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Saturday, June 23, 2007
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Medildo Meltdown You already know, if you've been paying attention, that UD attended the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University for one year (Medill students called themselves Medildoes when UD was there) before transferring to NU's English department. She was not happy at Medill. Now it turns out that "a series of internal and external audits in recent years [has] judged Medill -- which enjoys seeing itself as a journalism school without equal -- as an academic basket case." The Chicago Reader story that reports this doesn't say exactly how Medill's a basket case, but I'd guess this means it's losing students to other J-schools, isn't getting good jobs for its graduates, has an incoherent curriculum, has high levels of student discontent, etc. Because of the crisis, NU's president has appointed a new head of the school who's all about technology, online venues, and consumers rather than writing style, newspapers, and readers. Inside Higher Ed reported on the shift last year: Further integrating media management into the journalism education is now essential for a well-rounded education [said the new head of the school]. In a statement, [he] referred to much of the media’s inability to keep up with technology and consumer preferences. [There's a] growing need for media outlets to increase their marketing savvy... [The school also needs] to help students understand trends in how people consume media. [Another person involved in the change said that these changes will] certainly make marketing a larger part of the average journalism student’s experience. [He said that] marketing knowledge doesn’t necessarily “infect” journalistic content, but that if journalists want readers, they need to know how to produce good work, but also “how the audience wants to get it, and who they are.” The bottom line, as a commenter on the IHE thread put it, is that "traditional print news publishers haven’t figured how to make money at new methods of electronic publishing." In an NU alumni magazine article, Medill's new leader says that The use of technology is another area that will be beefed up.... UD's ambivalent about these changes. She needs to know more about them. She certainly remembers a very unimpressive Medill School of Journalism, but she suspects that all schools of journalism are unimpressive because they're schools of journalism. Anyway, Northwestern's faculty has decided it's royally pissed: The faculty senate at Northwestern University has formally accused NU’s administration of abolishing democracy at the Medill School of Journalism. A resolution passed unanimously June 6 by the General Faculty Committee says it found NU’s “suspension of faculty governance at [Medill] to be unacceptable and in violation of the University’s Statutes.” The resolution predicts “curricular changes that are ill considered . . . the demoralization and enmity of the faculty . . . damage to the national reputation of the School . . . the loss of and the inability to hire faculty who believe that the faculty’s role in governance is important for students, faculty and the public.” Again, UD would have to know a great deal more to say whether the faculty's right to be outraged. You don't want to mess with faculty governance unless you've got very good reasons for doing so. Some good reasons for doing so would be a school within your university that's mired in the past, that can't govern itself or evolve intellectually, whose faculty is so internally riven that it can't make appointments, etc. Assuming some of this was going on at Medill, the university might have been justified in moving unilaterally. |