education

Academic freedumb

Submitted by yelvington on May 5, 2008 - 12:27pm

Now that Vin Crosbie's year of teaching at Syracuse is drawing to a close, he's talking about what he found in about a quarter of the faculty:

"They're obstructionists because they either deny things are changing (for example, one still thinks the Internet is a fad that will disappear) or they've grown too comfortable teaching the same curricula year after year for 20 or more years. They are tenured and so can't be fired, and the doctrine of academic freedom allows them to teach whatever they see fit."

I always thought the point of academic freedom had to do with research and ultimately the growth of human knowledge, not simply to teach whatever the hell you want.

So I looked it up in Wikipedia to see the current consensus definition from people with a surplus of time on their hands. Interestingly, the article is flagged that it "may not represent a worldwide view of the subject," but it does use these words:

"Academic Freedom is the belief that the freedom of inquiry by students and faculty members is essential to the mission of the academy. ... Academic tenure protects academic freedom by ensuring that teachers can be fired only for causes such as gross professional incompetence or behavior that evokes condemnation from the academic community itself."

So: Are academic luddites practicing academic freedom? I don't mean to be unkind, but are they perhaps merely professionally incompetent?

An academic position isn't a place to go hide from the storm. It's a great place to be a storm-chaser. It's sad to hear of people who've passed up that opportunity in favor of retiring on the job.

What the Medill uproar is really about

Submitted by yelvington on February 23, 2008 - 2:39pm

Here's another item I wasn't going to touch: The uproar at Northwestern University, where Medill Dean John Lavine is being raked over the coals for writing a letter promoting the school in which he used an anonymous quote that he can't back up. But I am inspired by Gawker firing both barrels of double-ought snark into the middle of it:

All that self-referential ivory tower bullshit is not gonna do one thing to change the fact that all these kids are shelling out huge money in order to be trained for a dying business. We know that great journalists always, on instinct, attack their own bosses , like a trained pit bull will attack a baby. But it's time to get over it, and focus on something that actually matters. Because those Medill students are gonna be upset when the journalism industry continues to tank, their jobs don't exist, and this Dean Lavine story ends up being the biggest one of their entire careers. No mas.

And by Pat Thornton's observation:

For every Mindy McAdams there are 100 professors who don’t have a clue about the Web.

And Will Sullivan's comment:

Getting a doctoral degree pulls you out of the real journalism world for 4 years. And four years is 1/3 of the entire life of the web. You’re dead in online journalism with that gaping hole.

Here's the deal. This is not about John Lavine citing an unnamed student who he says liked the changes he's making at Medill.

This storm began the day Lavine was appointed dean with a mandate to radically change Medill, to tear it apart and rebuild it to meet the needs of the 21st century. This outsider, this unholy businessman, crashes into the Church of the Journalist, suspends the arcane rules of the academy and starts pushing an integrated marketing and communications program and jiggy new multimedia studies and setting up a satellite school in Qatar funded by the Qatari government. For cryin' out loud, they don't even have a First Amendment there.

Suddenly the whole world is turned upside-down, the tenured faculty is in a snit, and a bunch of people who have a lot of time on their hands are looking for something, anything, they can use against this apostate in dean's clothing.

I haven't visited Northwestern's campus in years, but I spent time with some great Medill students and faculty last year, and I've talked with Lavine, and I've been watching with interest as this unfolds. I don't think there are any villains in this opera. Lavine has a plan that he thinks will reposition Medill so that it can prepare students for the world of 2025. Some of the faculty fears that these changes represent the end of cherished values.

I think the angry faculty who are fighting change need to step out of their comfort zones and take a really hard look at their assumptions, their motives, and their own skill sets. In the future we need great editors who can act as -- gasp -- the chief marketing officers, content strategists, and product leaders of their journalistic organizations. This will require a mastery of tools and techniques not taught in a 1970-style reporting and editing course.

Some of the students need to wake up and see that they're not looking ahead to the world of 2025. Being a student, as opposed to a mere pupil, means that you take responsibility for your own education. Getting trained for old-media jobs that may not survive to see the end of your student loan isn't responsible behavior.

And all of those responsible for the utter lack of perspective and proportion being shown in this matter need to take a cold shower. Journalism is about news judgment as much as it's about digging, and I'm not seeing it displayed in this case.

Dreamweaver and the California job case

Submitted by yelvington on February 15, 2008 - 4:18pm

Martin Stabe recaps the ongoing debate about whether simple tools like Dreamweaver -- which no professional journalist is likely to ever use -- have a role in journalism education.

It reminds me a bit of Glenn Hanson requiring his typography students at the University of Illinois to learn the California job case sufficiently to set a paragraph of type. Or Daniel Slotnick making me write a tiny computer program in machine code (binary, not assembler). Waste of time? I don't think so. For a designer, an appreciation of how letterforms physically fit together is an asset you get from touching type, not from listening to a lecture or reading a book.

I don't use Dreamweaver. Never have, never will. But it seems to me to be a fine tool for exploring how information can fit together visually in a hypermedia presentation. In the real world, those students are going to be locked into heinously inflexible content management systems. There will be time for learning about them later. Classroom time should be devoted to illuminating the range of possibilities.

I'd also introduce journalism students to HTML and CSS, by the way -- not because they'll ever need to write HTML on a daily basis, but because they need to know something about the wires holding everything together under the hood. That's why Slotnick had a bunch of liberal-arts majors writing binary code by hand back in the dark ages of computing. I hated that exercise, and I love the fact that I did it.

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