In a controversial yet widely expected move, the Medill faculty overwhelmingly approved Wednesday an honor pledge that students will be required to sign upon admission to the journalism school.
The pledge restates Medill’s already-existing code of ethics, telling students that fabricating sources in stories or plagiarizing could lead to expulsion.
“Professional journalists who fabricate and/or plagiarize violate industry standards and the public trust, greatly compromising the integrity of their medium,” the pledge reads in part. “Such journalists are often disciplined or fired.”
The faculty debated the pledge for about two hours Wednesday morning before approving it in a voice vote, said Medill Prof. Dick Schwarzlose, who helped write the pledge. In the final tally, Schwarzlose said, one professor voted against it.
“All we’re trying to get our students to do is to look at the (code of academic integrity) and understand what it says,” he said. “This is a community that really feels strongly about its concern for ethics. We’re a community of students, staff and faculty interested in maintaining the highest standards we can.”
Schwarzlose said incoming freshmen in 2002 will have to sign the pledge as a condition of enrollment, but current Medill students will not have to sign it.
Although the pledge received widespread support from the faculty Wednesday, some professors and students have spoken out against it, saying that it unfairly punishes students who are not inclined to violate journalism ethics.
Medill sophomore Rebecca Chang said most students already abide by the pledge’s basic principles.
“Medill should trust that their students would come in knowing what’s expected and that they have a responsibility to be ethical,” she said. “Signing something won’t necessarily stop someone who wants to plagiarize from doing it.”
The Integrated Marketing Communications program will come up with its own honor pledge and present it to the faculty at the next meeting, said Medill Prof. Mary Ann Weston, one of the pledge’s proponents.
Weston heads an 11-member committee that will devise ways to teach students about the pledge.
“Really, this is an education issue,” she said. “It’s not a punitive issue. We cannot assume that everyone is born knowing every permutation and aspect of the challenges they will run into in journalism.”
Neither of Medill’s two main journalism school rivals – Columbia University in New York and the University of Missouri at Columbia – require their students to sign an honor pledge, and officials at both universities said Wednesday that they have no plans to do so.
David Klatell, associate dean for academic affairs at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, said forcing students to sign a pledge would fundamentally alter the relationship between students and administration.
Students already see copies of the journalism school’s honor code in admissions packets and course material, he said.
“We assume they’re behaving morally until proven otherwise,” Klatell said. “Asking them to sign a document stating what we take to be an implicit part of education here would change the atmosphere. It’s one thing to ask people to look at certain precepts and codes and another to say, ‘Here’s a contract. Sign it.'”
Rob Logan, associate dean for undergraduate studies at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, said students already come into constant contact with the school’s honor code.
When journalism students write a story, they know that any of the faculty can and will check it for accuracy, Logan said. For the most part, however, students fact-check their own stories, he said.
“There’s the implication that any faculty member could check for accuracy,” he said. “It’s an automatic safeguard against someone making a story up.”
The honor pledge vote comes four months after a Medill student was removed from the graduate program after administrators could not verify elements of two of his news stories. He remains eligible to receive a bachelor’s degree in journalism.
Although the incident gained national attention and embarrassed Medill, Schwarzlose said the honor pledge is not related to the allegations.
Loren Ghiglione, who will replace Ken Bode as Medill dean this summer, said he “strongly supports” the pledge and that it will help teach journalism ethics to students.
Ghiglione said he asked his students to sign copies of an honor pledge when teaching at Emory University, where he worked from 1996 to 1999.
“We have an obligation to set the tone of the school and not to surprise our students,” he said. “We need to prepare them for our expectations and prepare them for what we want them to do.”
