fix journalism a conversation about journalism’s future

Author: Donica Mensing | 01.24.2009

Stanley Fish, a distinguished professor who writes for The New York Times (and whose opinions I love to read but generally disagree with) has a recent blog post about a book called “The Last Professor.”  The author argues that utilitarian education has completely eclipsed the model of humanist education centered around wise and tenured professors who inspired students to think and understand, without any insistence on the application of those skills to a particular enterprise. Today, he argues, universities value the teaching of employable skills, which can be delivered by part-time adjuncts as well (or better than) full-time professors. This echoes Fish’s educational philosophy, which he summarizes:

higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world.

For the most part, journalism schools have never engaged in this debate. Our curriculum skips the humanities, except as required electives, and focuses nearly single mindedly on the teaching of grammar, Associated Press style and how to conduct an efficient interview or write a persuasive press release. One of my colleagues insists on calling most journalism school classes “vocational.”

But perhaps it is precisely this vocational-centered training that hast contribured to the current mess that journalism is in today. Our best students, trained to efficiently operate in a particular model of journalistic style and organization, are floundering as the institutions they were bred to excel in collapse. One could argue that the lack of depth in thinking about journalism historically, across disciplines, as a process and not a product, is hindering the current generation of journalists from thinking their way to the next model of journalism.

On the other hand, no doubt some argue that it’s the idealism of journalism professors that led these students to refuse to consider economic models as part of journalism training in the first place. Perhaps if the business side of journalism had been dealt with more completely in schools, today’s managers would be better equipped to avoid the economic dead end they find themselves in now.

Neither of those arguments seem completely persuasive, although I see more truth in the first than the second. I keep thinking there are other ways to avoid this false dichotomy and move forward more constructively. Perhaps if our “vocational” classes stressed creativity, curiosity, open mindedness, humility, persistence, patience, and intellectual honesty in the practice of journalistic skills, then, even if the skills are not executed perfectly, the student would be better equipped to succeed in a variety of situations. Ironically, “character education” is precisely the kind of education Stanley Fish argues is inappropriate for university educators. And from my limited observations, direct attempts at teaching these skills in content-free courses rarely inspires hoped for change.

Perhaps one model journalism schools could consider more fully is that of the self-examined life. Not in the sense of self-absorption, but in a more expansive sense of what journalism is and could accomplish in our public life. If journalism professors exercised more rigorous examination of how the practices they teach are applied in daily journalistic life, and then applied those observations to a more articulated sense of what journalism is for broadly and fully; if they honestly went through the exercise of how those practices could be altered and improved in relation to community life and not just corporate life, they would have an opportunity to  inspire a desire for understanding in the broadest sense of education and provide the opportunity for practical application where it could most matter.

ADDENDUM: Now that I’ve also read today’s Reno Gazette-Journal, I am reminded again of the Nevada governor’s recommendation that the state balance its budget on the back of higher education, cutting 48% from the budget for the University of Nevada, Reno. Presumably, his reasoning is that education is a “luxury” good that we can afford to lose in times of downturn. Practical skills training or not, he clearly devalues all types of education regardless of its economic or social impacts.

UNR President Glick is quoted as saying he would not be able to “protect all the smaller units” on campus. Given the size of our journalism school, it is easy to imagine that we are on some of the lists of proposed cuts. By tying our fortunes so closely to an industry, and not to a vital social purpose, we may have accelerated our own demise.