Q&A with Lee Bollinger
In His Own Words
In July, Lee Bollinger, the new president of Columbia University, called off the search for a Journalism School dean and said he wanted to re-think the school's mission. He named a task force, and in the wake of its first meeting he answered questions from CJR's Brent Cunningham.Brent Cunningham: What is the problem, or what are the problems, you hope to fix?
Lee Bollinger: My interest is not in fixing a particular problem, but in addressing and exploring what a modern journalism school should look like. There is a very significant debate that has gone on for years about what journalism education should be. And that debate has also gone on within the Columbia School of Journalism. The degree of difference in the perspectives on what a curriculum should be, what type of scholarship should go on, is substantial. In addition there are serious questions about how you use the resources of a great university to enhance the education of any one part. My sense is that it is possible to enhance what is already a very fine program by looking at opportunities to relate the school to other parts of the university. Finally, there are serious concerns within journalism about where the profession is going and about the relationship of universities — and journalism schools in particular — to the profession, given the dramatic changes that are occurring.
Do we need to have journalism schools at all?
Yes, of course we do. Journalism is one of the most important professions in the world; it is the principal way for us to mediate between the world of actions, the world of expertise, and the general public. Most of us, nearly all of us, can only really encounter, given the way the world is organized now, a tiny fraction of what is actually important to us. And we have come increasingly to rely on the accounts of what is happening through journalism, in order for us to exercise our responsibilities as citizens and other roles. So how we educate and prepare future journalists is a serious question.
Is journalism as a profession as intellectually rigorous as, say, the practice of law?
I definitely think it's as intellectually rigorous as the practice of law. But some people like to divide the issue between teaching technique on one side and teaching theory on the other side. I think that's an artificial distinction. If I look at just my own field, law schools decided long ago that they would not put any significant emphasis on teaching many of the basic skills of being a lawyer. So you do not learn in any ordinary law school class how to draft a complaint, where to file it, how to raise a motion in court. Nevertheless, law schools have focused on one very important piece of the practice of law and that is reading cases. Every lawyer spends a good deal of his or her life reading cases and applying them to new fact situations. It takes the process of doing what lawyers do, reading cases, and encases it in an intense educational experience and produces what law schools like to describe as the ability to think like a lawyer.
I think a similar question should be asked about journalism schools. It is not a question of teaching craft or teaching something else. Are there portions of the craft, portions of doing what journalists do, that better yield an intellectual experience, or an educational experience that improves your intellectual capacities, than other parts of the craft? At the end of the day no journalism school worth its name would not teach craft. You should teach craft. On the other hand, what about theory? It would be a grave error to believe that theory as a dimension of our ways of understanding the world is completely inappropriate to the teaching of journalists. Understanding the underlying theory of journalism, the history of journalism, the ideas about how people receive information and process it are all things that it would be good to know, it seems to me, as a journalist.
But unlike law, journalism isn't a body of knowledge. It is a process of critical inquiry.
I'm not so sure about that. I think that's an open and very important question. I'm not convinced that there isn't a body of knowledge that can be worked with in journalism schools in the way that law schools or business schools or even art schools have used a body of knowledge in the process of having students engage in the techniques of the profession. Surely there are great pieces of journalism that can fruitfully be reviewed, unpacked, examined, all with a very critical eye. And in that process you develop habits of mind that can be helpful to you as you go about doing new stories.
Can you give any specific examples of the types of change that might be in order?
I think it's extremely important to have some sense of political theory, and politics, similarly with economic theory or principles; one might very well have an understanding of the arts, opportunities to understand the arts, or scientific practices and new discoveries. Another possibility is to give students the opportunity to develop expertise in a given area, or to understand the history of your field. There is an obvious need for ethics. How you do it is debatable. I tend to be one who favors integration of ethics into all courses rather than isolate it in a single course. I think it's also possible to think differently about the time frame of a journalist's education. One of the things we know about journalism is that reporters go from one field to another field, and perhaps there should be more opportunities for journalists to return to a university setting for a short period of time to gather deeper knowledge.
Are you talking about a two-year program?
We might have several different opportunities for people, so that some might come for a six-month period, others could choose a year, or a two-year program. I think the framework should be open to review.
Do you expect the task force to produce a blueprint or just a range of options?
I hope that there will be a general sense that these are directions in which a school such as ours ought to move over the long term. I am asking for a long-term perspective, not what should be implemented next year, but what should we be driving toward over a decade.
What kinds of jobs do you see Columbia preparing its students to take? Because there are those who would argue that the media industry in this country wants students who know the basics and can go cover a school board meeting on day one.
Universities have a public trust; the public expects we will design our education and do our research consistent with fairly high ideals about the way people should participate in society. But that's not the only thing we do when we have a professional school. We are also trying to create an environment that reflects critically on the profession, and on the broader society, and at the same time we are trying to relate to other fields of knowledge. If the profession said all we want are people who can do some technique, then it is our duty to decline. It is not worthy of a great university to produce graduates who know a technique and nothing else. But I don't think that's what the profession wants.
Also in this issue: "Searching for the Perfect J-school" by Brent Cunningham.
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