Ron Farrar, dean emeritus of the journalism program at the University of South Carolina, spoke at the college’s annual honors convocation, this year on April 11. Following are excerpts of his remarks.
This is my first trip to your campus, but I’ve known about the journalism program at Nebraska for a very long time now.
My first teaching job, many years ago, was at Indiana University in Bloomington, and my boss, the department chairman, gave me several assignments in addition to my teaching load. One of these was to be responsible for the Hearst College Journalism competition team. The Hearst Foundation conducted monthly contests in writing and reporting and awarded pretty good prize money for the winners, with matching grants for the schools, and the team that won the most money in the monthly contests was chosen national champion. After he had explained all this to me, my chairman then warned: “Your biggest competition will be Nebraska.”
Well, I knew we had some talented undergraduates at Indiana so I looked forward to seeing how well they stacked up in Hearst competition.
My boss was right, however, and Nebraska won the national title that year. Nebraska’s team was coached by your former dean, Neale Copple. Back then he was director of the school. He had written a textbook called “Depth Reporting,” a book that was excellent and, in fact, years ahead of its time. He pushed his students toward entries that would do well in Hearst competitions, and his kids were remarkably successful.
I have to boast, however, and tell you that I got the message. The following year my students from Indiana University won the national championship in the Hearst competitions. What I did not tell anyone, and certainly not your Dean Neale Copple, was that after that first year I went out and bought his book.
A second connection I have with Nebraska is that at one time my wife and I were close friends with Dr. Wilma Crumley, who was associate dean here for many years. Wilma and I were doctoral students together at Missouri.
A third connection I have with Nebraska — and it’s a connection most of the people in our field around the country share — is admiration and affection for your good dean, Will Norton. He is a good man — one of the very best in our field — and I am honored that he asked me to come visit with you.
I was asked to talk with you for a few minutes this evening about the evolution of journalism education.
It is a continually humbling experience for those of us who’ve devoted our careers to this field to realize that many of the industry’s most brilliant successes never saw the inside of a school of mass communications. Lincoln Steffens, one of the great investigative reporters of all time, never took a course in news writing. (Think of just how far he might have gone if he had studied Professor Copple’s book!)
Horace Greeley’s professional credentials did not include his completing Editing I. Ted Turner, so far as is known, never took a class in media management — nor did Ivy Lee ever sit through a college class in public relations. While it is unlikely we shall ever encounter a self-taught brain surgeon or meet a Supreme Court justice who never studied law, plenty of people in the mass media field, including many of today’s top-of-the-line stars, have yet to undergo an hour of formal study in their chosen profession.
It was ever thus. Throughout much of American history, mass communications was not regarded seriously as a career field, much less a subject worth intensive exploration at a college or university. The earliest publishers were, in fact, postmasters who got out newspapers primarily as a service to their constituents. Later on, printing house proprietors developed newspapers as sidelines to their more lucrative job-printing businesses.
During the formative years of the republic, politicians often operated newspapers by and for their followers. While some of this period wrote brilliantly — giving us, among much else, newspaper editorials that became known as the “Federalist Papers” — they did so almost as an afterthought. Their main goal was to perpetuate a philosophical point of view and to root for a political party. Journalistic techniques remained pretty far down on the editor’s list of priorities.
During the 1830s, when newspapers first began to break away from narrow partisanship in search of a mass audience, publishers tended to be promoters bent on making profits. For these cold-eyed individuals, staffing was easy. There was always a bright young person around with a literary flair and an eagerness to become a reporter or editor.
But as events grew more complex, the uneven quality of news reporting became embarrassingly apparent. General Robert E. Lee’s experience with reporters covering his headquarters during the Civil War convinced him that formal education in the journalism field was plainly necessary. In 1869, as president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) in Virginia, he initiated the practice of offering full-tuition scholarships to a selected number of students who would, in effect, intern with a local editor, much as a would-be lawyer of that era would study in the office of a good attorney. General Lee’s program did not work as well as he had hoped, but the idea was well publicized, and other individuals began, in one way or another, to encourage some systematic instruction in journalism at the university level.
One such advocate was the celebrated publisher, Joseph Pulitzer. Ashamed of himself, perhaps, over his own journalistic excesses during the sordid Yellow Journalism-era circulation war with William Randolph Hearst, Pulitzer wanted young journalists to know better. He urged Columbia University to establish, with funds he himself would donate, a school of journalism. But, fearing its dignity would suffer if it endorsed what many regarded as purely vocational training, Columbia turned down Pulitzer’s multimillion-dollar offer. (Years later Columbia would reconsider, using Pulitzer’s millions to establish what became a superb journalism school and, with money left over, to endow awards for exemplary performance, the Pulitzer prizes.)
Meanwhile, a self-educated country editor in the heartland, Walter Williams, was trying to persuade the Board of Curators to launch a School of Journalism at the University of Missouri. He had been arguing for years that “ … there is scarcely a single line of human activity in which there is not a school for preparation. Only in journalism is the beginner turned loose on an unsuspecting public without the slightest knowledge of his duties or the work.” The faculty at Missouri resisted — again, the trade school question — but Williams soon became a Curator himself and ultimately prevailed. In the autumn of 1908, as the new school was about to offer its first classes, the president of the university, Dr. A. Ross Hill, told his faculty:
“I believe it is possible for this School to give dignity to the profession of journalism, to anticipate to some extent the difficulties that journalism must meet and to prepare its graduates to overcome them; to give prospective journalists a professional spirit and high ideals of service; to discover those with real talent for work in the profession, and to discourage those who are likely to prove failures in the profession, and to give the State better newspapers and a better citizenship.”
Missouri met that challenge in outstanding fashion, and soon other institutions around the country followed suit. By 1912 there were 33 active journalism programs — Nebraska’s started soon after that, in 1917 — and in the early 1920s there were more than a hundred, enough to prompt the creation of an accrediting body to attempt to impose and monitor performance standards. Today there are 105 fully accredited such programs. Your Dean Norton has long been a national leader in this accreditation process.
The 2001 annual census of our field, conducted by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, reported a total of 178,970 mass comm majors in the U.S. — and that number reflects only the enrollments at the 462 colleges and universities that responded to the survey. And while this figure includes students in advertising and public relations and related disciplines as well as those studying journalism, the fact remains that journalism schools have become a significant presence. And a growing one: Numbers of majors are up 12 percent this year alone.
The good journalism schools more than pull their weight inside the academy. There are several reasons for this:
1. Strong teaching and mentoring. No other unit on the campus, including the English Department, works with a student’s writing as much as a good journalism school. J-school tenure and promotion policies, at most institutions I know anything about, overwhelmingly emphasize teaching and mentoring. Over the years my various colleagues have endorsed about 30 of their peers for promotion and/or tenure. Every one was successfully promoted or tenured or both. Every one was a strong teacher. Those who weren’t strong teachers had been weeded out long ago. I would argue that undergraduates majoring in journalism get far more professional attention and guidance than their counterparts in other fields.
2. The placement record is outstanding — approaching 100 percent in many journalism schools. Vocational outcomes may seem a crude index compared to the loftier aspirations of higher education, but over the years I’ve been proud to be part of an academic discipline that does more than simply lure students down a primrose path — that leads to waiting tables.
3. Mass communications schools tend to be cost effective for the institution. This is a bureaucratic argument, of interest primarily to administrators, and I won’t say much about it. But as an example: The program I headed had a bare-bones academic-year budget of just over $2 million. Yet our majors paid twice that amount each year to the institution in tuition alone, quite apart from additional funds appropriated by the state. Other deans across the country report much the same story. In short, and to put it in the crudest of terms, some other units on our respective campuses are parking their cars on our nickels.
4. An impressive record of service. Few units on any campus are as close to their various constituencies as a good journalism school will be. Typically, the J-school each year brings to the campus for conferences literally hundreds of individuals, ranging from high school journalists to mid-career professionals, American and foreign, at all levels and in virtually all media fields. Beyond that, many schools offer media-training classes to business leaders and public officials. (While we haven’t snagged many research dollars, we have pulled in several million dollars in media training grants.) In addition, journalism faculty serve as writing and editing and graphics coaches, as creative and management and technology consultants. The entire campus benefits from this kind of outreach.
5. The news media are improved — and improving. Anybody who questions this should examine the newspapers and the electronic media content of a generation or two ago. The improvements cut across all media but to me are most striking in precisely the area where the journalism schools, such as yours here at Nebraska and mine at South Carolina, have the greatest impact: the community level. Weeklies and small dailies, once largely mom-and-pop operations, are now able to hire journalism school graduates, and these young men and women have strengthened news coverage in their communities to a remarkable degree. And those of us who’ve spent our years working toward that honorable goal are proud of the progress. This is precisely what President Hill of the University of Missouri envisioned back in 1908 when he predicted that a good journalism school would, quote, “give the State better newspapers and a better citizenship.” In this Information Age, that is no small thing.