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| Editor’s Note
“Focusing” on What Presidents and Provosts Think of JMC Education If the word from a group of university presidents and provosts is indicative of how journalism and mass communication education is doing in the United States these days, our discipline is doing extraordinarily well—there are no problems with JMC’s place on campuses, and no negative or unresolved effects on journalism schools resulting from crises in the mass communication industries and professions. In mid-April, I had the opportunity to attend, as an observer, the Focus Group: University Presidents/Chancellors/Provosts, held in suburban Chicago by the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication (ASJMC), the sister organization to our Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). Comments about their own campuses’ programs were informative and interesting. For example, Jo Ann M. Gora, president of Ball State University, told of her College of Communication, Information and Media raising $40 million—$20 million for “i-communication” projects and $20 million more for “digital exchange” projects. Joan Robinson, provost of Morgan State University, told of how her university, now classified as a research university, is launching a communication school in fall 2008 with a new building. Carol Cartwright, president emeritus of Kent State University, pointed to that institution’s journalism school moving into a rehabbed building. George Dennison, president of the University of Montana, noted that his university’s journalism school (second oldest in the United States) is moving into a new 50,000-square-foot building. Leo Lambert, president of Elon University, mentioned communication and other students on his campus being involved in Project Pericles, a twenty-campus effort in which teams of students work on social issue initiatives to develop senses of social responsibility. Henry Bienen, president of Northwestern University, said that the Medill School of Journalism is setting up a campus in Qatar. As focus group moderator Jim Spaniolo, president of the University of Texas at Arlington and former dean of the College of Communication Arts and Sciences at Michigan State University, said, the focus group participants did not disagree with one another at all. That was not surprising, considering that most of them were engaging in some well-earned bragging. But assuming that journalism education is more than buildings, administrative structures, foundation-funded special projects, and overseas campuses (Qatar gives a whole new meaning to the term “distance learning”), the presidents and provosts still touched on some substance. Alvin Thornton, associate provost at Howard University, encouraged journalism schools to hold government officials accountable on public policy affecting mass media. Northwestern’s Bienen said the Medill School could and should be doing more public policy analysis generally. And they seemed to have generally agreed that the core areas of journalism education are reporting, ethics, and technology (where public relations and/or advertising students fit into that model wasn’t addressed, apparently because this group interpreted a conversation about journalism education to mean just that—journalism [print, broadcast, online, photo] education only). Participants and observers had been given copies of the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s 2005 report, Improving the Education of Tomorrow’s Journalists, in hopes that they would comment on, or at least be inspired by, its recommendations (collected by McKinsey & Co. from more than forty journalists and media company executives). The “reporting, ethics and use of technology” rhetoric among the presidents and provosts was consistent with the 2005 report. For example, it prescribed, “Emphasize the basics of the journalism craft… and a strong sense of ethics.” Projects at Ball State, Elon, and Kent State, plus those recom-mendations of the Northwestern and Howard administrators, certainly satisfy the 2005 panel’s emphasis on “serve the public interest and protect our democracy.” Projects mentioned by administrators from Ball State and Kent State, plus the Media Management Center affiliated with Medill, are addressing the 2005 report’s concern with “engaging distracted, fickle audiences.” But that was about as far as it went. Although the presidents and provosts generally struck me as quite knowledgeable about their journalism schools and departments (whether they always were or had gone over a briefing book on the way to Chicago), not a single participant mentioned the fact that most journalism/mass communication programs do not have a separate ethics course, and even among those that do, it’s often—perhaps usually—an elective rather than a requirement. They didn’t mention (even today, after so many high profile journalism ethics scandals in the last few years that it’s difficult to remember them all or keep all of the details straight) that in programs offering a media law and ethics course, law is receiving 75% to 90% of classroom time and students’ attention. They didn’t mention anything about the difficulty, in schools accredited by the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC), of covering all the reporting, ethics, and technology that faculty want to cover within the program credit caps. Only my fellow observer Medill School of Journalism Dean John Levine brought up the idea of journalism schools being change agents with regard to media industry executives and corporate cultures that are technologically and managerially out-of-date. The presidents and provosts mentioned the word “interdisciplinary” only once or twice (without defining what an interdisciplinary JMC program meant to them), and did not address at all the part of the 2005 Carnegie Corporation report that has struck me as simultaneously the most important and yet least-often heard (among JMC faculty) “prescriptions,” what the report later calls, “the need for mastery.” Those “prescriptions” were “help reporters build specialized expertise to enhance their coverage of complex beats from medicine to economics, and help them to acquire first-hand knowledge of the societies, languages, religions and cultures of other parts of the world; channel the best writers, the most curious reporters and the most analytical thinkers into the profession of journalism.” And lest one think that these specifications were coming from ivory-tower academics, let me note that they came from top newspaper, magazine, television, and radio journalists: Christiane Amanpour, Dan Balz, Fred Barnes, Amanda Bennett, Tom Bettag, John S. Carroll, Leonard Downie Jr., James Fallows, Jack Fuller, Andrew Heyward, James F. Hoge Jr., Eason Jordon, Jim Kelly, Kevin Klose, Bill Moyers, Norman Pearlstine, Neal Shapiro, Stephen B. Shepard, Leslie Stahl, David Westin, and Mark Whitaker, among others. I was immensely impressed that so many university presidents and provosts devoted so much time to attending the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication focus group, and I wasn’t surprised that they would take the opportunity to inform everyone involved about their own campus’s building projects, grant-funded projects, program restructurings, and—of course—an upcoming campus in Qatar. But I’m afraid that we still don’t know much of anything about what presidents and provosts—especially those on campuses with average or typical journalism programs (which is where the majority of faculty and students are)—think about JMC faculty and JMC education. Specifically, we don’t know much more about what those presidents and provosts think about internal and/or external criticisms of JMC education, and the only indications of what they think about journalism/journalists were a couple of anecdotes or wisecracks. And if one goal of the focus group was to start moving JMC education from point A (where it is today) to Point B (where many of the nation’s best journalists said, two years ago, that it needs to go), we haven’t made much progress. • • • Earlier this year, many of us were surprised to see unexpectedly, on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Web site, rankings (as of 2005) of research productivity of journalism schools with Ph.D. programs, which we didn’t even know was being assembled (by Academic Analytics); it accompanied a Jan. 12, 2007, article in the print version headlined, “A new standard for measuring doctoral programs.” Journalism and mass communication education always has been a bit light on various rankings and ratings—it seems we can’t get much respect from even our fellow mass communicators at U.S. News & World Report and so on—so any such rankings are enough to pique our curiosity, at the very least. Academic Analytics has detailed its methodology, with—for example—a book counting for five times what a journal article does, only books published between 2001 and 2005 and articles published between 2003 and 2005 being counted, and so on. (The methodology’s explanation is lengthy, and available, so I won’t recount it all here.) Figures are given for “Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index,” “percentage of faculty with a book publication,” “books per faculty,” “percentage of faculty with a journal publication,” “journal publications per faculty,” “percentage of faculty with journal publication cited by another work,” “citations per faculty,” “citations per paper,” “percentage of faculty with an award,” and “awards per faculty.” Four other possible pieces of data regarding grants were left blank on these “mass communication/media studies” listings. For those who haven’t seen the rankings for “mass communication/media studies,” Pennsylvania State University at University Park was ranked highest, followed by Michigan State University, Ohio State University, University of Wisconsin at Madison, New York University, University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, Northwestern University, Louisiana State University, University of Iowa, and Temple University. The easiest pieces of listed data for any of us to check are the “number of faculty” on which the data, ratings, and rankings are based. Penn State is listed with 23 faculty (with the 2006-07 AEJMC Directory, I count 42, all of whom are in mass communication when one includes film studies); Michigan State is listed with 50 faculty (I count 72, including communication professors not teaching mass communication, so that might be about right); Ohio State is listed with 29 (I also count 29, but that number includes many who do not teach mass communication and/or media studies); Wisconsin is listed with 34 faculty (I count 13 in its School of Journalism and Mass Communication); Iowa is listed with 55 (I count 18 in its School of Journalism and Mass Communication); and so on. Academic Analytics surely explains its methodology, but the numbers it came up with don’t make any sense to me—and all of the firm’s percentages and mean averages are based on its faculty counts. The Chronicle reported that Academic Analytics’ methodology has been criticized. Indeed. • • • If you have been thinking about ideas for research you could and might want to do to submit to Journalism & Mass Communication Educator and would like some help, you can go to http://www.aejmc.org/JMCEfolder05/JMCE/index. html, and then click on the link: View Helpful Research Ideas. Over a period of several months, my editorial assistant (and graduate assistant), Robin Blom, reviewed every refereed and nonrefereed article, essay, and other piece published in the journal (with the exception of book reviews and obituaries) since it became refereed. He then organized all of that content into topic categories and posed questions about related data that could be gathered in the future as the basis of new research. (Note: Blom did not pose formal hypotheses and/or research questions, nor did he intend to; researchers will want and need to develop those on their own after conducting their own literature reviews.) The View Helpful Research Ideas content will be updated from now on, two to four times per year. We welcome your suggestions and other feedback on it. • • • In the next issue, I will report on the first World Journalism Education Congress in Singapore in June. Stay tuned. For details in the meantime, see: http://www.amic-wjec.org/. Dane S. Claussen, Editor |
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