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My journalism school, at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, is changing its name from The Medill School of Journalism to The Medill School of Journalism, Media and Marketing Communications. This development culminates several years of changes instituted by the new journalism dean, who has shifted the focus of the school from news writing and reporting to marketing and business and technical skills. I’d appreciate any thoughts you have, please leave them in the comment section below.
Here are my thoughts:
1. No one should be surprised by this. The writing was on the wall, no pun intended, when the school’s administrators reportedly physically removed the word “Journalism” from the doors of Fisk Hall roughly three years ago. Despite the dean’s continuous hedging and dodging and occasional insistence that he had no firm plans to change the name of the school, could we have thought an official name change wouldn’t eventually follow?
2. Medill is not the same place many of us remember, and we need to admit that, too. When I studied there from 1982-86, and I know many of you share this recollection, the school proudly and prominently stood for training young, precocious writers to ferret out truth, seek out the facts, convey them concisely and colorfully, and hopefully to change the world through bold, accurate and balanced newsgathering.
Journalism was to many of us a lofty calling as much as a career. Our heroes were people like Edward R. Murrow, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Mike Royko, Pam Zekman and Seymour Hersh.
It’s clear Medill today stands for watching a tight, difficult job market very closely and supplying its students with exactly the technical and professional skills needed to get their first job, preferably one that pays fairly well. And pretty much that’s all it stands for, whether that job is editing a daily in Detroit, conducting focus groups for Newport cigarettes, or assembling cool-looking Web pages for Citibank. So in that sense, Medill now has exactly the name it deserves.
3. Although I’m not surprised, I’m sad. Medill has become a trade school in every sense of the word. There has always been something of that because of the core, pre-professional courses the school has required. But now the ascendance of the graduate school under Dean Lavine, focused as it is on marketing, audience research, advertising, and business-to-business writing, guarantees that the school is a vast buffet table of job-oriented courses, plus internships.
The dishes on the buffet can be switched and replenished quickly and as needed to please potential employers and to keep up with trends. The job market now fully dictates what students learn, much in the way that some high school teachers gear their classes’ content to prep students for achievement and college placement tests.
What happened to the idea, common a generation or two ago, that college is a time to step back from the need to make money, a time to learn with the greatest thinkers of history by reading and discussing and debating and writing about society’s greatest challenges? Are Medill students compelled to come into contact at all anymore with Plato and Shakespeare and Hamilton and Jefferson and Freud and Gandhi? Do they even write many complex research papers? Can a school such as Medill, in its emerging form, honestly call itself higher education anymore? Is it so diifferent from a city college teaching medical coding or any other basic trade?
4. As Roger Ebert has said, the new name is “ungodly” because it’s simply so long and verbose. It ironically flies in the face of a cardinal Medill value, brevity.
5. Lastly, I balk every time I hear the name Medill together with the word “brand” — and it’s being used this way commonly these days, by Medill students and recent grads, as well as by faculty and certainly the dean.
I suppose breezily referring to Medill as a “brand” instead of a valued, highly respected tradition (and one that had been intertwined with things like objectivity, balance, integrity and mission) is to be expected now, but I don’t have to like it. “Smuckers” is a brand. “TOSTITOS ARTISAN RECIPES Roasted Garlic and Black Bean Tortilla Chips” is a brand. “Sun Drop Golden Cola” is a brand. But please, out of consideration to older alums who are still sensitive to such things — even today — kindly don’t call Medill a brand. For us, it’s a sacred memory from the past.
Bob Kazel
BSJ ’86
National High School Institute/Journalism 1980
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