Portfolio at NYU

Posted 10.12.07
Rethinking J-School
Why Columbia matters more than it should, and how to fix it.

By Conor Renier Friedersdorf

Last spring Bill Wheeler, 27, awoke one morning to a package on his porch that bore the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism's insignia. He tore it open and let loose a celebratory shout. The acceptance letter was unlike those sent by other journalism schools: It came by special delivery, and bore a handwritten note of congratulations from then Assistant Dean of Admissions Robert MacDonald. Bill felt special that morning, and I felt a hint of envy for my good friend as I drove home, hoping I'd find a similar package on my front porch.

I did.

On a rainy Friday soon after, Bill and I spent seven hours in a pickup truck rehashing a common argument among American journalists: Is it advisable to spend roughly $40,000 and a year or two of your life on a master's degree in a field that doesn't require one?

We were on our way to San Francisco, where scores of aspiring Pulitzer winners gathered to attend rival receptions hosted by the graduate journalism programs at Columbia and UC Berkeley. The former held its Ivy League event atop the Bank of America building downtown, where alumni and prospective students mingled in suits and cocktail dresses, having been welcomed to the Carnelian Room--"jackets are recommended for gentlemen"--by well-coiffed admissions staff. Bill and I, unabashedly under-dressed, gazed through sheer walls at a stunning sunset over San Francisco Bay, sipping complimentary chardonnay and munching on vegetable samosas and lamb shanks.

The next afternoon, UC Berkeley's graduate journalism department hosted its event, a barbecue hosted among the wooden picnic tables of its cozy on-campus courtyard. Casually dressed faculty members mingled outdoors with prospective students. Some wore dress slacks; others wore Rainbow sandals.

Whether graduate school meant elite gatherings atop the city or laid back barbecues in the afternoon, Bill and I agreed it sounded a lot more fun than our respective newspaper jobs: he covered community news for the Orange County Register; I worked as a columnist and blogger for The San Bernardino Sun and Inland Valley Daily Bulletin. But we realized we hadn't actually discovered what going to journalism school would be like.

"I hope we get a better picture of Columbia when we visit New York," I said on the drive home.

"Their event was swanky," he said. "I don't know whether I like that or not."

Every Columbia applicant who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what's going on knows that part of his urge to attend the school is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, consciously exploiting the Ivy League's cachet, planning to advance his career through networking and nepotism without remorse. Sometimes it is the biggest reason a student chooses Columbia; more often it is a secondary factor, a safety net of sorts providing assurance that even if the education falls short of his expectations, the line on the resume will provide a soft landing.

The attitude is easily reinforced. Apply to UC Berkeley and New York University and your friends and family congratulate you when you're admitted. Get into Columbia and they're more impressed, as are colleagues, many of whom either scoff at the idea of a master's degree or insist that an Ivy League diploma earned in 9 months is too good an opportunity to pass up.

No surprise, then, that many more articles are written about Columbia than all its competitors combined. The most famous is J School Ate My Brain, a 1993 essay in which Michael Lewis concludes that the whole enterprise of journalism school is rubbish. Another common critique casts Columbia as the indoctrination camp for a liberal press. Hugh Hewitt's 2006 piece The Media's Ancien Regime is a particularly sophisticated variation.

Bill and I weighed these pieces alongside the advice of friends, family and colleagues as we fretted over whether to attend Columbia, or one of its competitors, or to forgo journalism school entirely. Despite our research, we now agree that neither of us really understood the nature of the school when he decided to attend and I opted for NYU's three semester journalism program instead.

In fact, if you've relied upon the mythology Columbia projects, mainstream media accounts or public opinion generally, your impression of the school is wrong in significant ways. That wouldn't matter much in a rational world. Columbia is but one school among many that teaches journalism. But the newspapers, magazines and blogs of our world lavish such wildly disproportionate attention on it that the enterprise of journalism school, and the profession itself, is perversely tied to the fate of one institution.
For better or worse, it matters that people have a clearer understanding of Columbia, its good attributes, and its substantial flaws.

* * *

The Class of 2007 began its year during August orientation sessions in a stately lecture hall that overlooks Columbia's lovely grass quad. Some 250 students attended, including 40 from abroad; the average age was 28.

Asked later why they opted to attend, members of the class gave answers including these:

1) A desire to become better writers and reporters.

2) The prospect of networking with accomplished professors and Ivy League approved classmates and alumni.

3) An urge to explore the intellectual side of journalism that goes unfulfilled in the workplace.

4) The fact that Columbia doesn't require taking (and thus studying for) the GRE.

5)It's undeniably fun to spend a year in New York exploring whatever stories you want while partying among/dating/hooking up with well-traveled, twenty-something friends... but your parents/the Fulbright Scholarship/Fannie May won't provide the money to do so unless you're a graduate student... and besides you're ambitious and driven, so even you can't really enjoy/justify time off work and occasional binge drinking unless there's a degree at the end of it.

These various pursuits propelled new students through the wooden doors of the journalism building, past a high-minded Joseph Pulitzer quotation and into an elevator that took them to the sixth floor. The courting process was over: they'd just committed nine months and $43,422 to journalism school, most signing promissory notes, which suddenly made their debt seem more real.

What would the deans say now?

A 2006 Cornell University graduate, David Austin Gura, arrived at orientation having sacrificed the chance to work at NPR, where he freelanced over the summer. He remembers administrators stressing how lucky each member of the incoming class was to be at Columbia for graduate school.

Administrators emphasized the school's tradition of excellence, he said, especially the Reporting and Writing 1 class, cornerstone of the Master of Science program, which teaches students how to write a lead, structure a story and cover a beat.

"I remember copious jokes about being here late drinking bad coffee, feeling more tired than we've ever been," Gura said. "It's a bizarrely romanticized vision of what I think of as the Woodward and Bernstein type of journalist, but it's supposed to afford a shared experience, so I relate to someone who graduated in the class of 1973. The attitude is that we've done this so long we know this is the right way to teach journalism."

The shared experience is actually as much mythology as fact. Some students enter RW1 having reported for years at major daily newspaper; others are right out of college or lefty nonprofits. A few professors demand rigor that surpasses a real newsroom: students are sent out on assignment at odd hours, all sources are called to double-check facts and stories filed 30 seconds past deadline are marked late. Others assign a couple 800-word stories a week from experienced beat reporters who produced twice as much at their last job.

One constant is the assumption that a solid foundation in objective print journalism--reported pieces neutrally written in the third person--is the appropriate foundation for every journalistic career. The other is that students are mostly assigned to poor immigrant neighborhoods in the outer boroughs. Certain areas of the Bronx and Queens are so overrun that new students sometimes mistakenly try to interview each other on the street, while the Upper East Side, Midtown and Greenwich Village aren't deemed pedagogically suitable. (Explanations differ as to why that is so.)

Is this old school approach the best model for educating journalists? The critiques are many, and they start within Columbia University itself. Upon taking over as its president, Lee Bollinger, a legal scholar noted for his expertise on the First Amendment, demanded a major review of the journalism school's Master of Science curriculum. A member of the task force, New Yorker writer Nicholas Lemann, was hired as the new dean, and although he didn't overhaul the MS Degree, he did oversee the addition of an alternate track, a Master of Arts degree meant to focus on subject knowledge for students who've already mastered the basics of writing and reporting.

Plenty of students praise the MS program, particularly Reporting and Writing 1, saying that it provides a rigorous foundation for working as a beat reporter. Others loathe the class: raised on Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson, they prefer first-person accounts to what they regard as false pretensions of journalistic objectivity, and aspire to careers writing cultural criticism or magazine stories, not stale newspaper articles.

Another critique of the old model comes from right-of-center commentators like Hugh Hewitt, who asserts that political bias dooms the old model of journalistic education. A mainstream media that defines itself by pledging fealty to objectivity cannot survive, he says, when most of its American audience believes it to be hopelessly biased.

Suffice it to say that the best minds in journalism, and those who care most about educating tomorrow's journalists, have argued for years, amid striking changes to the media landscape, about the best teaching model.

Unfortunately, a robust debate about the future of journalism schools is absent at Columbia. President Bollinger and Dean Lemann consult colleagues and implement aspects of their vision, of course, but for all the Pulitzer Prize winners and former bureau chiefs among the faculty, there's precious little time spent engaging one another, students and the public--this last is engaged least of all--about the best model for journalism education. The prevailing attitude is that the school, due to its age and prestige and expertise, has that figured out already.

This top-down, slow-to-change model is common within academia, but the CJS approach is jarring when compared to the industry it ostensibly serves: modern journalism is increasingly defined by transparency, citizen participation and harnessing the audience's knowledge, often to good effect. Newspapers hire public editors, Web magazines ask for reader help ferreting out errors and an increasingly blurry line separates reporters, bloggers and their audience, who use comments sections to fact check, suggest unexplored angles and conduct more wide-ranging discussions about journalism than I've ever heard on Columbia's campus.

What's missing from Columbia?

1) A group blog where administrators ponder curriculum decisions publicly, pitching their posts to Romanesko and Instapundit in hopes that they'll elicit the wisdom of their colleagues and intelligent voices outside journalism.

2) Forceful disagreements and public debates among tenured faculty members with different views about the direction the school should take.

3) A message board where the whole community engages one another and the public about the ethics of their craft.
More generally, the spirit of transparency is missing, as are vigorous attempts to engage the outside world, whatever form they might take. It's impossible to know for sure whether Columbia insiders or iconoclastic outsiders are best qualified to improve the school; what is certain is that the latter group has a useful perspective and some good ideas that are unknown to many on the inside.

Within the MS curriculum, big questions about journalism are most likely to be addressed in Critical Issues, a required ethics-plus course that all students take during their first semester. Longtime faculty member and New York Times education columnist Sam Freedman taught it for the first time last autumn.

Professor Freedman is a talented writer, cares deeply about the journalism school and its students, and draws stiff competition for enrollment in the book writing course he teaches each spring. In Critical Issues, many students were put off by his once-a-week lectures, however, citing his less than engaging speaking style--he mostly read verbatim from notes--and his penchant for shouting down students who arrived late or left to use the restroom.

"We don't play here!" he twice shouted mid-lecture at one tardy student.

I attended two Sam Freedman lectures and a Columbia student forwarded me transcripts of the others, despite Freedman's request that they be kept private (an odd request from a man who makes his living as an education reporter). A whole article could be spent on the ethical precepts taught at the school; I find a lecture titled "Fairness" most revealing.

"I wonder if I could ask for a show of hands on a couple of questions," Freedman said. "How many of you favor gay marriage? How many of you favor gun control? How many of you favor school vouchers? How many of you favor the legal right to an abortion?"

It's important to recognize views shared by many of your fellow journalists, Friedman instructed, because "you can't turn a compass to true north unless you can read the direction it's already pointing."

He continued:

If there's a reason that conservatives accuse the media of liberal bias, at least part of that reason is because of the culture of consensus we share on a number of issues. I don't think that shared set of values is conspiratorial. To a great extent, it has to do with the self-selecting nature of any profession, which for us means the way journalism tends to attract people with a reformist bent, people with a desire to contribute to, if not directly make, social change. One result, though, is that readers or viewers who do not share many of our values feel we are alien, even antagonistic.

Several important lessons emerge.

One: this is a self-aware moment that conservative critics of Columbia can't imagine happening, but there it is. A professor instructs students to be aware of their profession’s left of center consensus on social issues.

Two: Journalism obviously attracts more leftists than not, but not because the right is less desirous of reform and effecting positive social change! Consider two of the examples that Freedman uses: the right desperately wants social change that reduces abortions and favors reforms to the school system in the form of vouchers.

Three: Those flawed examples are just the kind of thing a well-intentioned professor like Freedman could improve upon if Columbia posted its ethics lectures online for critical feedback, and generally adopted an attitude of engagement rather than a posture of dispensing wisdom from on high or engaging students behind cloistered walls, away from public discourse.

Four: Part of the reason Columbia avoids that kind of transparency is that some conservatives make a cottage industry of attacking or mocking the school, hoping they can undermine it, rather than engaging it for the sake of its improvement. The most unfair criticism is that CJS is a place of liberal indoctrination. In fact, the faculty mostly avoids politics to a fault, and I've yet to meet a student whose worldview--probably liberal to begin with--changed appreciably as a result of their year studying interviewing techniques, leads and nut graphs.

The ferocity of attacks on Columbia surprised me twice during the fall semester. It's a safe bet that someone cheated on an exam at every college in the United States during fall 2006, but an anonymous allegation of cheating at the school--on an ethics exam: the irony!--provoked a story in the national edition of the New York Times, and snarky zings from pundits who acted as though the story proved the moral turpitude of journalism students and the profession generally.

In fact, the average Columbia student is as over-zealously ethical on the most pedantic points as the institution itself, and on matters of real journalistic consequence misconduct is unthinkable. Note that the ink spilled on that "scandal" was motivated not by an earnest attempt to report on the actual ethical climate at the school, or to inform readers about journalistic ethics generally, but to lazily revel in a schadenfreud story irrelevant to everyone save journalism insiders who either went to Columbia or didn't and resent those who did.

Student Sheena Tahilramani bore the brunt of a second attack fall semester. She made a dress out of newspapers, wore it to a costume party thrown by the school, and posted the photograph to her Web site, www.simplysheena.com (since altered). If she were a student anywhere else, a couple friends might have poked fun at her for the outfit. Since she attended Columbia, however, numerous Web sites cruelly and mercilessly mocked her appearance and Web page, including Gawker, which frequently mocks Columbia students and graduates, even seeking out their worst stories years after they've graduated from the school.

The effect of Columbia critics lavishing so much attention on the school is to falsely signal that its every hiccough is consequential. Granted this article only adds to the ink spilled, but I tell myself my motives include all the noblest reasons.

I came to NYU's journalism school with substantial financial aid after two years as a beat reporter covering Rancho Cucamonga, California, and roughly two years as a twice weekly columnist and blogger on immigration politics and policy. I'm invested in improving our wayward press, and I figured given my access I could capture Columbia better than any other outsider, accomplish much of my research while hanging out with Bill, and exploit the misplaced obsession the media has with Columbia to sell the story somewhere good. (Would you still be reading if this article examined journalism school through the lens of Berkeley or Northwestern or Missouri or NYU?)

When Dean Nicholas Lemann accepted my request for an interview I knew I'd at least garner some attention from insiders. Like Hugh Hewitt, I read everything he has written for the New Yorker magazine, among other pieces, before I questioned him in his office, which affords a lovely bird's eye view of Columbia University's copper rooftops. On the day we spoke, Dean Lemann had a cold.

I asked what he's accomplished since he came to the school in September 2003. He noted that Columbia has founded a center for investigative reporting, that a third of the 30+ faculty is newly recruited since his arrival, that substantial fund-raising has taken place (around $50 million according to the last announcement), and most significantly, that the school has launched a Master of Arts degree, in which students can choose to focus on business and economics, politics, arts and culture, or science, taking a year-long seminar and other classes offered in Columbia departments outside the journalism school.

"Our four majors are meant to cover everything in a university that could be of use to a journalist," Lemann says.

In his critique of Columbia, Hugh Hewitt concluded that the MA program's focus on expertise rather than craft, though a step in the right direction, is ultimately doomed to fail, partly because of thoroughgoing left-wing bias among mainstream media outlets, and partly for a related reason.

"There is too much expertise, all of it almost instantly available now, for the traditional idea of journalism to last much longer," Hewitt wrote. "In the past, almost every bit of information was difficult and expensive to acquire and was therefore mediated by journalists whom readers and viewers were usually in no position to second-guess. Authority has drained from journalism for a reason. Too many of its practitioners have been easily exposed as poseurs."

The counterargument is that an explosion of available information requires more mediators, not fewer; good writers who find the most relevant needles in the haystack are needed more than ever; so are good writers who can translate all the new work being done in business, science and technology into readable language.

Nor is it likely that the need for paid information gatherers will disappear. The oddest feature of the debate between Nick Lemann, who says bloggers create precious little that's new, and Hewitt, who revels in naming bloggers who are doing original foreign reporting, analysis of domestic policy, etc., is that their argument is focused on medium, not means. Maybe newspapers will experience a renaissance when someone invents a cheap, portable electronic broadsheet; maybe we'll all be reading blogs in 10 years. Either way someone must get paid to ferret out good stories and important information, and whether they render them on newsprint or blogs matters very little.

If I understand Hewitt right, his other point is that even if journalists can do regression analysis and read quarterly earning reports--even if they become experts rather than poseurs--their ideological bias, or at least the impression of it, will remain, and Americans will stop trusting them.

As someone who spent two years reading almost everything published in large newspapers and magazines about immigration, I'm sympathetic to the argument that the press slants left-of-center in its coverage of some subjects, and that readers are canceling subscriptions and seeking ideologically like-minded substitutes. Unlike Hewitt, I fear cocooning, and find the notion of a non-partisan press that aspires to fairness and accuracy worth fighting for.

Hence my discomfort with the ideological bias I perceive at Columbia.

Consider the Bronx Beat, a school publication written as though it's the local newspaper for a swath of New York's poorest borough. Like most urban newspapers in America, the Bronx Beat often reports on immigration, most frequently by rendering a sympathetic immigrant narrative. Don't cry bias yet. Most immigrants are hardworking people who want the best for their kids. It's impossible to reflect the reality of immigration in America without writing sympathetic immigrant narratives, and many of the attempts by Columbia students are carefully written, and avoid the slanted language I've seen elsewhere.

But another part of reality is that some immigrants fuel gang problems; sometimes cute immigrant children who don't speak English fluently put added strain on school systems already failing to educate inner-city kids; sometimes immigrants fuel public health problems like overcrowded emergency rooms or the spread of certain diseases, or drive down wages for certain jobs. You're less likely to read those stories in the Bronx Beat than The Los Angeles Times or the New York Times, papers whose coverage is far from adequate, even though the stories are part of the reality of life in the Bronx.

More generally, few Columbia students are likely to cover, or even conceive of covering, a story about how high taxes and bureaucratic regulations are an impediment to starting a small business, or about women who years later regret having had an abortion and wish they would've gotten counseling at the time, or about the clandestine roll teacher's unions play derailing charter schools, merit pay and voucher plans.

Shouldn't journalism school teach its students to see stories their ideology predisposes them to ignore? I asked Dean Lemann. Isn't fostering that skill one way graduates could supply fairer coverage that engages readers of diverse world views? Why not assign an occasional story from an angle that contrasts with a student's ideology, I suggested, or an editorial advocating a position they don't believe?

Lemann nodded.

"I totally get your point, and I think that's important. When I teach I push a methodology that trains students to see things from different perspectives," he said, bringing up a document on his laptop that spelled out the methodology.

Lemann said neither students nor professors are asked their ideology when they're considered for admission or hiring (though let's be honest: a journalist's ideology is often apparent from his or her writing or the publication where he or she works), but that he has sometimes invited conservative journalists to his classes to afford students another perspective.

"I don't want to tell a teacher how to teach a class, but notionally that can be a good exercise, a flip in empathy or a flip in perspective," he continued. "I suspect that our international students are to the left of our students, who are to the left of our faculty, who are to the left of most Americans, so if anything we're pulling students toward the center, but the real victory would be getting so that no one sees an issue from one perspective without realizing it."

I'd entrench that goal as part of the core curriculum, assessing work a student completes during her first semester, and afterward assigning beats, stories and angles designed to push beyond her ideological comfort zone, whatever it is. Columbia could host debates on matters of controversy so that every student would learn to articulate the strongest arguments on all sides of certain issues. Classes that produce publications like the Bronx Beat could strive to ensure that accumulated coverage, not just individual stories, is evenhanded.

Most Columbia students I spoke to agreed that they'd benefit from some exercises like that. Ben Frumin, who graduated from UC Berkeley in 2003 and worked at newspapers in San Diego and Colorado, echoed the sentiments of several classmates.

"Anything that's outside of my comfort zone is a good exercise," he said. "It's my hope that I'd cover any news event straight if I was sent to cover it. But perhaps instead of writing a story about downtrodden immigrants, which is my natural inclination, maybe it would be better to try my hand at... see, I can't even think of an example, but I think I'd learn from the attempt."

He also expressed a counterpoint.

"I think ideas are the currency in this business. You need to be able to come up with clever, creative story ideas," he said. "That's how you succeed in the real world, writing stories you care about, so I wouldn't want to always be doing these leg-stretching exercises."

* * *

In spring, Columbia students celebrated the completion of what they gravely call their "master's theses"--actually these are mostly just lengthy magazine pieces--by attending a Bloody Mary party, or taking an afternoon off from job hunting or sleeping at long last. Students looked forward to summer and the administration to next year's class, and then tragedy struck: a student was tortured and raped in her Harlem apartment.

In the somber aftermath, the tight-knit nature of the class was apparent. Candles sat outside the building from a vigil held for the hospitalized victim, and students came in small groups to write messages of support in a book to be delivered to her.

When I arrived for a long-scheduled interview with Dean of Students Sree Sreenivasan, he looked haggard and deeply upset; other administrators didn't look much better.

As we talked about the school's new media efforts he perked up a bit. Columbia is placing renewed emphasis on new media skills for all students, welcoming a third more students to its new media concentration, and integrating a new content management system that will allow every professor to post material to a class Web page, circumventing the need for a Web master.

"Students will be filing a quick version of a story, and a longer version, and then the full story," Sreenivasan said. "They're going to know how to gather material for podcasts, to take photographs, and most importantly to understand the New Media mindset."

The biggest obstacle, for Columbia and other journalism schools, is faculty. The caliber of journalists they're used to hiring--years of experience, Pulitzer Prizes, bureau chiefs at major dailies--simply doesn't include very many people who also know how to blog well, or post podcasts, and even fewer who want to spend their time teaching those skills.

Dave Gura tells an anecdote about his Reporting and Writing 1 professor, who headed NPR's bureau in Moscow and Johannesburg and left the organization in the 1990s.

"I sat down beside her to edit my first radio piece and it quickly become apparent that she'd never edited digital audio before," Gura said. "NPR didn't switch to that format until 2001."

Columbia ran a summer training session this year to get its faculty up to speed in new media, but the mindset is harder to acquire than the skills, and even the skills can be curiously hard to pick up. (As my friend Mike Doyle likes to say, your grandparents are probably confused by their cell phone, though it's hardly different from the telephone they've been using for years. Why? No one knows.)

Dean Sreenivasan is himself an interesting character, and difficult to imagine at any other journalism school.

Earlier this semester he surprised one of my friends by chiding her when she mispronounced Pulitzer: "If you ever expect to win one, you'd better learn how to pronounce it," he said harshly.

At the time, I chuckled because it so perfectly fit the stereotype of the pet peeve a Columbia dean would have, but I worried the anecdote might paint an unfair portrait. Soon after, however, Sreenivasan sent the whole school an e-mail noting, "Learn the correct pronunciation of 'Pulitzer.' It's NOT 'PEW-litzer.' It's 'PULL-it-SIR.'"

In our interview, I mispronounced the word on purpose, and as though on cue he politely interrupted my question: "By the way, here's something you'll learn today. It's Pulitzer. Everyone mispronounces it, including Pulitzer winners. It's like, please sir, can you pull it? Everyone gets it wrong, so...”

As a pedant and new media expert, Sreenivasan embodies the tension inherent in CJS's approach to new formats. On one hand, he seems to "get it" as few journalism deans do. "Readers have changed as much as the business has changed: they want more kinds of information, and they want to participate with you," he says. "Reporters have to learn to use bloggers to really connect. In every field of human interest there is a blog or Web site that parallels or supplements or overrides the traditional news source."

Other times he almost gets it.

"When I do a print story my presumption is that I've gotten every answer, made the 37th phone call, knocked on the twelfth door," he said. "With blogging that's just the beginning. It's 'here's what I know... what do you know?' Here's the story I have to the best of my knowledge but I don't know it all." Yes! Although surely blogging requires something less than a 37th phone call and twelfth door.

And sometimes he gets it wrong. If every class is able to have its own Web page, I ask, why not a Web page for every student?

"In RW1 most students are just learning to write simple, coherent sentences. You don't mess that up by saying here's your story and we're going to publish it so everybody sees it," he says. "Not every story deserves to be published."

He is insistent on this point.

"We don't have an entitlement system here. Once the school puts a stamp on it we're saying we think this is worth reading. It's not a welfare program. You have to earn it."

I submit that one doesn't earn publication on the Web--just click post on Blogger!--one earns readers. So long as a student's sub-par story does no harm, better to harness the wisdom of a critical audience than bury a learning experience on a hard disk for all eternity. If Columbia can get over its stuffy notion of itself as a gatekeeper, it may realize that it has much to gain from the Web, and nothing but gigabytes of server space to lose.

* * *

As a Columbia student, Bill benefited most from the friendships he formed among his classmates: people like Tim Hume, a New Zealander who attended Columbia on a Fulbright scholarship; Anna-Katarina Gravgaard, a Dane who grew up running a small newspaper and has fascinating ideas about using media to form a pan-European identity; Rafael Mazer, who has worked as a bike messenger, an ambulance driver and a museum conservator; and an Iraqi student who I didn't interview because he's constantly being interviewed, and I felt sorry for him.

After graduation, I accompanied Bill and other friends I met through him to one of their Connecticut estates, where we stood by the swimming pool and gazed across an impossibly large lawn toward a nearby country club. We enjoyed a lovely outdoor barbecue, and afterward traveled to the Cape Cod lake house of another of Bill's classmates, also a friend of mine, to water ski and relax. I couldn't help but think back to that swanky cocktail party above San Francisco. Our free outing into upper-crust New England somehow seemed to make good on its implicit promise.

"I always knew if I hung out with your Ivy League friends long enough I'd end up at a place like this," I kidded Bill as we sipped Coronas on a private dock. "If it makes you feel any better your debt has worked out well for me."

Bill isn't certain whether he's better off professionally having spent 40K meeting these people, and refining his writing and reporting. But he's a better journalist one year later than he otherwise would've been, so at worst it's good for journalism, bad for Bill.

"Columbia isn't for everyone, and no one should go here just because it's thought of as the big dog," he said. "But journalism needs all kinds of influences. I like Hunter S. Thompson, but if everyone took that approach, journalism would come unhinged. You need a conservative counterweight like Columbia, a place that clings to traditional newspaper journalism and the idea of objectivity, if only to anchor one end of the spectrum."

In a rational world, Columbia would quietly fill that niche. Students suited to its approach could attend, refine their writing under some talented professors, and pay a reasonable tuition. The media wouldn't scrutinize its every move; prospective students wouldn't turn down tens of thousands of dollars in grant money from comparable schools to pay full price at Columbia; conservative critics would engage the school, hoping to end up with better journalists rather than score debating points, and professionals would neither be more nor less inclined to hire Columbia graduates based on their diplomas alone.

Our world has turned the notion that Columbia matters into a self-fulfilling prophecy, lavishing it with attention and money. The results aren't all bad. "We're here to preserve things we believe are important about journalism that pure market forces aren't going to guarantee," Lemann says. "Things like ethics and ambitious, careful reporting." It's good to have someone beating those drums.

Still, CJS's out-sized influence is at best a squandered opportunity, for if the school improves itself, it could serve as a model for addressing the failures in competence and ideological circumspectness that plague the craft.

How to improve?

Step one is abandoning a model that relies so disproportionately on the wisdom of Columbia insiders to figure out how best to improve journalism. As increasingly rapid changes reshape the media landscape, credentialed experts inside academia are less and less able to keep up. It's the old irony that plagues so many journalistic endeavors: journalists claim that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and public discourse the best crucible for testing the worth of ideas, but journalistic institutions are often opaque and reluctant to engage outsiders.

That's unfortunate, for an arrogant, temperamentally conservative institution like the Columbia School of Journalism, transparently engaging a semi-hostile audience, might just strike precisely the right balance. Or so I hope.