Is J-School a Joke?

“Can J-School Be Saved?” by Jack Shafer, in Slate (Oct. 7, 2002); “Some Ruminations on Journalism Schools as Columbia" by Orville Schell, and “Getting Journalism Education Out of the Way” by Betty Medsger, in Zoned for Debate (Sept. 16, 2002).

The prestigious graduate school of journalism at Columbia University, the sainted press critic A. J. Liebling once wrote, had “all the intellectual status of a training school for future employees of the A&P.” Columbia president Lee Bollinger may not have harbored so subversive a view last summer when he suspended the search for a new dean and called for communal reflection on the school’s purpose. But some have begun to think the unthinkable.

“The biggest losers in J-school abolition . . . would be (in order) the janitors who maintain the physical plants, the faculties, and the Annenbergs and Gannetts who’ve purchased naming rights to the buildings,” maintains Shafer, a Slate columnist who is a former editor of the weekly Washington City Paper and never went to J-school himself.

A 1996 survey, he notes, found that only 10 percent of newspaper editors and reporters had graduate degrees in journalism (though 54 percent held undergraduate degrees in journalism or communications). “In the 17 years that I hired and fired,” Shafer says, “none of the J-school graduates who worked for me did better work than the many English majors I’ve employed.” Medsger, a freelance writer, found in 1996 that 59 percent of the journalists who had won a Pulitzer Prize in the preceding 10 years had never studied journalism in college or graduate school.

The schools do serve a limited function, Shafer concludes: They help would-be journalists who are clueless about how to proceed and have $10,000 or so to spend explore their interest and land a “substantial” journalism job. But he urges Bollinger to warn prospective students that “you can get as good a journalism education via an internship or by working a year on a small-town daily.”

For the most part, however, “media outlets” no longer “mentor and cultivate young journalists in the best traditions of the craft at the lower reaches of the professional ladder,” argues Schell, the dean of the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley, who also enjoyed a successful career in the field without benefit of a journalism degree. That function now belongs to the journalism schools.

Schell agrees with Bollinger on the need to transcend the trade school model. He argues that M.A. programs must last two years instead of the usual one, and that the schools must “broaden their curricula” to include history, culture, science, and other subjects that a journalist—or any educated person—ought to know about.