Who Needs Dr. J? Columbia's president is right to call for journalism-school reform.

A seemingly arcane debate has just started to fizz at Columbia University, one that has all the makings of a major--or at least a medium-sized--culture war. Watch it closely and root for The Right Side.

This is my response to the WSJ
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Far be it for me to claim that I understand Journalism better than Mr. Varadarajan, but I think he fails to see the danger in President Bollinger redefining the Journalism school.

Changing the Journalism School from a glorified trade school into the journalistic equivalent of the Law school may not be all that beneficial. Law schools are places of leftist indoctrination where the Constitution is made irrelevant by the fetish of precedent and procedure, and where PC teachers teach students what the law should be, not what it is. One need only look at the recent troubles concerning law-school Professor Fletcher's failure to adhere to the PC standard to understand the complete hijacking of Law schools, and that of Columbia in particular.

Perhaps it is a moot point for journalism. In the last poll of Columbia J-school students, 80% supported socialism. Still the thought of a PC commissar like Bollinger redefining Journalism worries me. I foresee the Journalism School becoming a place where leftist orthodoxy is codified and aspiring conservatives are silenced or pushed out of the profession.

Many readers probably believe that journalism is already a lost cause. However, given the damage Columbia's Teachers College has done to pedagogy and education in America, I shudder to think what a politicized J-School will do to Journalism and the transmission of news in this country.

President Bollinger is no Nicholas Butler, or even Grayson Kirk. He is a committed leftist who has put ideology above education and even the law in the past. At the University of Michigan, Bollinger supported speech codes and then defied the courts to ensure racial quotas. President Bollinger is the type of political academician that the Wall Street Journal usually opposes. Even if his proposal theoretically has merit, Bollinger's goal is to enforce PC orthodoxy on journalism.

The average Columbia Journalism School student would derive more benefit from reading "The Fatal Conceit" by FA Hayek and "Coloring the News" by William McGowan , or even "Bias" by Bernard Goldberg, than anything President Bollinger would impose.

Sincerely,

Ron Lewenberg
Founder and first President of the Columbia College Conservative Club
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/conservative

" At present, the J-school is little more than a vocational workshop, where students have their writing "critiqued" and line-edited. Students work in what one graduate described to me as "laboratory conditions, which basically means we play pretend-journalism.""

This is why Mizzou (the world's first and finest j-school) is still the best in the world. There is very little "pretend journalism". The U owns the local NBC affiliate and the Columbia, MO's biggest newspaper. The "student" newspaper and radio station are owned by the student association and are not run by the University. At Mizzou's j-school you put out a daily newspaper and work on real newscasts.

The students also work very hard to make sure the lions in the archway never roar and that there will never be a need to build a new column. :)

(The stone lions in the j-school archway will roar if a virgin walks between them. The quad has six columns from the original administration building still standing, one for every virgin that ever graduated. It's common to hear of a girl on campus "they're building a new column for her." Never had to complete one yet.)

I shudder to think what a politicized J-School will do to Journalism and the transmission of news in this country.

All Americans believe in progress.
Conservatism is a long term view of progress--a vision of progress over a multigenerational span of time. This viewpoint necessarily looks at all past history worldwide in the hope of discerning long-term threats to ourselves or even to posterity.
Conservatives recognize that there are always short-term negatives going on--our own individual mortality not least--but insist on the multigenerational viewpoint nontheless. Journalism seeks those negatives out and publicizes them. "Liberalism" exploits those negatives by using them as occasions to change the rules in ways that gain political credit--with minimal regard to, and generally to the detrement of, the welfare of posterity.
No commentator or columnist who takes account of the welfare of posterity--no conservative--is accepted by any liberal as a journalist.

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