Carl Botan

By Devin Cooper

A thirty day speaking tour of Australia can be daunting, but it’s made all the easier when you’re designated as Australia’s 1998 Outstanding Scholar-Practitioner in Public Relations. This, among other awards, has solidified Carl Botan as one of the more influential public relations practitioners of our time. Botan also received the Outstanding Research Achievement Award in Public Relations from the International Communication Association. With 26 years of experience in the field of public relations, Botan now taps his bottomless well of knowledge and shares what he has learned with his students at George Mason University.
The 61 year old Canada native has been a professor in the communication department at Mason going on six years. His lectures boast a strong emphasis on ethics and stress the value in honesty and truth not only within the practice of P.R. but in everyday life as well, pushing students to better themselves inside and outside of their careers. His work in 37 essays, numerous conference papers, 6 books (2 of full length), and various articles and reviews, gives him an impressive list of 45 total publications. Some of his more popular works include Public Relations Theory I & II, Grand Strategy, Strategy, and Tactics in Public Relations, A Semiotic Approach to the Internal Functioning of Publics: Implications for Strategic Communication and Public Relations, and Pubic Relations: State of the Field, to name a few. His students are given the opportunity to study some of these works in his classes.
Professor by day and practitioner by night, Botan still keeps his hands, and heart, in a number of campaigns. As a member of the Research Team for Center for Climate Change Communication, he finds himself devoting a great deal of his time to research. His primary focus lies in that of strategic communication, and more specifically at the moment on strategic communication campaigns to address terrorism and other homeland security issues in both the U.S. and the developing world. In particular, he studies ways to ethically integrate strategic communication campaigns into domestic preparedness, training, and education efforts, addressing both bio-terrorism and natural disasters. He also focuses heavily on health, public diplomacy, and national development campaigns.
Botan’s reputation exceeds the U.S. as he has been recognized around the world for his work. He has been invited to speak in over 10 countries across the globe including Romania, Australia, Egypt, Austria, the United States, Norway, Canada, Korea, three invitations to Germany, and two to Brazil. Although when he’s not jet setting from country to country to give presentations, Botan likes to spend his downtime with his wife Jennifer McCreadie, who has also taught at George Mason, on their own private island in Canada close to where he grew up. On this remote Canadian island, their only means of transportation is boating. Appropriately, he finds himself working on boats quite often. Resources are limited and the nearest Wal-Mart is much to far to be considered convenient, so Botan finds this to be the perfect place to unwind and free himself from the busyness of everyday life in the Northern Virginia area.
He has taught at universities such as Purdue, Rutgers, Temple, and Illinois State University but now proudly calls George Mason University his home. He graduated from Western Michigan University, where he was inducted into the alumni hall of fame, with a BS degree in communication arts and sciences in 1970. From there he went on to get his masters in 1982 and his Ph.D in 1985, both from Wayne State University. His education never ends as he would say, and he continues to press on with his research to further the field of public relations and to further mature the already very well respected communication department at George Mason University.