Does the tenure system make sense for journalism professors?

Tenure serves a vital purpose for many disciplines and professors, especially since a lot of ideas and research are controversial — at least at the time (Remember when the Earth was flat?). Tenure serves to protect the academic honesty of educational institutions and their faculty. With tenure a person is free to question everything, which often is how our most groundbreaking ideas are conceived.

I’m not sure if that purpose is served with journalism schools. Journalism education is much closer to trade school than to a typical liberal arts education. J-school is very much a skill — not idea — based curriculum.

I majored in both political science and journalism. They were completely different majors in terms of how they were taught. Political science was all about ideas and analyzing those ideas. Political science teaches one to think critically about the world, but a political science degree is not direct preparation for any one job or field.

J-school is all about learning skills to be a journalist — that’s all it really is. In fact, many programs are not only conceived to help someone become a journalist, but even a particular kind of journalist — like broadcast or newspaper. But a journalism degree isn’t even a requirement for being a journalist (many papers still employ people without bachelors degrees, because journalism doesn’t really require a liberal arts education to be successful).

I took a class in publication design as an undergrad. That’s not a real liberal arts skill. Yet, I never had a political science class in something like “how to work for a think tank.” Everything in political science was on a much more academic level.

Yes, journalism made me a much better writer and researcher, which would benefit anyone. But many of my classes were very much terminal classes — all about learning a particular skill that a newspaper would need.

All this brings me back to the question: Does the tenure system make sense for journalism professors? I can’t really think of any sort of controversial research that journalism schools do. Nor is journalism even about research (maybe if journalism schools were more progressive and aggressive we wouldn’t have this huge mess we do right now).

In fact, one might argue that tenured professors hold back many journalism programs from being more modern and aggressive in trying new things. This is just an idea though. Maybe tenure has a firm place in journalism education for certain professors.

But maybe it doesn’t.