“I don’t believe in doing anything that’s conventional.”
That’s the ethos that has motivated Kathryn Mangus, the director of Student Media at George Mason University, for her entire life.
Soft spoken and non-threatening in khaki slacks and a pink sweater, the 60-year-old Mangus is warm and friendly, like a favorite aunt.
During our interview, she is interrupted several times in mid-speech by knocks at the door from students whom she serves as a faculty adviser.
“I’m sorry,” she apologizes, rising from her chair. “This will just take one minute.”
After clearing up a point of AP style, then the proper use of a tripod camera, then meal arrangements for the young reporters working on newspaper production in the next office, she returns to her seat.
Time is scarce; Mangus oversees all aspects of Student Media, including GMU Radio, the student newspaper Broadside, the online publication Connect2Mason, and a host of independent projects being pursued by her advisees. Our interview has been wedged between a full schedule of meetings, consultations, and the hundred unplanned needs she must address on a daily basis.
Despite her easygoing manner, Mangus is attuned to all of this with exact precision, simultaneously monitoring her newsroom and her computer screen with darting eyes even as she rattles off the details of her long and varied professional life.
This organizational prowess and unflinching self-discipline is Mangus’s greatest strength—in fact, it’s had to be. For while she has accomplished much and is seen as an authority by the dozens of young men and women she supervises, George Mason’s director of Student Media has never forgotten that she wasn’t supposed to be here.
“I can remember saying I wanted to be a journalist and everyone laughing at me,” Mangus says, her soft brown eyes dancing with amusement while they take in her office, as if the dichotomy between prediction and reality is entertaining. “I just knew I was going to do something with writing.”
Mangus grew up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a tight-knit factory town east of Pittsburgh that was hit hard by the industrial decline experienced in the Northeast after World War II. The city had already lost 70,000 people from its population peak by the time that Mangus graduated high school in 1967, and in the time since it has hemorrhaged 30,000 more.
In the unionized politics of an ailing steel center, Mangus learned the power of words early on in life.
“My father was a representative for the union, and he was very effective,” Mangus recalls. “So effective that the company offered him a very high position in management, which was a common practice. He accepted it, and we went from not having any food in the house to being members at country clubs.”
The transition came with a price: Mangus and her family were ostracized by the steel community of which they had once been a part.
“People no longer wanted to do things with us,” Mangus remembers. “We had to get a new set of friends. I was very young, but I picked up on it. The whole attitude was, ‘They’re not one us anymore.’”
And wherever they went, be it the grocery store or out for a night on the town, there was one term they heard over and over: scab, a derogatory word for a strike-breaker, or union “traitor.”
“Being called that word was very profound,” Mangus says. “It would be equivalent to a black person being called the n-word.”
Words found their way into Mangus’s life in other ways, but also through her father; some of her earliest memories are of the steelworker writing poetry, which she says gave him the strength to handle the difficulties of a laborer’s life, and, after he joined management, the rejection of his peers.
Perhaps taking from her father’s hard-working, language-conscious example, Mangus departed Johnstown after her high school graduation in 1967, seeking better fortunes farther south.
“It was a very depressing place,” she says. “The snow came down black from the mills. When I left I never looked back.”
Instead, for the next ten years she build a new life for herself in Northern Virginia, taking a host of odd jobs that included time at Blue Cross Blue Shield, an assistant-teaching position at a school for troubled youth, a stint as an airline reservationist so she could see all 50 states (she made it to 46), and work as a research assistant at the Virginia Department of Transportation, where she analyzed drunk driving trends for the Alcohol Safety and Awareness Program (ASAP).
Her responsibilities included synthesizing judicial and public opinions on the issue, and it was through this job, arranged by a temp agency, that her skills came to the attention of Richard Wirthlin, who in 1980 was the chief pollster to California governor and presidential hopeful Ronald Reagan.
After Reagan’s inauguration in 1981 Mangus was installed as the field director for the East Coast, in which capacity she supervised a staff of 100 people and responded to the public relations needs of the new administration.
Her experience there was further confirmation of the power of words.
“We conducted weekly polling for the White House, usually by telephone,” she says. “And if anyone tells you that politicians aren’t paying attention to public opinion, don’t listen to them. Reagan’s people were constantly reviewing our findings, using what we brought them to refine their message, down to individual passages of a speech he might give.
“When President Reagan was shot, a survey was immediately conducted. We did the same thing when Nancy Reagan bought expensive china for the White House and there was public backlash.”
Working at the White House gave her invaluable insight into the importance of communications strategies.
“I was able to see how people use the media to get out their messages, and how messages are created,” she says. “The White House is very sensitive to public opinion, and Reagan was not an exception to that. You see that now with some of the changes that President Obama has made in response to poll numbers.”
In the spring of 1987, by which time she had received her undergraduate diploma in communication and journalism from George Mason University and was pursuing a graduate degree at the same school, Mangus took her talents to The Washington Post, where she served as part of the paper’s public relations team.
According to her, however, she didn’t get the coveted slot (there were 500 other applicants) because she was the most qualified.
“It was so clear I had done my research and I knew so much about the Post that it really impressed everyone,” Mangus says. “I wasn’t the smartest or the best writer, but I knew how to do my research and I knew how to do a good interview.”
She wrote a newsletter for the Post called Shop Talk, which circulated among reporters and editors. She also made a guide to the Post, wrote public relations materials, scheduled television and radio interviews, and did press releases. When Cybill Shepherd and Robert Downey, Jr. filmed a movie called Chances Are, they took garbage from the premises, including old papers and notes, and recreated the Post newsroom in Burbank, California, there being a rule at the time that prohibited filming on the newsroom floor.
She also covered events for the Post board of directors and for the newsletter.
She wrote brochures, ad copy, and represented the Post at many events, including being the paper’s spokesperson at the opening of new bureaus. Another task included giving tours of the facilities, to tourist groups and others.
“The scariest one I did was with Katherine Graham,” Mangus laughs, recalling the day when the owner of The Washington Post dropped by for a visit.
Mangus left the Post in 1989 to take up a position as a public relations specialist for a television show, and, after once again finding success in the field, decided to strike out on her own.
In 1990 Mangus founded a company, Communicators Edge, that capitalized on the importance of language in professional and other environments.
“I was a subcontractor for the federal government,” Mangus says. “Which means we did everything. I led writing classes for workers at the Smithsonian, instructed FDIC attorneys in effective presentation-making for when they had to speak before Congress, and taught public speaking and how to lead a meeting. These are all essential skills.”
In addition to that, Mangus had contracts with the state governments of North Carolina and Utah, a circumstance that led to constant traveling.
All of this reflected Mangus’s strong belief that communication opened doors on all fronts, from superior education to more lucrative marketing to the better execution of government policy, all areas in which she assisted.
She was offered a full-time position in George Mason University’s communications department in 1995, an overture she gladly accepted.
“I taught people to write, to speak, and to be better communicators in higher education,” she says. “I specialized in curriculum design and instruction strategy.”
Mangus’s plans were dealt a major setback in Dec. 1996, when she was involved in a serious car accident that left her with four shattered vertebrae, bone fragments lodged in her neck, near total paralysis of her left side, and difficulty speaking.
After two surgeries in early 1997 to correct the problem, doctors told Mangus that she would never be able to move her left arm or fully talk again.
“I was furious,” Mangus says. “And in so much pain. I told them, ‘I will show all of you. You don’t know me.’”
Mangus embarked on a self-motivated and self-created rehabilitation program in which, she asserts, she drew upon her broad knowledge of communications to aid in her recovery.
“It all went back to public speaking,” Mangus says. “I visualized living my day the way I did before I was injured. I literally exercised in my head two hours a day.”
Through her own regimen and the help of speech therapy, Mangus regained the use of her arm and her ability to speak, a feat that left her doctors “amazed.”
Mangus returned to teaching after taking a year off and in 2001 was named assistant director of Student Media. In 2009, she took the top spot, a move she couldn’t be happier with.
“I really love research and I really love students,” she smiles. “Research is the cornerstone of good journalism. If you can’t go out and get the story, it doesn’t matter that you can write. [In] the job I have now...I get to do promotion, publicity, and I’m helping students improve their skills as reporters. It’s the best of both worlds.”
