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

Washington Monthly, May, 1986 by Carolyn Lewis

It is virtually impossible to fire a tenured professor. One such professor at Columbia "borrowed' some of Dean Osborn Elliot's private letters and ran off copies without permission. The appalled dean asked Columbia's president, Michael Sovern, howe to go about firing the man. Sovern told the dean he couldn't. That professor remains on the faculty, where he continues to teach--you guessed it--investigative journalism.

The journalism school has been able to reduce the instructional influence of its weaker faculty by hiring outside adjunct teachers. For every full-time faculty member there are four or five part-time adjuncts. These are the real stars of the faculty--the working professionals who come in part-time to co-teach basic reporting and writing classes. It's expensive, of course, but better than relegating all the teaching duties to professors who can't handle them.

One particular academic fault is missing at the journalism school--the pressure to publish or perish. Ironically, journalism education is the one area where the dictum actually makes sense. While I was there, only a handful of the tenured faculty members at Columbia published articles or worked in broadcasting regularly. Making them publish would have done them some good.

What's sad is that there are a few talented faculty and students at Columbia who deserve better. While I think most of the J-school high achievers would have gone on to success without-Columbia, certainly some were helped by their time there. My point is simply that they could have been helped a lot more, that journalism schools could do a much better job than they are now doing.

Given the reluctance of most news organizations to take on the job of offering in-house training for promising young writers, plainly the basic kind of instruction in techniques and skills has to be offered in the schools. And certainly any budding reporter needs to know how to cover a news conference, write a lead, and meet a dead-line before he can go on to higher and better things.

The question here is whether the journalism programs in our better universities, like Columbia, have a responsibility to do more than that. I would argue that we have enough of the kind of education geared to getting a student his first job. What the profession needs is education that forces the student to think creatively.

There is altogether too much innocence abroad in journalism, reporters who accept whatever they are told from officials, who are easily wowed by the trappings of power, who don't understand that the guy out front talking may have no real authority and the guy who is invisible is the guy who is pulling the strings. What is needed is instruction on process journalism--the kind that traces a decision back to its source. And what is needed is a curriculum that deals with issues percolating below the surface of events.