In the Beginning...
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Pulitzer's School: Columbia University's School of Journalism,
1903-2003 |
As Columbia's ever-evolving journalism school looks ahead to its next phase — Dean Nicholas Lemann took the reins this fall — a new book looks back on the school's ninety-one-year history, from the earliest days when it lacked even its own building. Then, as now, the school was seeking its place in a changing industry and within a mighty academic institution.
In 1903, the publisher Joseph Pulitzer provided $2 million ($40 million in today's money) to Columbia University to create a school of journalism and to underwrite the Pulitzer Prizes. He refused, however, to permit the school to open until after he died. What follows is adapted from the early chapters of Pulitzer's School, to be published in December by Columbia University Press.
Columbia moved with alacrity — even unseemly haste — after Pulitzer's death on October 29, 1911, to open the school in September 1912. It was a challenging task — to create a full-fledged school of journalism in ten months. The project had to encompass, at a minimum, a scheme of governance established according to the Pulitzer agreement; a four-year curriculum leading to a bachelor's degree; a director found and set
in place; a teaching faculty hired, borrowed, or stolen; and, not least, students. The raw materials were a hodgepodge — Pulitzer's desires as expressed in a 1904 article, his will and its revisions, the plans written by his subordinates and by various Columbia committees over the long incubation, and a field of study that was, academically speaking, in its infancy. Walter B. Pitkin, destined to be one of the founding teachers, called it "Pulitzer's implied program of a school which trained the young in the duty and art of omniscience."
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| The first city room in Hamilton Hall (the journalism building was still under construction), class of 1912-13. Historical photos and documents can be found on the journalism school's web site. |
President Nicholas Murray Butler convened a committee of academics and administrators to write a plan for the school, and Professor Charles A. Beard submitted an enthusiastic scheme for a floor in the new journalism building to be devoted to the raw materials of history, politics, and economics: "We are all agreed that the central work in the new school of Journalism is to be made up of instruction in these great subjects . . . . I believe that the new school of Journalism now affords an opportunity to develop what we may call applied Politics — an opportunity of which we should make the most."
On January 16, 1912, the school's newly appointed advisory board of eminent newspapermen held its first meeting. The board did not much like the "Bachelor of Letters" degree proposed by the university; why not "Bachelor of Journalism?" [The school became an all-graduate program in 1935.] It preferred that women not be admitted. It thought that the school might take over the Columbia College newspaper, the Spectator (a bad idea that was a long time in dying) but eventually leaned toward a laboratory publication.
The next meeting, on February 16, was crucial; it was to determine the leadership of the new school. In January, Butler had written to John W. Cunliffe asking him to become director. Cunliffe was primarily a literary scholar who headed the English department at the University of Wisconsin. He hardly seemed the "right Dean" that Pulitzer had called for in his last letter to Butler, and the board was chilly toward him. Instead, it recommended Talcott Williams, a reputable, elderly journalistic statesman from The Philadelphia Press.
At the end of February Williams met with Butler and wrote the
next day to promise that the school would be no place for misfits
of the sort that had populated journalism for so many years: "The
trifler & the man who wants the social advantages of university
life, while avoiding its burdens . . . , the man who looks on
journalism as a province in Bohemia, and, worst of all, for the
man unfit or uncertain, particularly uncertain, who knocks daily
at the door of a newspaper because the apparently irregular life
of journalism deceives him to believe that he can pick up a living
there when he is unwilling or unable to acquire or to bear the
yoke of more organized callings in the professions or business."
He predicted, accurately, that not all who enrolled would survive.
The issue of the admission of women soon surfaced in the newspapers. In The New York Times, a Dr. A.L. Jones, identified as chairman of Columbia's committee on admissions, was quoted as saying that "girls are not allowed in the new school," because Columbia College was not coeducational and because Pulitzer's will made no requirement as to women. Williams, who as it happened opposed suffrage for women, came down firmly for equal educational access and announced that women would be able to study journalism. In fact, he had threatened to decline his new post if they could not.
On April 16, 1912, the University
Council, the campus academic governing body, approved a four-year
curriculum. The first year — informally called the "College"
year — resembled a standard bachelor of arts course, except
that, as the Columbia University Quarterly explained, "each
subject is taught with reference to the needs of journalism,"
as Pulitzer had proposed. For example: "The French and German
is to be read in the daily newspapers of the two countries. The
course in science is to be a survey of the present condition of
science intended to give the reporter the knowledge he will need
to work up a scientific subject . . . . American politics are
to be studied in the newspapers of the period. . . ." The
aim was to provide "a sound general education" and "specialized
technical training" in the same four years usually required
for general education alone. The curriculum appeared to have ingeniously
bridged the gap between the liberal and practical arts and, equally
important, to have invested the scholarly resources of the university
in the success of the school.
The outline promised that the advanced journalism course would be offered by at least one full-time teacher "fresh from the practice of his calling." The school hired that teacher in May — Robert Emmet MacAlarney, city editor of the New York Evening Mail, the first in what became the school's long succession of demanding practitioner-instructors. Nineteen other teachers were borrowed from Columbia faculty, many distinguished names among them. The most significant loan was Walter B. Pitkin of philosophy, whose association with the school was to last more than thirty years.
The school's first announcement was issued in May 1912. Students who already held a bachelor's degree would be admitted to complete the journalism degree in a single year; the single-year institution that the school ultimately became was thus foreshadowed in its beginnings. [Columbia's new president, Lee C. Bollinger, is on record as in favor of a program of at least two years, and Nicholas Lemann, who would become the school's new dean, proposed a two-year curriculum to a university task force on the school last year.] The bulletin provided the times and places of classes, which were to be scattered for the first year through seven campus buildings.
In the spring, Williams churned out, in his characteristically diffuse style, an article explaining the school for the Columbia University Quarterly. Much of it may have made readers' heads spin, particularly when he compared social processes to "yards of flourishing, smooth-rolling well-fed intestine." But he noted: "It is the first school of journalism to use a great city as its laboratory for technical training," and this assertion survived, in many forms, as a slogan for the school.
On September 30, 1912, Columbia University opened its new school of journalism, just 337 days after the death of its progenitor and patron. Even before Williams gave his ornate opening address, the new journalism students caught the IRT to go downtown and cover New York City.
They instantly became the butt of good-natured hazing. One student went to Democratic national headquarters, under instructions to learn how "Jack" Hammond, the publicity chief, contrived "to get tainted news into the papers." Leading the victim on, Hammond said: "We retire into that rear room there and hold a few whispered conversations. Then I give every reporter $10. There are twelve of them, and it costs us $120 a day." He pulled out a wad of soiled bills and said he would get them changed because reporters did not like dirty money. The student departed, with thanks, and his supposed gullibility was exposed in the Tribune the next day.
On the second day, a reporter for the Evening Post was admitted to MacAlarney's classroom, to observe a session with advanced students. After starting the story with the requisite joshing, the reporter offered a not-unfriendly view of the proceedings:
The first class in reporting met this morning for business in
the lecture room on the top floor of Kent Hall, which is really
the Law School building, but which must serve as a city room until
they get the new Pulitzer building finished. There were about
twenty cub students in the class, and two of them were women.
Professor MacAlarney handed out assignments before dismissing
the class and hurrying over to the next city room, in the Philosophy
building, where the senior cubs were mobilizing. One student was
to "cover" Democratic headquarters, another was to cover
Republican headquarters, a third was to get a talk with some prominent
Socialist on the Lawrence, Massachusetts, strike, a fourth was
to nose around in the Bull Moose headquarters, and so on.
As for the young women in the front row, they were to go together to the Charity Organization Society and do a bit of slumming in the tenements, so that they would be able to put the sob-sister flavor into their "stuff" when, in days to come, the city editor sent them out on a good heartthrob story. You know, coldest day in winter and all that.
And so to the senior class in journalism 43-4, "practice in editing and rewriting copy; lectures on differences in styles of presentation and theories of headlines. Tu., Th., and S., at 10, and S. at 11." There were no young women in this class, but there was one Chinese student, H. K. Tong, in the fifteen who aspired to be college-made reporters. As this class had to meet in the hall that is dedicated to philosophy, the familiar handsomely carved mahogany writing desks and gold-filled typewriters of a regular newspaper office were not in evidence. However, with the first zip of the ten o'clock gong, every one of the fifteen students had a batch of copy in his hand and he had just fifteen minutes to whip it into shape, put a head on it, and catch an edition . . . .
"Copy boy," called the professor at the stroke of 10:15, and every journalist passed up his magnum opus and saw it tossed unceremoniously in a heap on the professor-city-editor's desk. The results of the quarter-hour of toil and labor included:
BOY WENT FISHING: IS DROWNED.
$193,000,000 TO MELT NORTH POLE ICE.
AGED ORGAN GRINDER DIES IN STREET.
It took the rest of the hour to explain what was the matter with the heads.
Having no doubt seen the newspapers, President Nicholas Murray Butler sent a note to Director Williams on October 2, sharply suggesting that he clamp down on publicity "concerning the daily work of the School of Journalism." But the pattern of that daily work, built around the practices of the industry, was set and was to continue, with variations, for the rest of the century. Moreover, from the first instant, the school seemed to have an identity and vitality of its own.
Who turned up for that opening week? A roster compiled on the first day listed ninety names, which, with dropouts and latecomers, shook down to seventy-nine enrolled. A dozen were women. There were two dozen of the nonmatriculated students on whose admission Pulitzer had insisted. Fewer than a third of the enrollees were destined to earn the B.Lit.
The advanced students were plunged by MacAlarney into the city's news maelstrom. A week into the term, he asked for passes to put two of them, Carl Ackerman and Geddes Smith, on the press ship when President Taft, as part of his unsuccessful re-election campaign, was reviewing the fleet in New York harbor. Later in the week, students were sent to the sensational murder trial of Charles Becker, the rogue police officer who had ordered the execution of an uncooperative gambler. Director Williams boasted afterward: "Half the class were in the courtroom when the verdict came in at midnight and came to the University and wrote their stories. . . . How seven got in with an official admission for only two and the court room vigilantly 'tiled,' I did not ask, but every newspaper man knows, and knows, too, that this is part of the 'School of the reporter.' To go where you are not wanted, and get what is wanted, these are the first and second commandments of the newspaper decalogue."
By midyear, the intense common experience had knit the seniors into a club called "The Staff" — thirteen students and an honorary member, MacAlarney. The Staff's first dinner was organized to say good-by to Hollington K. Tong, whose notable exploit had been to serve as an undercover waiter in a downtown cocaine den. Now he was returning to China to find a spot on the Peking Daily. That he and Carl Ackerman met was significant: thirty years later, Tong, as the Chinese Nationalist minister of information, and Ackerman, as dean of the school, collaborated to set up a wartime journalism school in China, staffed by Columbia and underwritten secretly by the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA of its day.
Early in 1913, while the new building was being completed, Columbia
carried out, after its fashion, its agreement to name the structure
for its donor. On January 27, 1913, Butler received from the relevant
committee a "memorandum In Regard to Inscription in the Journalism
Building." The committee noted that the agreement dated April
10, 1903, "provides that the building shall bear the name
of the donor after his death and shall have erected within it
a tablet inscribed to the memory of 'my daughter Lucille.'"
Then it proposed: "In compliance with the foregoing requirement
it is suggested that an inscription in bronze letters be inlaid
in the floor of the vestibule of the Journalism Building."
The inscription was to read:
SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM
ERECTED AND ENDOWED BY
JOSEPH PULITZER
IN MEMORY OF HIS DAUGHTER LUCILLE
MDCCCCXII
The memorandum concluded: "RESOLVED, that the foregoing form of inscription be approved and that the architects be requested to prepare and submit a drawing of the same."
There seem to have been no demurrals to this action, which (from the perspective of ninety years) appears not to name the building for the donor at all. Yet no objections are on record from members of the Pulitzer family, from Pulitzer's associates, or from the school's advisory board. Perhaps they all accepted Columbia's claim that the floor tablet carried out the agreement. But the result was that neither the building nor the school itself, except informally, was to bear Pulitzer's name. In May 1913, the trustees notified the architect that the word "JOURNALISM" was to be carved above the main entrance. It was done.
The circumstance might hardly be worth noting were it not for Columbia's curious policies in naming new buildings on its Morningside Heights campus. Some bore the names of such donors as Hartley, Avery, and Furnald. However, the building given by Adolph Lewisohn was initially called "School of Mines" and only decades later given his name. Similarly, four years after the construction of the journalism building, a Barnard building donated by the financier Jacob Schiff became "Students' Building" (later, Barnard Hall) and subsequent efforts by the Schiff family to change it were unavailing. In his history of the architecture of Morningside Heights, Andrew S. Dolkart notes that Schiff's gift is commemorated only in a "marble tablet set into the floor of the lobby" — a recognition that bears an odd, perhaps not coincidental, resemblance to the Pulitzer tablet in the journalism building.
Dolkart relates the reluctance to name buildings for Lewisohn and Schiff directly to the anti-Semitic views of Butler and the trustees, one of whom noted that he believed Columbia had to deal with the "Hebrew question" and rid itself of its reputation as a "Jew college." Granted, Pulitzer's identity as a Jew had been considerably blurred. Although his Hungarian parents were both Jewish — as has been re-established in recent research — he was not religious beyond an affiliation of convenience with the Episcopal church, in which he was married. Moreover, the sporadic attacks on him — "Joey the Jew" or "Jewseph Pulitzer" — when he first came to New York had subsided or gone underground.
Columbia's dealings concerning Pulitzer, external and internal, are free of any references to him as a Jew, yet it hardly seems possible that Butler and his trustees — hypersensitive as they were to the supposed encroachments of Jewishness — would be unaware of that identity. The pertinent questions remain: Was the relegation of Pulitzer's name to a tablet in the lobby a slight? If so, was he slighted because he was a Jew or because he was one of the creators of yellow journalism? Or was he slighted at all? The civility of Butler's late correspondence with Pulitzer would suggest not; but Butler's own policies raise doubts.
The new building, with five working floors measuring 208 by 55 feet, had no difficulty accommodating the 129 students who registered in the fall of 1913. On the entrance floor were offices for the director and associate director, an auditorium, and a large typewriter room. Between the directors' offices was stored the morgue, the collection of clippings that Talcott Williams had started in the 1870s, numbering, by 1913, more than 400,000 items. Continuously augmented for the next forty years, it came to contain possibly four million pieces, the older portions becoming increasingly fragile. In 1954, the historian Richard T. Baker asserted that "this morgue will be written down as one of the most enduring contributions Columbia ever made to the communications profession." In the 1970s, after microfilming of the collection was found to be cumbersome, expensive, and inconvenient, the morgue was consigned to scrap-paper dealers.
On the next floor, there was an ambitious library and reading room, designed along the lines that Professor Beard had recommended. The mezzanine above the library contained a city room for fourth-year students, equipped with desks, typewriters, a telephone, and a semicircular copy desk. A time-locking copy box was set up to enforce deadlines.
All told, the building had a seating capacity of 2,200 students.
The total cost, after finishing, was a little more than the $500,000
that Pulitzer had designated for it [nearly $10 million in today's
money]. The faculty and students moved in on September 13, and
on October 28 the advisory board inspected the building and accepted
it. The effects of occupation were immediate. As the director
put it, in his decorous way: "The sense of corporate union
and professional enthusiasm which existed in the first year of
the School, though its members were scattered through a number
of buildings, has been greatly quickened by a daily contact, which
brings the whole School in mutual touch."
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