructor in the speech department to complete his doctorate.

The timing of the notice is telling: the Honolulu Advertiser had already profiled Ekroth as a UH faculty member on December 10 — six days before the ceremony itself. He had already begun his career as an assistant professor of speech in Hawaii before the formal credential was in hand. He likely flew back to Minneapolis for the commencement, was listed in his home-state newspaper as still from Superior, and then returned to Honolulu to continue teaching.

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Intercultural Competence, in its “Intercultural Timeline,” records the event this way: “1967 Loren Ekroth, the first PhD with an indepth focus on intercultural communication, graduated from the Speech Communication Department at the University of Minnesota, under the direction of William S. Howell.” The entry identifies Ekroth’s dissertation advisor as William S. Howell and recognizes the degree as a landmark in the founding of intercultural communication as an academic discipline — the first doctoral-level work devoted to the subject.