The $19,000 press pass - a former journalism school dean asks, is it worth it? - Carolyn Lewis

Washington Monthly, May, 1986 by Carolyn Lewis

"They were such baby courses,' says Jack Hitt, a 1981 graduate. "Imagine sitting in a room and being taught to read again.' This is a lead. This is the inverted pyramid. Put a "-30-' at the end of the story.

On a typical Monday morning in the basic Reporting and Writing class, the student meets with a professor for an hour of instruction on that week's subject matter. One week is devoted to the courts. The student is told that a journalist must be fair, accurate, and balanced. He is told how to get to the courthouse on the New York subway. And then he is sent on his way. Later the student returns from the "event' to write a basic he-said/she-said story about what happened in the court that day. The teacher collects the story, edits it, and returns it to the student later in the week. The following week the student deals with another subject, like city hall, and once more the story is a simple, meat-and-potatoes exercise.

Okay, much of journalism is of this variety-- surface stuff. And if you want to get that first job, you need to know how to do it. But is this an appropriate kind of instruction at the graduate level of a university? Students need a deeper understanding of how the system works, how one part of government interacts with others, where the real, as opposed to the apparent, power lies. You don't get that by practicing wham-bang journalism.

"No one said, Here's how you analyze a budget, here's the way the courts work,' recalls Carol Polsky, a 1981 Columbia graduate who works at Newsday. "There was no analysis of institutions, power, and structure.'

Ironically, when I was associate dean at Columbia, I proposed a course that was designed to do just that--analyze the sources of power and their interlocking relationships. My suggestion didn't get very far.

So lacking in intellectual substance is the Columbia curriculum that students can go through the entire program without having to read a book. When I was co-teaching a course with Dean Osborn Elliot, I even had to nag him to read the books assigned in the course. In the end he managed to read only one. "There was no analysis of what makes news, what are the ethics of journalism, what kind of choices you make as a journalist,' Polsky says. One current student, Tom Vinceguerra, says that in his basic reporting class a difficult ethical question came up. When a student tried to open a discussion on the matter, the professor barked, "I don't want to get involved in a Fred Friendly type of discussion.' He was referring to the legal issuess course that former CBS president Fred Friendly teaches. Friendly used the socratic method in a course he described as, "posing questions so difficult, the only way out is to think.' Friendly uses the same technique in his Media and Society television programs, which are under Columbia's wing but are separate from the journalism program.

Why Johnny can't report

Critical thinking does not come easily to many students. And that difficulty is reflected in their writing. When I first began teaching at Boston University--both undergraduate and graduate students--I was astonished to find that many of the students in my basic classes were virtually illiterate. Instead of teaching the basics of journalism, I spent my time explaining the importance of using a plural verb with a plural noun. At an American Press Institute seminar several years later, a group of professors from other schools exchanged similar horror stories. "Any body who wants to can get into our school,' one of them said, "and a lot of the kids can't even write a simple sentence.' Not one of the journalism programs represented at the meeting required basic literacy before entry. "Either I teach the kid how to write a lead, or I teach him how to write English,' was the way one professor explained his dilemma.