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Topic: Miscellaneous items
Date/Time: 2/18/2008 3:48:26 PM
Title: Dean Lemann's self-evaluation
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
Self-Evaluation

I would like to begin this with a (mercifully brief) overview of journalism education as a whole, because the Graduate School of Journalism aims to be a worldwide leader in its field.

The idea of higher education in journalism appears to have originated with Robert E. Lee, of all people: he opened a journalism department, which still exists, at Washington College when he became its president after the Civil War. The next big step was taken here, when Joseph Pulitzer finally persuaded Columbia to accept a large gift to create a school of journalism. Pulitzer's vision was of a school that would be closely tied to the rest of the university, focused on teaching journalists how to understand complicated subjects and communicate their essence to the general public, and minimally concerned with practical matters like the business or production aspects of journalism. It's significant, however, that between 1903, when Pulitzer made his gift, and 1912, when the school opened, the University of Missouri had started its journalism school, which was the first such freestanding school within a university.

Missouri's school is the model for this very large and thriving field in American higher education to a far greater extent than Columbia's. It is at a relatively low-tuition public university. It teaches mainly undergraduates. It teaches journalism along with other "mass communications" fields like advertising, marketing, and public relations. And it understands the teaching of journalism in a spirit consistent with that of the Morrill Act of 1862: it is a practical skill, not an intellectual endeavor. Of the hundreds of degree-granting journalism programs in American universities (this field in higher education is growing rapidly, and it is beginning to take hold internationally), we are the only one that offers only graduate professional education in journalism at private-university rates. Conversely, Columbia's peer universities have thus far let pass the opportunity to offer for-credit journalism education, for the same reason that they don’t teach many other practical-minded skills that one regularly finds among the offerings of the great mass of colleges and universities. Last year Harvard initiated a journalism program in its continuing education school.

For most of its existence, the Graduate School of Journalism has been overwhelmingly "craft" or "trade" oriented (which adjective you choose depends on whether you approve or disapprove). During the 2002-03 academic year, Lee Bollinger convened a task force on journalism education, of which I was a member, whose purpose was plainly to push the Journalism School to upgrade itself intellectually. That was my primary assignment as dean, and the attractiveness of it was what led me to accept the job.

After five years, I can report that this effort has borne fruit to a greater extent than I would have dared to expect -- though I would also say that the overall culture of the school has changed only partially, and the culture of journalism education around the country very little at all, even though our work here has had a strong endorsement, backed by money, from the most influential figure in higher education philanthropy, Vartan Gregorian of the Carnegie Corporation. In additional, journalism, to an extent that nobody on the Bollinger task force would have predicted, has undergone a technological revolution and a related economic crisis over these last five years, and that has substantially affected both my deanship and the field generally./CONTINUED

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