The days of coasting though an ASU education could be coming to a close. With the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication operating as an independent entity, ASU students are faced with an unmitigated disaster. A catastrophe of this magnitude has not been seen since 1674 - when ninja commandos overran ASU. (I know; I was there.) Soon, we may be forced to undertake a more demanding role than just one student in a crowd of 60,000. We may be looking at more personalized attention, and man, does that suck.

Talk around campus has been that ASU President Michael Crow is a Bill Gates disciple, running ASU as if it were a multinational conglomerate rather than a university. But that really isn't fair. Lately, he follows Genghis Khan. Crow's newest strategy seems to be "divide and conquer." It's proven impossible to accommodate a population of students larger than many cities, so his strategy is to split it up and address each part individually.

The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication has always been best described as a fortunate accident. It has produced some pretty heavy-hitters in the industry. But these successes can neither be explained nor consistently replicated. The Cronkite School would seem to be a natural choice for an experiment in credibility building.

Newly appointed dean Christopher Callahan just arrived on campus. He has already been looking around and digging for facts - "reporting," I believe they call it. He struck me as a very personable man, an enthusiastic man. He is also the harbinger of doom for students like me, who would settle for a career writing photo captions in Hustler.

He made it clear to me that the Cronkite School he envisions will not be geared toward producing trash-talking degenerates. He is an idealist. He has a so-called "respect for the profession." He talked about his formation of the radical concept that we should aspire to stand out in our industry.

"I was in junior high school right around the time of Watergate," he recalled, "a time in your life where things start seeping into your head, and all this stuff's going on ... And from that I realized, pretty early on, that journalists are actually a part of this."

Hold the phone. If, when this maniac thinks of the word "journalist," "Watergate" pops into his head, what madness does he have planned for the Cronkite School? Does Crow know about this? What kind of loonies does he hire these days?

"In a 10-year time frame, my goal is that the Cronkite School should be the best journalism program in the American West, period," Callahan firmly stated. "I think it's an ambitious but realistic goal."

His job, as the man behind the merciless cracking whip, is to put the people in place to make all this happen. "That's my job," he affirmed, "to go out and find the partners to help build new programs, to help add to our current resources, to help add new faculty members ... more and better equipment and labs, we now have the pieces in place to do that. We didn't have a dean before."

Even the notion of rapidly filling classes did not daunt his determination to advance the program. "If it needs to be fixed, we're going to fix it," he said.

Callahan's so-called reasoning for doing away with an educational happy hour prolonged over four years is career advancement. He believes that a diploma from a reputable school, a school that takes no prisoners, will lead to more prestigious, higher-paying jobs.

"The careers of the students who go through those programs will be an obvious and enormous benefit to them, and to us -- institutionally. It will increase the profile of the Cronkite School nationally and help us down that road of trying to make a very good school a great one nationally," he said.

I was shocked as I left his office. The vision of the Cronkite School he described to me did not match my own. I mean, what's the point of attending a huge school if they're just going to single you out as an individual and address your needs as a student?

Oh, well. I guess if a person still wants to roll through a diploma mill, there's still a viable option - about 90 miles down I-10.