Taking the Initiative
Moderator: David Rubin, Dean of the S.I. Newhouse School of public Communications at Syracuse University and Nicholas Lemann, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University

David Rubin called on two Syracuse associate professors, Gustav Niebuhr, director of the Carnegie Religion and Media program, and Mark Obbie, director for the Carnegie Legal Reporting program, to explain how the Carnegie-Knight Initiative has impacted their courses and curricula.

Niebuhr said, “I’ve created a religion and media minor, meant to introduce students, whether in some form of journalism or who think they may be headed in that direction, to an interdisciplinary range of Syracuse courses that have to do with religion. The guiding premise behind this, which comes out of my own experience in newspapers, is that regardless of what you think you’re going to do in the news, at some point or another you’re going to encounter religion, in either its organized or its disorganized form—and probably a lot more often than you think,” said the former religion correspondent for The New York Times.

The minor consists of six courses, which is standard for minors at Syracuse. Said Niebuhr, “The first gateway course I’ve designed, called religious issues in American life, is very flexible and topical; it highlights themes in the news involving religion. The capstone course focuses on how religion is treated in the major media. Students spend a semester analyzing national media, both broadcast and print, and reading about aspects of religious life in the U.S. Both courses have drawn well, but I keep talking them up, hoping I’ll draw more. We’re just beginning,” Niebuhr pointed out.

When Rubin asked if Niebuhr felt that he was “welcomed” at the university, Niebuhr replied, “Absolutely. It has been a positive experience. At Syracuse, practitioners of journalism are well regarded.”

Asked if the minor was in the School of Journalism, Niebuhr said no, it actually was lodged in the College of Arts and Sciences, but comes through the journalism school.

	David Rubin, Nicholas Lemann

Mark Obbie said, “I’m doing something similar with legal reporting. We took Carnegie Corporation’s direction in a different way. We’re tapping into the college of law, creating a new undergraduate minor for those students who could be drawn to covering public affairs and law by taking courses that already exist around the university. So I spent time creating a gateway and capstone course—playing evangelist, trying to interest our journalism students in a specialty that may not have interested them yet. The college of law has been eager to partner with us because of their students’ interest. This will be only the third semester though, so we’re still experimenting.”

When asked how all this applied to graduate students, Obbie said, “It is now an elective for them. We toyed with a graduate-level specialty in legal reporting, but didn’t know if there was a market for that, and ended up going with undergraduates.”

Getting down to specifics, Obbie said, “In talking about the law, we have writing assignments, but students are not out there doing reporting. I’m not standing in front of the class talking about how you find files in the courthouse. But some of the Carnegie Corporation money is supporting my time, allowing me to go into general reporting classes and teach one-day seminars.”

Niebuhr said, “Me, too. But in my case, there’s also an optional seventh course, a specialty reporting class called reporting on religion, spirituality and moral issues that you can take through the Newhouse school. It focuses on advanced skills and is more academically centered.”

“Universities are old institutions,” Nicholas Lemann pointed out. “It’s sort of amazing how they’ve stayed in business since 1100, 1200 AD, on the same basic business model, and they’re really thriving. professional education is a new idea, relatively speaking, in the long history of universities.” Long ago, he said, arguments raged in the fields of law, business, and medicine about whether you needed professional training—those used to be taught mainly through apprenticeships. “Journalism has moved to the university model relatively later than others,” said Lemann, adding that journalism schools are comparable not to law or medical schools, but to business schools and public policy schools.

	Group Discussion

Lemann went on to say that many students no longer feel the apprenticeship option is open to them. Still, leaving that aside, “because we’re in the rarefied atmosphere of universities,” he said, “we should push ourselves to think: if you’ve got somebody as a full-time student, probably for the last time, what can you do that will be useful to them in newsrooms, especially over the long term, but that they can’t get in the newsroom itself? I don’t think, fundamentally, that we should be in the business of replicating conditions in an entry-level newsroom. The question I keep asking myself as a dean is, what can we do for students that won’t end up being irrelevant?” A variant of this kind of soul-searching goes on at every professional school in the university, he noted—how theoretical to be versus how practice-oriented.

Lemann continued, “We’ve spent Carnegie Corporation money on our new master of arts program, which has graduated two classes, in 2006 and 2007. It’s a going concern. We have 40 students and plan to grow slowly to about 50 and, I think, stop there. This is thought of as a second-year program, which it really isn’t, but it’s not a two-year either. When we started the program, we thought the students would be people who stayed for a second year, but that’s only a quarter of them; the rest are people from the outside world who we judge have a skill level commensurate with our MS degree. They major in one of four areas: science, arts and culture, business and economics, or politics.” Further, he noted that, “Two of the 2007 graduates work at The New York Times now. They’re news clerks for editorial page columnists Nicholas Kristof and Gail Collins.”

“I’m of two minds about specialization,” said Lemann. “I take the point that we use specialization as a construct because it’s a forcing mechanism to do things like tie into the rest of the university and to have more intellectual content and reading in journalism courses. Even if you don’t stick with your major, there’s a sort of ‘learning how to learn’ factor that goes along with majoring in something. It’s a transferable skill: you’ll be a better political reporter, for example, because you were a science major.” He added that an important part of what they teach is learning how to understand expert conversation.

Lemann noted that there are two required courses at the Columbia School of Journalism: “A History of Journalism for Journalists” and ”Evidence and Inference,” which focuses on hypothesis testing. For these courses, said Lemann, they bring in social scientists, direct students to Karl popper’s work on falsification, etc., with the intent of trying to “map the academic material very powerfully onto journalism.” Lemann also noted that although students take some courses outside, the main construct they teach is the substance inside the journalism school—not sending students outside to get it. “This,” he said, is because of the “mapping to practice” we’re trying to do—have students make web sites, make the faculty associated with this program think through who they might need to bring in to help teach this course, what’s the body of essential knowledge, etc. Said Lemann, “I want that kind of rich thought and knowledge to exist inside our school.” He also noted that Carnegie Corporation money is used, in this context, to compensate outside professors to come to the Journalism School to teach.

When asked for more detail about the “mapping to practice” aspect he spoke about, Lemann said, “Journalism education tends to be very clinical: it’s focused on doing stories. We have many courses with no reading list, or those that are all works of journalism, so we tell the instructors that the reading list must include canonical, nonjournalistic work. Therefore, we’re teaching people how to do things like review literature on a subject, evaluate methodology in a tech paper, etc., but students, confronted with this, often ask, why am I reading this? So we’ve started partnering these readings with journalism readings about the same subject.” He went on to say that the instructors are strongly urged to “cover” the rest of the university to find out who might be useful to them in teaching their courses and urge others to participate in the planning and teaching of the course. paying them wakes them up, noted Lemann; it makes them prepare more. The professors themselves have to think about things like, what are the big ideas that should be the contextual map for students covering City Hall next year?

Asked if there was remuneration for people from outside the journalism school who participate in teaching, Lemman said, “Yes. I was advised never to go to a department chair and ask to have somebody’s teaching load reduced. So what I do instead is go to the individual faculty member and offer them extra money to teach. Almost nobody ever says no.”

Jim Willse of the Newark Star-Ledger asked, “In the business part of the arts program, is the thought to prepare journalists just to be more knowledgeable? Is there a component where they might actually go into the news business and worry about that?”

Lemann responded, “In that major, I can almost guarantee you every student will have a job at graduation. The workplace wants business stories, Arabic speakers, and web skills. But that major gets the least applicants; most applicants are to arts and culture—and those graduates, by the way, are almost guaranteed not to have a job, especially,” he joked, “since most of them refuse to live west of the Hudson, unless it’s in the San Francisco Bay area.”

Rubin said things are different at the Newhouse School “because our programs involve undergrads who are with us for four years and have many different interests.”

Cynthia Gorney of the University of California, Berkeley Journalism School asked, has it been hard to get professors to distill or rearrange their subject matter for teaching reporters?

Lemann responded: “We’ve been lucky with that. We have university law professors who teach media law, so they get it and participate in our courses. Also, I think there’s a kind of hope that some sort of ‘celebrity journalist’ factor will accrue from this, by virtue of their proximity to all these reporters.”