Professor Burnis R. Morris is the Carter G. Woodson Professor in the Marshall University School of Journalism and Mass Communications, a position he has held since 2003.

He is former vice chair of the Marshall Faculty Senate and continues as a Senate representative from the College of Arts and Media.

As chair of the Journalism Division at Marshall since 2006, he has created courses in copy editing and sports reporting, and taught other courses across a wide spectrum in mass communications.
In the classroom, Morris said he recreates big-city newsrooms reminiscent of his experiences as a New York Times intern and as an editor, reporter and director of marketing services at newspapers such as The Atlanta Constitution, Dayton Journal Herald, Charlotte Observer, Palm Beach Post and Austin American-Statesman. Journalism students generally dislike numbers and analyses, but Morris requires his reporting students to analyze tax returns and financial audits of nonprofits, examine governmental budgets, attend budget hearings and play hardball with public officials.
Since he created the copy-editing course, four of Professor Morris’ students have won editing internships from Dow Jones News Fund, the most prestigious national journalism internship program in America. His public affairs reporting students won first place in the West Virginia Press Association’s public service award competition one year and second place the following year. Other students from his classes have won more than a dozen national first-place awards for documentaries they produced for this reporting class and aired on WMUL radio (about Huntington’s aging infrastructure and parking meter operations).
Professor Morris said he is also proud of a high school workshop he created to attract the best and brightest students to the study of journalism at Ole Miss (1999-2005) and operated since 2009 at Marshall. It has become a major recruiting tool, and a significant number of this year’s Journalism and Mass Communications School graduates are alumni of the Marshall workshop.
On the national stage, Professor Morris has led a national effort to improve news coverage of nonprofit institutions by explaining philanthropy and educating journalists about the nonprofit sector, which prompted the Knight Foundation to award him more than $800,000 in grants in support of this cause. He is author of two books about coverage of nonprofits, and copies of both books were provided compliments of Independent Sector, the Hearst Foundations and Radio-Television News Directors Association Foundation to editors at the 500 largest newspapers, all journalism school deans and department chairs, and more than 800 radio and television news directors.
Professor Morris was a visiting professional scholar at the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, where he produced a study of minority access to the Internet. For a master’s project, he identified critical issues in urban education for the Charles F. Kettering Foundation and later, for fun, received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for journalists studying modern fiction at the University of California at Berkeley. He earned a journalism degree at Ole Miss and a Master of Public Administration degree from the University of Dayton.
Professor Morris, a native of Laurel, Miss., was the first black student at Ole Miss student elected to Who’s Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges.
He recently published an article on Carter G. Woodson’s early years, including his time in Huntington, and he completed a manuscript for a book that is now under review for publication about Woodson’s use of the black press.
Professor Morris is a member of Kappa Tau Alpha, the journalism honor society, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the organization founded by Dr. Woodson in 1915.