A Profile of JMC Educators: Traits, Attitudes and Values

Profound contradictions plague U.S. journalism education in the late 1980s. On the one hand, the number of programs and faculty continue to increase sigdicantly. The quantity and quality of journalism students has also increased, with Rhodes and Marshall scholars now in their midst. ’ And, increasingly, journalism and mass communication schools are becoming major hiring centers as the news media compete with advertising and public relations for the brightest students. ’ This material success in journalism and mass communication education has done little to quiet critics, however. Journalism and mass communication educators have been criticized by those who practice journalism and by their own prominent colleagues for not doing enough to develop high standards of literacy in students, for not paying enough attention to the liberal arts, for overly professionalizing mass communication education, for neglecting the study of ethics, for being too preoccupied with esoteric or trivial research, for not getting their fair share of campus resources, for resisting change in their courses, for poor relations with those who work in communication industries and for lacking real-world experience in the subjects they teach. ) Often, criticisms of journalism education and educators are based on very sketchy information or, worse yet, on stereotypes built from a few anecdotal cases. At the same time that criticism of journalism and mass communication education is prevalent, however, the hiring of its graduates by newspapers, radio and television stations, and various news services is at an all-time high. Our recent survey of U.S. journalists shows that from 1971 to 1983 the prcportion of U.S. journalists with journalism degrees jumped from about onefifth to nearly one-third, and the 1985 Dow Jones Newspaper Fund survey shows 85 percent of new college graduate entry-level hires on daily newspapers are journalism majors. ‘ Given the dependence of the nation’s news media on journalism and mass communication graduates and the high level of criticism of journalism education, it becomes all the more urgent to have valid information about journalism professors’ backgrounds, motivations, satisfactions and dissatisfactions, working conditions and views on education, media roles and ethics and media performance. The Project on the Future of Journalism and Mass Communication Education, spearheaded by Everette Dennis in the early 1980s while he was dean of the School of Journalism at the University of Oregon, was a sound beginning to the study of journalism education. ’ But the Oregon Report (as it has come to be known) focused more on curriculum than on the educators themselves, and it relied on the views of selected teachers, scholars and administrators rather than on a representative random sample of journalism and mass communication educators. This present study builds upon the Oregon study and upon previous studies of American professors in general, most notably those by Ladd and Lipset: Bowen and Schuster,’ and the Carnegie Foundation. * It also includes a number of the same questions asked of our national sample of 1,001 U.S. journalists in 1982-83, so that