Just What is The Point of J-School

The National Post ^ | August 1, 2002 | Robert Fulford

[Loyalist]

Just what is the point of j-school?

Robert Fulford
National Post

Journalism has been taught in certain American universities for at least 90 years and in some Canadian universities for half a century, yet it remains an odd duck among disciplines, grudgingly tolerated by both journalism and academe, an embarrassment to many who teach it and some who study it. J-schools have never become professionally necessary (most successful journalists did not attend one) and even universities that offer the subject tend to consider it marginal. In 1993 the University of Western Ontario set out to eliminate its journalism school but instead downgraded it to a section in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies.

The question that haunts journalism education -- is this really a proper university subject? -- surfaced last week in New York at Columbia, the Vatican of j-schools. The president of Columbia University, Lee C. Bollinger, startled the journalism faculty by announcing that he will not fill the now empty dean's office until a task force investigates what's taught in the school and explains its value.

It appears that President Bollinger can't quite see the point of the j-school. He's not alone. Columbia offers 10 months of practical work leading to a Masters. A dozen years ago, when tuition was US$28,000, I asked a recently retired Columbia dean what the school could possibly give students, in less than a year, that justified such cost. He answered, "A credential." Columbia is Columbia; its certificate impresses just about everyone, even editors.

President Bollinger thinks that's not good enough. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, he asked: If a school merely teaches a trade, which many learn on the job, does it belong at Columbia? He acknowledged that training journalists is worthy, but not "within the setting of a great university." He seems to have in mind a more ambitious school, on a higher intellectual plane.

Given Columbia's eminence, this review will inevitably produce demands for reform elsewhere. But university reform always emphasizes curriculum and teachers, whereas in journalism education the persistent problem seems to be (forgive me, students) the young men and women who choose to become journalists under the guidance of professors rather than by writing apprentice-level articles or scripts.

Two years ago a teacher of journalism at the University of Wisconsin, Dave Berkman, wrote something that I would have immediately discredited if it hadn't matched my own experience. After 20 years he concluded: "The overwhelming majority of students ... see no need as future journalists to read newspapers or watch or listen to broadcast news. And they vehemently express their resentment when criticized for this."

How could that be? Are there music students who don't listen to music, medical students who aren't interested in the human body, architecture students who don't notice buildings? I can't imagine there are, but many journalism students don't much care for newspapers, TV news, etc. This surprised me more than anything else when I spent four years, beginning in 1989, as a part-time teacher at the Ryerson journalism school in Toronto. Only a few of the students were newspaper readers, and many had never seen the fifth estate on CBC-TV, or read Jeffrey Simpson, or followed the work of a movie critic. Four years ago, when I went back to gathering material for a Toronto Life piece on j-schools, a Ryerson professor told me that in every class of 20, about 12 did not read newspapers.

How, then, could they imagine becoming journalists? I think they believed that if the newspapers contained something they needed to know, their teachers would tell them about it, which was after all the job of teachers. To these students, journalism wasn't a younger brother of literature or political science; it was a white-collar equivalent of auto mechanics, and its content could be captured in a finite number of classes and workshops.

But if they were not interested in journalism either as consumers or citizens, why did they choose it as a future career? My guess is that they imagined it would be as easy as it looks. For teachers, that sort of student can be soul-destroying. In the end few professors imagine they are preparing the ground-breaking journalists of the future. Of course there are bright students, and if they find the right professors they can learn something valuable; but the atmosphere works against them.

At Ryerson I sensed an air of mild embarrassment hanging over the whole enterprise. Staff meetings dealt with academic schedules, holidays, etc. There were two subjects we almost never discussed, journalism and education. One day a new part-time teacher, having been astounded to discover that his students couldn't write the English language, suggested that we needed a crash program in literacy. It was quickly decided that there wasn't room for it in the schedule and it probably wouldn't work anyway.

The j-school experience was encapsulated for me at a convention of journalism educators at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. During one session a teacher raised the question: What makes a good journalist? "Burning curiosity," someone answered. Almost everyone said, yes, indeed, that was the key, of course, burning curiosity was essential. Then a rather weary-looking woman, from a Florida college, said: "In 10 years in this job I don't think I've had more than two or three students with burning curiosity. I can only hope our school is an aberration." The glum silence that followed her words seemed to last forever.

[Loyalist]

Four years at a well-known Canadian journalism school and 2 1/2 years at a major regional Canadian daily newspaper taughts me one thing: I did not want to spend the rest of my life hanging around stupid media people.

During my first and second years in j-school, students were required to write a news quiz every week. I routinely scored 90% or more while the class average wasn't even 60%. All anybody needed to do to get a decent mark was just read the paper every day.

(I did go to the same school as Robert Fulford's daughter Sarah, who was a year ahead of me. She never set foot in journalism school, but today she works for Toronto Life .)