THE SMILING SUBVERSIVE: AND HIS CRUSADE TO PRODUCE BETTER-EDUCATED JOURNALISTS
By Thomas Kunkel, [email protected]
American Journalism Review, MD
Jan 29 2008
New York is a city of colorful characters and iconoclasts, a place
where people on the streets could be seen talking to themselves long
before the advent of Bluetooth technology.
Even by New York standards, Vartan Gregorian is a bona fide
character. Not large in stature, he has an aura about him that commands
attention everywhere he goes. His great erudition, put across in a
soft Middle Eastern accent (he was born in Iran to Armenian parents),
is worn lightly. Twinkling eyes rescue what might otherwise be a
stern countenance, and they betray a puckish humor always at the ready.
At a recent gathering, for instance, the president of the Carnegie
Corporation of New York shared an anecdote about his advisory work for
the Encyclopedia Britannica. Some of the editors of that information
dreadnought wondered if they could adopt more Wikipedia-like techniques
(see "Wikipedia in the Newsroom,").
Gregorian was taken aback. "Why does everything have to be so
light?" he told them. "Some things should be heavy."
The humor disarms and sometimes disguises an incredible drive. In
a profile two decades ago for The New Yorker, my late friend Philip
Hamburger characterized Gregorian, then amid his storied tenure as
president of the New York Public Library, this way: "One must approach
him as one would approach an extraordinary force of nature – a tornado,
perhaps, or a hurricane. Of course, Gregorian is a benign force,
and he leaves behind him as he whirls through New York not death and
destruction but a heightened sense that, while knowledge is power,
knowledge itself is the primary goal."
Indeed, Gregorian – Stanford Ph.D. in history and humanities, former
professor at UCLA and Texas, former dean and provost at Penn, former
president of Brown, resuscitator of perhaps the nation’s most beloved
library, and now head of Carnegie – remains first and foremost an
educator.
Until a few years ago, his missionary passion had not extended
to journalism education. But this man, who amassed so much of his
knowledge as a lad in library stacks, cherishes America in that special
way that only immigrants can; no aspect of his adoptive home is taken
for granted. So he worries about the national welfare. And in time
he began to worry about how well journalists were being prepared
to do jobs so integral to that national welfare. "I highly admire
journalists," he told a gathering of journalism deans at Carnegie
a few years ago. "They might be badly paid, but they shouldn’t be
badly educated."
So Gregorian decided we should build better journalists. And he
launched what he calls a "subversive" effort to do just that.
In tandem with the Knight Foundation, the largest benefactor of
journalistic causes and itself an engine of journalistic change,
Gregorian started the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of
Journalism Education. Working with a relatively small number of
well-established journalism schools, the initiative aims to broaden
the intellectual horizons of journalists in training, in large part
by tapping into the academic firepower of the larger university.
A few weeks ago the Carnegie-Knight group met in New York, where
Gregorian talked about what he wants for young journalists. "Are
they educated? Are they well-cultured? Do they take advantage of all
the talent at that university?" he asked. Too many journalism-mass
communication programs are intellectual "outposts" on their own
campuses, he said. That makes them politically vulnerable. Instead,
such schools must figure out how to be at the center of their home
institutions.
My school, Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, is proud
to be a member of the Carnegie-Knight group. We are drawing on this
campus’ considerable intellectual store in a master’s-level seminar
for our students. Such superstars as Anwar Sadat Professor Shibley
Telhami, political scientist Ronald Walters, historian Ira Berlin
and sociologist Harriet Presser put the great issues of the day
into a context specifically for my students. It all happens under
the careful watch of Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist
Deborah Nelson, our Carnegie professor, who supervises and co-teaches
the course.
To make sure this is not a one-way street, the Merrill College in
turn exports some of its most senior faculty – among them Knight
Chair Haynes Johnson, Pulitzer winners Gene Roberts and Jon Franklin,
renowned journalism historian Maurine Beasley – to deliver honors
seminars in other departments at Maryland. This reciprocity gets to
another pillar of Gregorian’s thinking: Building such connections
enhances J-schools’ influence.
It also starts getting at what Gregorian means when he calls the
Carnegie-Knight program something of a "subversive" activity. He knows
that reform of journalism education can’t be imposed by Carnegie or
anyone else. It must occur from within. But it does need a catalyst –
someone to offer a direction, some seed money, a sense of mission. As
the Carnegie-Knight schools get stronger and more creative, they cannot
but help show the way for a 21st century model of journalism education.
Thus Gregorian, the happy warrior, fires you up, pats you on the back,
smiles that subversive smile, offers a little benediction. Then
he trundles back out onto the streets of New York, ready for the
next battle.