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William Serrin, page 2
This is not to say that journalism and journalism education do not need examining and change. Every profession should continually examine itself and try to improve. But doing this examination in an adversarial way will only end in further debate and no solution. One could write or teach a hard news lead and also entertain the idea of a larger or more expansive education. One could fashion oneself as a media critic and also appreciate the value of getting the news out fast.
In our department we continue to have these discussions in which we often talk from two camps, when we should not. I always remember two or three years ago when one of my colleagues came into my office and saw on my desk a copy of Edmund Wilson's The Great Earthquake. My colleague looked at the book, looked at me and said, ``What are you reading this for?'' The assumption, I suppose, was that, because I keep stressing basics, and I often teach a basic course, and I was and am a reporter, that I am not interested in great books.
What we all ought to do is say that we teach craft and context and that we always look critically at journalism — that is, we teach everything we need to teach, and we do it well. We also ought to say to ourselves that we will not accept being average or good, only great.
Joseph Pulitzer may have
had one thing right in the 1890s when he began his efforts to create a
journalism school (he was turned down for almost two decades by Columbia
Presidents Seth Low and Nicholas Murray Butler, who believed that teaching
journalism was beneath Columbia). He knew what a journalism curriculum
should be about. In an essay in the North American Review in May 1904,
called "The College of Journalism,'' Pulitzer said that a journalism school
should teach "good English style," law, "the relations
of capital and labor," ethics, literature, history, sociology, economics,
statistics and "the news." "The supreme end of journalism
education,'' he said, "should be public service."
William Serrin is an associate professor of journalism at New York University, and has reported for, among others, the Detroit Free Press and the New York Times. He is the author of Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town, edited The Business of Journalism, and, with his wife, Judith Serrin, edited Muckraking! The Journalism That Changed America.
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