In the past week, two powerhouses of college journalism, Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, have unveiled initiatives that cement two diverging views of journalism’s future. At Columbia, students in the school’s Master of Arts program can now take a course focusing on case studies. And next fall at Medill, undergrads will be able to begin a five-course concentration in integrated marketing communications – a mix of advertising, business and marketing – a signal of IMC’s growing role in a changing school.
The moves underscore how two elite schools have introduced radically different new curricula each school hopes will become a standard-bearer amid a changing media landscape. At Medill, Dean John Lavine has hewed to the media industry by building skills elements and IMC concepts like audience understanding into core courses. At Columbia, Dean Nicholas Lemann has taken a more theoretical approach by bringing students back into the classroom to ponder the fundamentals of journalism and master specific subject areas.
Both Lavine and Lemann would say they’re taking the right course as academia finally addresses a tumultuous time for journalists. But has either offered a path for others to follow?
The first half of this decade was not good for journalism. By 2005, just 54 percent of Americans said they could believe what they read in their daily newspapers, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Journalists blamed the bottom line for shifting coverage toward popular culture. Media corporations, hurt by advertising’s shift to the Internet, squeezed newsrooms jobs to keep profits up.
Yet many of the nation’s leading journalism schools remained stagnant. As journalism programs proliferated – even as journalism jobs become scarcer and less lucrative – top-tier schools realized they needed to position themselves to attract the highest-quality applicants and employers.
In late 2005, Provost Lawrence Dumas had lunch with Medill Professor Abe Peck. Months prior, Dumas convened a faculty committee to figure out how the school should adapt to changing media. Peck, a former acting dean of Medill, was put in charge. “I forgot to duck,” he remembers.
Peck’s critical report, no puff piece itself, reinforced two others written earlier that year: One found that feuding between the two sides of Medill, journalism and IMC, had grown acrimonious. The other, by a national accreditation board, said the school had lost its position as a leader in its field.
The verdict was in. The journalism school needed change. Fast. By that fall, Dumas and University President Henry Bienen had begun a quiet search for a new Medill dean. And over lunch with Peck, talk turned to the future of the school. Suddenly, Dumas asked Peck if he’d like to be dean. Peck declined (“It’s not my time,” he said), but had another candidate in mind: John Lavine, the founding director of the prestigious (and lucrative) Media Management Center, a joint foray by Kellogg and Medill into further education for media executives.
Lavine went to the top of the short list. A few weeks later, on Dec. 7, 2005, the university announced the position was his. Dumas sent out a press release saying that the dean at the time, Loren Ghiglione, had “graciously offered” to step aside seven months early so Lavine could take office. In the intervening month, faculty, students and alumni would speculate as to the new dean’s approach. Before long, Lavine would wrest curricular control from the faculty, empower IMC officials and speak of “blowing up” the curriculum.
In 2002, long before this upheaval at Medill, Columbia University president Lee Bollinger started his own task force. The J-school was searching for a new dean; instead, Bollinger chose to invite 34 news media bigwigs to come educate him about the future of journalism and the role of a journalism school in the 21st century.
Two things emerged from those meetings. One was a firm belief that journalism education needed to be refocused on fundamentals of the craft, with students focusing on theory and specializing in specific subject areas – not in particular media. The other was Nicholas Lemann, who was named dean of the Graduate School of Journalism in April 2003.
Lemann, a veteran of The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly and the Washington Post, set out to add what he calls “intellectual substance” to the curriculum. He wanted to lengthen Columbia’s program from 10 months to two years, emphasize case studies and realign journalism education with a journalist’s duty in democratic society. At Columbia, the faculty approved his new curriculum by overwhelming margins. “It’s possible to create a consensus for change in a journalism school,” Lemann says, alluding to Lavine’s suspension of faculty control over curriculum.
But what began as far-reaching change at Columbia has been reined in since 2003. Lemann’s initial plan, to supplant the school’s skills-based program with a two-year, craft-based degree, has evolved into a separate program. The long-standing M.S. degree, which enrolls about 200 students annually, now stands alongside Lemann’s M.A. program, which enrolls about 50. Graduates of this M.A. program have had no trouble finding jobs, he says, noting that of the first graduates, 10 are employed at The New York Times, Dow Jones, the Washington Post, Time and Newsweek.
But even as an increased focused on the Web and the high costs of some of his programs have curtailed his initial goals, Lemann still believes in his more intellectual approach. One example is the new class on case studies. He pointed to a case involving the Knight Ridder newspaper chain’s ahead-of-the-curve coverage of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction prior to the American invasion as one idea students wouldn’t be exposed to by just going out and writing a story. “They take you into a higher place than doing a story on your own.” Lemann says. “Reporting in the field is very good at putting you inside the experience of being a reporter. Then there’s other stuff that goes on in journalism practice that isn’t captured by that experience.”
“They’re wrong,” Peck says of that idea. Even so, Medill’s new graduate journalism curriculum, like Columbia’s M.A. program, lets students opt for a subject concentration, such as government and public policy, instead of a media specialty, such as broadcast.
Today, Medill is a changed – and changing – school. Though the student and faculty rancor has died down, it hasn’t been easy for the dean. “If people say things that are attacks, and you don’t hurt, you should quit,” Lavine says. “If you get into organizational change to be popular, you shouldn’t do it.” In the two years since his arrival, Lavine has won the grudging acceptance of a faculty that once seemed poised to fashion pitchforks from pens and storm the dean’s suite. Many professors now insist their initial opposition stemmed not from the changes themselves, but from the process through which they were implemented.
Within months of his arrival, Lavine supplanted what had long been a journalism-heavy administration with IMC leaders and MMC loyalists. Mary Nesbitt, who served as director of the Readership Institute under Lavine, became his associate dean for curriculum. (Nesbitt has never taught a course at Medill.) Two IMC professors also became associate deans, making Associate Dean Richard Roth the last bastion of journalism in the dean’s suite.
Alongside the increased focus on concepts like audience understanding came a host of required equipment and a heavier load of skills instruction to go with it. Some faculty and students felt the changes were sacrificing the solid writing-and-reporting grounding the school had long been legendary for. (Lavine says he accomodated both by increasing the number of journalism classes required of undergrads from 11 to 14.)
Lavine and Nesbitt insist that the changes are in line with what Peck’s strategic plan – a faculty-approved document – emphasized. Still
, faculty decision-making power was limited. Student members of the curriculum committee said they never discussed individual courses. Nor did they vote on anything. Several faculty members said that much had to pass before Nesbitt and Lavine before receiving final approval. “It’s just part of the natural change process,” Nesbitt says of the past two years. “I don’t think about it too much.”
Even as the curricular maelstrom passed – and it largely had by the time the Medill 2020 curriculum went public in August 2007 – students and faculty have repeatedly been handed fodder with which to fuel their anger at the dean’s regime. During the summer of 2007, the dean helped redesign and remodel the second-floor Fisk suite which houses top-level administrators. It cost an estimated $360,000, according to Medill director of business and finance Earl Barriffe. Among faculty, it became emblematic of Lavine’s business-side elitism and of his desire to distance himself from their concerns. And plans to consider renaming the Medill School of Journalism were announced last October, sparking perhaps the greatest alumni uproar to date.
Despite the turmoil, Lavine’s ideas aren’t all that revolutionary. Many schools have been focusing on expanding skills instruction – some long before Lavine’s mandates. In 2001, USC’s Annenberg School of Communication moved toward what’s called, in journalism jargon, a convergence curriculum. Rather than teach students only how to specialize in broadcast, magazine or newspaper – as Medill, too, had long done – their budding journalists must be able to develop, report and write stories across all platforms.
Neither Annenberg nor Medill has completely converged its curriculum. Medill undergraduates still specialize in a medium, or “track,” and then intern for a quarter at a news organization in that field.
“Despite its troubles, we still have a large and lucrative newspaper industry out there, and the same for broadcast and magazines,” Nesbitt says, defending the tracks.
Above all, the decision to embrace part-way convergence speaks to an overriding goal of providing the education likeliest to result in good jobs for Medill grads.
As such, some degree of convergence has become the norm elsewhere. At the University of Maryland, an online specialization is offered, but all undergraduates must take graphics or online journalism. The University of Missouri, another popular undergraduate program, offers a convergence track, though it does not require newspaper or magazine students to step into new media. Even Columbia is now adding Web skills to both of its graduate programs. But Lemann has reservations about opening the floodgates. “One of my mottos is, ‘If they’re teaching it at the Learning Annex, we should not be teaching it here in a for-credit course,'” Lemann says, referring to the center in some cities that teaches skills seminars.
Lavine denies that Medill has gone too far in the other direction, even if he admits new media elements have been cut back in both the undergraduate and graduate programs. “I reject entirely the fact that we should not teach you how to use a computer, a camera, a video camera, a recorder,” he says. “We expect students to use the tools of the day, whatever they are.”
Lavine is fond of calling change a process, not an event. Courses continue to be tinkered with. Some, like News and New Media, are getting the best student reviews they’ve ever received. Others, like the freshman introductory course, Reporting and Writing the News, have seen their course ratings plummet throughout Lavine’s tenure.
But broad changes, like the new IMC certificate, also continue to appear. The school is interviewing for eight open faculty positions, most of which relate to pillars of the new curriculum like audience understanding and multimedia reporting.
This January, Bienen announced he was extending Lavine’s initial three-and-a-half year appointment indefinitely. Before he leaves, Lavine wants an apparatus for permanent change – something that he believes will require scrapping the old framework for faculty governance – and plans to convene a committee to study other ways of implementing faculty curricular control. “It appears as if media and journalism are changing so rapidly that instead of changing the curricula being a fixed event, long after I’m gone it will be an ongoing process,” Lavine says.
Regardless, faculty governance will be fully reinstated in spring or fall of 2009, he says, adding that he doesn’t believe the faculty will roll back any of the changes. Nor do others. “There’s no journalism school right now that really is ahead of the curve,” says Peck, who recently returned from an accrediting visit to Indiana University. “If this thing works, then Medill has a chance to be more unique.”
