Today’s thought: Do j-schools have the right professors?
For every Mindy McAdams there are 100 professors who don’t have a clue about the Web.
Even if journalism schools radically redesigned their curricula, would most of them be able to deliver a quality education with existing faculty? Yes, tenured professors should be constantly doing research in their field and becoming better teachers, but once a professor gets tenure, they don’t have to adapt to anything new.
Sure existing professors could attend some conferences and seminars, but would that make them qualified to be professors of online journalism? Professors are supposed to be experts, and journalism professors always come in with prior professional experience. A seminar doesn’t give someone professional experience.
It certainly doesn’t give someone the kind of experience that justifies the $45,000 — and rapidly rising — tuition at prestigious schools like Northwestern’s Medill. At many journalism schools the majority of professors are not tenured. But are there even enough qualified professors out there to fill the ranks of classes needed for modern journalism?
And would journalism schools be willing to get rid of the majority of their non-tenured faculty for new professors that had the skills and experience to teach the next generation of journalists how to excel in journalism?
February 23rd, 2008 at 1:29 am
While I agree with your general sentiment here, it should be noted that unlike almost all journalism schools in the county, Medill (based on my experience as a graduate student) is highly-focused on the professional application of journalism — both in the coursework and in the teaching staff.
It’s the reason I chose to go there over 4 other ‘top’ j-schools. (Others, including Columbia University, have recently been copying Medill’s operation to revamp and become more relevant and professional based and less ‘theory’ based.)
By focused on the professional application of journalism, I mean that in many of the courses after the first semester, your work is being edited, published and distributed throughout the Chicago media, as well as across the nation (In Chicago through the Medill News Service, a wire agency that most of the Chicago papers, except the Tribune, subscribe to and in DC and the international programs through real publications that subscribe to the service). It doesn’t get any more ‘real world’ than that.
And regarding the teaching staff, there were definitely some old school tenure track dinosaurs. But more than half of my professors there were working professionals in the industry while they were teaching. It doesn’t get any more ‘real world’ than that.
I can’t say the same for my undergraduate degree at the University of Toledo, for which professors were at least 10 years out of the working profession. But that’s the status quo in most university systems, which require a PhD to teach journalism.
I think that’s the real problem. Getting a doctoral degree pulls you out of the real journalism world for 4 years. And four years is 1/3 of the entire life of the web. You’re dead in online journalism with that gaping hole.
I rapped about this a couple years ago here (scroll down)
February 23rd, 2008 at 1:30 am
Wow, that’s a long link.
February 23rd, 2008 at 1:39 am
Fixed. We use links here on the Web.
February 23rd, 2008 at 8:17 am
I have been out of the newsroom for more than 10 years, even though I never studied for a Ph.D. But I feel pretty well in touch with what is happening in today’s newsrooms, in part because I read blogs by people in newsrooms, but also because I meet working journalists and editors at the conferences and seminars I participate in, and I talk to them about what’s going on in their jobs.
It’s not equivalent to, say, spending a summer working for a newspaper’s online. However, it’s been working rather well for me. I ask people what they’re doing, how their newsroom is changing, what skills they need themselves, what they want the new hires to know, etc. I take notes. I make follow-up calls.
I think this may point to the knowledge gap we see among many j-school professors today: They don’t talk to the people in newsrooms who are doing the new stuff — or they don’t talk to them about the new stuff. They have friends in newsrooms, but their conversations revolve around other topics.
In many j-schools (especially the smaller ones), the faculty have little or no training budget or money for attending conferences. If they can afford to attend only one conference a year, it would never be the Online News Association — it would be the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
February 23rd, 2008 at 1:51 pm
[...] reading Pat’s (Journalism Iconoclast) article about whether Journalism Schools have the right professors, I decided it would be cool to dream up my own online journalism course that all journalism [...]
February 23rd, 2008 at 2:00 pm
I’ve decided to come up with my own dream journalism course. Let see if I can play the role of Professor.
February 23rd, 2008 at 8:14 pm
Too many journalism programs are also underfunded. I remember when I was in j-school in 1988 and the journalism department finally bought some computers - up until that time we had two terminals from the local paper’s copy system. When they bough the computers, they bought about eight under powered Mac SE computers and Pagemaker 2.0 - the only problem being PM 2.0 would not fit on their limited hard drives. It was another year before we had a full lab of computers and better computers for the newspaper. When they outfitted the TV studio, they only purchased two editing setups and three cameras. We never had near enough equipment and it was never state of the art. Real journalism is expensive and equipment/software intensive. Yes, you need to keep your profs up to date, but it will make no difference if you don’t keep your gear, computers and software there too.
February 25th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
I can tell you unequivocally that the right professors do not walk the halls of my university. We have people who have been teaching here for FORTY years. They are not teaching me how to report, or create good multimedia. They are falling behind in teaching new media methods (if new media is, indeed, still new). None of them are blogging about media issues; they do not teach any newsroom management or discuss what the media shift means for us or readers or the future of journalism. They are unconcerned.
I won’t touch upon how the program combines PR and news courses. Yech.
I’m in a graduate program, and have not been able to take a reporting class, due to numerous required courses, mainly dealing with academic research. This will not prepare for a career in new. I miss my salary…