Saving Journalism From the Journalists
A report commissioned from McKinsey & Company by the Carnegie Corporation got to the point. Citing a recent Pew Research Center poll, it said that both TV news and newspapers “have suffered damaging blows to the credibility of their reports” and that “this unimpressive view of journalism is reflected in the academic world, where schools of journalism have never achieved the stature long enjoyed by schools that prepare students for medicine, law, architecture, business and other careers.”
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Under the old academic model–at least as it seems to be understood by the new–journalism students slink around campus as academically suspect as the football team. Doctors must attend medical school and lawyers law school–but journalism is simply the means by which a society informs itself, and to behave as a journalist is to become one. Academics squirm at a line so easy to cross. That’s why Carnegie, to quote McKinsey again, invited the heads of the journalism programs of “five leading research universities to consider the role of the academy in a national effort to revitalize journalism education and strengthen the capacity of the profession to fulfill its obligations to our citizenry and our democracy.”
“This is not just another set of grants,” said Gregorian in his prepared remarks. “It is a vision for what journalism schools can become when they are clearly part of a university president’s priorities.” The initiative stresses “curriculum enrichment”–exposing journalism students to the university beyond the J-school, bringing professors from other disciplines in to teach, and designing new courses. But curriculum enrichment is nothing new. When Loren Ghiglione, dean of Medill, said a few words, he mentioned some imaginative courses his students have been taking advantage of for years.
“Do the math,” replies Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia’s journalism school. “It costs about 60,000 bucks a year to bring a fellow here. If it’s ten fellows, you’re talking real money. Be me for a minute. I don’t have a lot of money sitting around. Would you say, ‘Nobody gets a scholarship anymore so we can keep NAJP going’? That’s the kind of choices we’re in.”
What was Schell saying? I e-mailed him for clarification.
