No Experience Necessary

Print Journalism -- Tenure track position. Ph.D. required . . . specific duties include teaching courses in Print Journalism. Applicant must have a minimum of three years of teaching experience at the college level.

Ph.D. required, teaching experience required, but no print journalism experience required, to teach students how to cover city hall? Isn't that unusual for a journalism school? Not any more.

 Reviewing the help-wanted listings in the Chronicle for the past academic year, I found 106 ads for tenure-track professors to teach basic newswriting and reporting courses. Ninety-four of these, or 89 percent, specified either "Ph.D. required" (68) or "Ph.D. preferred" (26). Only 25 said experience in journalism was required as well. The rest neglected to mention experience or said merely that some might be "helpful." Helpful?

Here's what several of the schools were looking for:

¥The State University of New York College at Cortland wanted a Ph.D. to teach newswriting and reporting, and to advise the student newspaper. No news experience asked.

¥Bowling Green State in Ohio wanted a Ph.D. with "potential for research" to teach broadcast news courses. No broadcast news experience asked.

¥Pepperdine University in California wanted a Ph.D. to teach basic and advanced reporting. No reporting experience asked.

What this pattern suggests is that thousands of students starting classes this fall will find themselves being taught writing, reporting, editing, and television news producing by professors who have never worked in a professional newsroom.

 From dozens of interviews at universities across the country, I found that this is fast becoming the norm, not the exception. The trend is driven by two factors, one academic and one economic. First is the desire of administrators, envying the prestige of the finest private universities, to make their own universities look like great research institutions. (A common boast at many big schools: "We have a higher percentage of Ph.D.'s on our faculty than Harvard.") Second is the demand in recent years for heavy budget cuts. Since administrators don't think journalists contribute "real" research, they use budget cuts as an excuse to wield the ax on journalism schools. Practical programs, with their small classes and computer labs, cost a lot; conventional academic programs do not.

 Undergraduate journalism programs that have been phased out in the process include those at the University of Michigan and Oregon State. At Iowa State the program was saved when the Des Moines Register and other news organizations rallied to its support.

The trend toward using Ph.D.'s with no experience to teach the basics brings howls of anguish from journalists-turned-educators, who say it ignores some important facts: To become good journalists who will satisfy the public's need to know, students must master such practical techniques as how to follow the paper and money trails and how to dig information out of reluctant sources and computer data banks. They have to know how government really works, and how to find out where the bodies are buried. Experienced journalists can teach them that; Ph.D.'s who have never worked in the field cannot.

 Practice in "counting how many times the word woman is mentioned in 1890 newspapers" doesn't qualify someone to tell students how to get a rap sheet out of a desk sergeant, as Mitchell Stephens, head of the journalism department at NYU, puts it.

Former reporters find it absurd to think several years spent by a doctoral candidate doing research for a dissertation is more valuable to the teaching of journalists than ten years spent by an investigative reporter doing research for long-form articles. Yet in school after school, experienced journalists are being frozen out in favor of theoreticians. "I think what's happening is a disgrace," says Joan Konner, dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, which is an exception to the trend. "What do they know about newsroom practice?"

Besides killing schools outright, university administrators have been collapsing them into "communication studies" programs. Whereas a traditional journalism department includes courses in reporting of public affairs, advanced television news production, media ethics, and First Amendment law, among others, a communication department offers courses such as (from the University of Arizona catalog) Nonverbal Communication, Topics in Rhetorical Theory and Criticism, and Communication Research Methods. That last is the course that trains doctoral candidates to apply quantitative research formulas to numbers amassed from survey questionnaires. Since department heads try to let professors teach what they want to teach, hiring more Ph.D.'s inevitably leads to theory courses replacing practical courses. Most non-journalist Ph.D.'s resent having to teach basic journalism -- it just doesn't interest them.

According to Ben Bagdikian, former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley, the main aim of communication theory faculties is to produce teachers of communication theory, while journalism faculties "are designed to produce promising journalism practitioners." Letting theoreticians take control of the curriculum, he says, usually produces poor journalists.

But that's what is happening at Ohio State, for example. The administration is ending the independence of its School of Journalism, which had a first-rate reputation in the reporting of public affairs, cutting its faculty sharply and merging it with the communication department. What's left of the old reputation is the Kiplinger Midcareer Program in Public Affairs Reporting. James Neff, a former Cleveland Plain Dealer investigative reporter who has just been hired as its director, will apparently be the sole professional appointment for the foreseeable future. The dean of the college to whom the school reports has informed the faculty that journalism "is not central to the mission" of the college.

John J. Clarke, an Ohio State professor emeritus and longtime director of the Dow Jones summer internship program, sent a little note to president E. Gordon Gee about the merger: "My Ohio State students wanted above all to learn how to be journalists," he wrote. "Their tax-paying parents sent them to Ohio State expecting them to become excellent reporters and broadcasters, not to be tolerated pawns of professors who are mostly occupied with tiddly-wink academic games." The university expects to complete the consolidation in 1995.

Other journalism programs, including those at the University of Southern California and San Diego State, are also being placed under general communication studies jurisdictions. The word passed this year to the journalism department at the University of Arizona, according to its head, Jim Patten, is "consolidate or die."

The drive for a more generalized communication education for journalists has staunch defenders. One of them is Dr. Ellen A. Wartella, dean of the College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin, where about 1,000 students are enrolled in journalism. "I think the trend is healthy," she says. "Narrowly defined professional education is not what education is about." Wartella, whose field is mass communication, wants to hire Ph.D.'s -- scholars who want to do research-based or creative work. "We are under constant pressure from undergraduates to have real journalists in here who can teach them writing and reporting," she says. "Well, we do need to teach them those things, but we need to teach them other things as well -- the wider concerns of communication." For one thing, she says, to communicate well, students have to know the theory of how humans communicate.

Moreover, Wartella says, at a research university, it's not enough just to teach; the faculty is expected to contribute scholarly work. If they don't, she says, schools will find their programs in danger of being closed down.

"The tide has turned to the academic side," says Dr. Maxwell E. McCombs, a noted communication researcher on the Texas faculty. "The old professional model is gravely wounded, if not dead. I see a lot of programs disappearing within the next ten years."

Rusty Todd, the new head of the college's journalism department, calls himself a switch-hitter -- a journalist with long experience (The Wall Street Journal) who paused to get a Ph.D. (Stanford). "It's a damn shame that real professionals have no place today in journalism schools," he says. He thinks schools should try to hire pros who also have Ph.D.'s, though such switch-hitters are hard to find. But he adds, "You have to play the hand you are dealt -- you can't change all the academic administrators in the world."

One administration that did change academic minds is the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley -- a holdout for the news-professional model. Last year, it survived a university review that concluded it was an academically successful small school -- ninety-three students and fourteen full-time faculty -- worth "special protection."

In the school's North Gate Hall, a student tells me she chose Berkeley because of the professional esprit de corps among students and faculty. A student who plans to go into television news says, "I came here because we have teachers who have done it, and are still doing it. It's invaluable to have someone who knows what is happening."

Susan Rasky, who joined the faculty in 1991 after six years in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, says, "I should be the flavoring -- teach them how to translate the information they've learned from political science professors into 800 words." Tom Goldstein, the dean, says the school is training students "for judgment and values, as well as to be terrific reporters and writers."

 Faculty research for publication is expected, but solidly reported articles in such "serious" publications as The Atlantic Monthly -- or journalism reviews, for that matter -- are quite acceptable.

Across the continent at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, changes are in progress. Columbia is bigger than Berkeley -- currently 22 full-time faculty and 180 students.

The country's most prestigious school, Columbia has been under pressure to add a scholarly research component to its heavily professional nine-month master's program. But according to Dean Konner, the central administration continues to support its policy of hiring practitioners who have done high-quality journalism. Nevertheless, the school has engaged Dr. James W. Carey, a respected communication scholar from the University of Illinois, to develop a doctoral program. Konner thinks this should be "a different kind of degree," stressing research to improve journalism. Carey, whose career has been spent in academia, says the faculty wanted to avoid duplicating the kind of doctoral programs typical of other schools of journalism. "Those programs, almost inevitably, diminished journalism as a practice and failed to support the most ennobling traditions of the craft," he wrote in a proposal approved by the faculty last December. "It is now time to build doctoral-level studies that reflect the importance of journism as a social practice and as a form of popular knowledge and understanding."

Setting up a Ph.D. program would never have crossed the minds of the New York Times editors and reporters who, as adjuncts, shaped the school's persona when I was a student there after World War II. Their aim was to train professional journalists in conditions as close to the Times's newsroom as they could make them. With the coming of television news and the newer electronic means of distributing information, Columbia and a number of other schools realize that they must educate students to do good journalism using whatever technology they encounter in the years ahead. But, Konner says, the principles of reporting will be the same, and so the core will remain intact. "Columbia," she says, "will continue to be a strong voice for professional education."

It galls journalist-educators to hear academics sneer at their units as "trade schools" interested only in teaching the techniques. Far from focusing all attention on the "craft" aspects, says Reese Cleghorn, dean of Maryland's College of Journalism, most journalism programs have more rigorously focused liberal arts requirements than many liberal arts colleges. Students in all accredited undergraduate programs, he points out, are required to take three-quarters of their course work in other departments of the university: political science, history, economics, English, and the like.

 Journalist-educators also think it's arrogant for academics to say that only Ph.D.'s are qualified to do university research. And they say a great deal of research done by Ph.D.'s is irrelevant -- produced only to pile up scholarly credits to be bean-counted by tenure committees. They point to articles such as this, from a recent issue of Journalism Quarterly: "The Effectiveness of Random, Consecutive Day and Constructed Week Sampling in Newspaper Content Analysis." Or this, from among papers presented at the 1993 annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication: "Constructivists' Use of Mentoring for Success in Broadcast Academe."

Worst of all, says Melvin Mencher, retired from Columbia, academics busying themselves producing dissertations on esoteric topics just don't have the fire in the belly to inspire beginning reporters to go out and improve the human condition.

Dr. Everette E. Dennis, currently executive director at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center in New York, has been credited with starting the current push for more research in the early eighties, while he was dean of the journalism school at the University of Oregon. He identifies Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Stanford, and Trinity College in San Antonio among communication programs with strong interest in research. While he would not exclude the hiring of journalists, he thinks that once they join academia they should go on to get Ph.D.'s. He deplores the "methodological fascism" in academia that rejects publication not based on quantitative research. On the other hand, he faults reporters who come to the academy thinking that their sole mission is to teach the craft, ignoring the value of research for publication. In Dennis's view, teachers who have produced research in communication -- and systematic journalistic research can serve the purpose quite well -- can provide a better, more roued education for journalists than those who haven't.

"At a time when society depends for its values as much on the media as on the traditional pillars of family, church, and school," he has written, "we ought to care" as much about how journalists are educated as we do about how public school teachers and police officers are educated.

Surprisingly, few news executives have jumped in to save education of journalists by journalists. (A notable exception is John Seigenthaler, former publisher of the Nashville Tennessean and current chairman of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center. See box.) This despite surveys, including a recent one at Ohio State, that show at least 75 percent of all new hires on newspapers come from journalism schools. "I'm puzzled by the lack of support within the industry," says Bagdikian. For their own self-interest, he says, editors should be concerned about the education of these beginners. They want reporters who can write interesting, informed, and credible news stories. That's something journalism schools can train them to do, and it's something most editors have neither the time nor the inclination to do.

Bagdikian thinks those who do the hiring ought to pay more attention to which of the 400 programs provide good training. In addition to Berkeley and Columbia, the programs at Northwestern, Indiana, NYU, San Francisco State, Montana, and Kent State in Ohio are among those where editors can look to find reporters who can hit the ground running. Gene Roberts, the longtime executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and now managing editor of The New York Times, who is on leave as a professor of journalism at Maryland, thinks editors are beginning to do just that. "Schools that emphasize communication theory courses over professional courses," he says, "are already being cut out of hiring, and I think that process will escalate."

Trouble is, says Melvin Mencher, if editors continue to stand by and watch as journalism programs are wiped out, they won't have many professionally trained reporters to hire.

"I'm worried about that," he says. "If journalism students aren't trained to report, how are communities to know and understand what is going on?"

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe