Professor Emerita Mary Peterson Arnold was born in December of 1947. She wrote for the Mitchell Daily Republic while studying at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell as the city desk reporter and women’s editor. She then spent four years (1973-77) as a reporter for the Vermillion Plain Talk after getting her master’s degree in English from the University of South Dakota.

Arnold was a high school journalism teacher and newspaper and yearbook adviser in Minnesota and Iowa until she joined the faculty of the University of Iowa in 1986. While there, she earned her doctorate in mass communications and directed the Iowa High School Press Association and summer workshops. She was also a professor at Ball State University, in Muncie, Indiana, where she directed that school’s American Society of Newspaper Editors’ High School Journalism Institute. From 1989 to 2004, she was on the board of the Student Press Law Center, serving as president.

From 1996 to 2001, Arnold managed the Newspaper Association of America Foundation in Washington, D.C., where Arnold managed high school journalism and youth outreach programs. There, she helped establish a student newspaper and youth editorial program. She then moved the journalism department at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind. She taught journalism classes and directed a high school journalism workshop for two years. Arnold also started doing consultant work writing books for the Media Management Center at Northwestern University She wrote a series of four books on women employed at top levels of management in news organizations.

Dr. Arnold was hired by South Dakota State University in 2002 as head of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication. She retired in 2017.