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

Washington Monthly, May, 1986 by Carolyn Lewis

Did the professors discuss the flaws and virtues of journalism and how they might labor to make it better? Did they argue the subtleties of instructing young minds? Did they worry about how to connect their courses to what the professional required in a fast-changing world? Well, no.

Here is the subject matter of a typical faculty meeting: When are we going to get the copier fixed? What is the deadline for grades? Who is going to change the lightbulb in my office? Why didn't the dean pick up the tab for my magazines? How come Professor M. got the sunniest classroom? Who is responsible for the cockroaches in my closet? Any why do I have 12 students in my basic reporting class when Professor O. has only 11? Norman Isaacs says in his new book, Untended Gates: "In so-called real-world political maneuvering, the goals are evident: position for power and the rewards that go with it. In academe, the objectives often seem tied to egotistical one-upmanship. Columbia's late Wallace Sayre may have described it best when he said, "The reason faculty politics are so vicious is that the stakes are so low.''

The barriers to change are institutional, and therefore difficult to overcome. The tenure system preserves deadwood and the academic environment fosters unparalleled pettiness. The idea of lifetime tenure has always been to protect faculty from retribution if they dared to write or say things that challenged the establishment. Ironically, inside the Columbia journalism school, its effect is just the opposite. Non-tenured faculty who want tenure are pressured to conform to the dictates and whims of the tenured. Any whiff of mutiny is unceremoniously squashed.

Protected from the normal risks of dismissal that keep the rest of society's workers alert, the tenured professors' womb-like security becomes an embalming embrace. It keeps in lousy professors and keeps out most new ideas. My suggestions that we create summer institutes on reporting, teach a course on finding the true sources of power in institutions, and create a course called "critical evaluation of the news' were resisted mostly because they were new. When I first came to Columbia in 1978, the school was teaching broadcast journalism with eight-millimeter silent film cameras, when videotape--talkies!--had been used by local and network stations for ten years. Because the film took days to process, it was both a technological anachronism and a hindrance to teaching. The suggestion that we use videotape infuriated the senior broadcast faculty member who had last plied his trade at CBS in the heyday of film. When the videotape arrived --and it did, eventually--it meant that he and the other instructors had to retool. They had not had to retool in decades (if ever).

The tenured faculty particularly feared popular professors with a reputation in the outside world. The most embarrassing example at Columbia was the faculty's insane jealousy of Fred Friendly, whose Media and Society TV series is highly acclaimed.