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Wednesday, April 07, 2004
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MEDILDO DAYS
The April 6 Chicago Tribune reports that some administrators at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism are worried about grade inflation among their undergraduates. The dean remarks that it might be time to think about "reviving the nearly extinct grade of C." Medill students beg to differ. "When you come to a school like Northwestern, everyone's a perfectionist anyway and is intelligent," one of them assures the Trib reporter. I don't know about that. I started college life as a Medill School of Journalism student myself, and although it was a long time ago, it wasn't THAT long. I suspect Medill looks roughly the way it did when I attended, give or take a few computers. Gregg Easterbrook, who was a Medill graduate student after I was an undergrad there, describes what I remember: "One year of practice writing simple declarative sentences." The students were neither particularly intelligent nor perfectionist -- they were highly motivated hacks in training. Perfectionists become Martha Stewart or Hilary Clinton. Intelligent people are drawn to substantive undergraduate educations. Medill was a trade school, and one of the reasons I became an English major after a year as an undergrad "Medildo," as we lucky few who'd been accepted into this inexplicably sought-after program were called, was that the cognitive dissonance of listening for two hours in the morning to a retired hack mutter about "who what where and why" as if this phrase were up there with "the unexamined life is not worth living," and then listening for an hour in the afternoon to Erich Heller talk about Hegelian spirit became insupportable to me. In the morning I'd be dispatched with my eager fellow-students to the local Evanston supermarket to interview what our professor called "ordinary moms" about how inflation was "impacting their pocketbooks." In the afternoon I'd listen to Heller read Rilke in German and talk about how "nowhere will be world but within." In the morning I'd learn to write "lifestyle" when I meant "life." In the afternoon I'd consider the tragic ironies of "Death in Venice." The marriage could not be saved. To the amazement of my fellow fledgling hacks, I abjured the simple world of declarative sentences for the enigmatic world of the subordinate clause. As to the grade inflation question. As are simple. As are exactly what the declarative world of journalism is all about. The world of journalism keeps giving As to the great shit Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley and Janet Cooke are turning out because few in the world of journalism learned the intellectual and moral discretion you're supposed to learn in college. Bs are relatively simple. Doin' okay, man. Doin' okay. Cs are something else. Cs do not come trailing clouds of glory. Cs insinuate a world of limitation, darkness, reluctance, some sort of inadequacy, into the shining declarative world of J-school. The people in J-schools, and the undergraduate "communications" majors who are having the same experience, are being given simple tasks. They are being trained to smile and talk slowly to the retarded people whom television news broadcasters believe (I have to assume they're right) constitute their audience. They are being trained to bring a crude intrusive sensibility right up to the nose of complex vulnerable human beings. They are being trained to write robotically. These are not difficult things to do, and if you're getting a C as you try to do them something is wrong. Something in you is resisting. You may not be a hack. It is understandable that J-schools would be reluctant to deliver this message. |