I almost let this kind of thing ruin my attitude toward teaching one semester (my worst semester ever). Then someone pointed out that if you let all the deadwood students drag you down, you won’t be doing a good job for the one or two students in the room who are really there to learn what you have to share.

So I vowed that it is my mission to teach for that one (or two) who is actually here for an education, because if I pander to the others, that one — the best one — is getting screwed. It doesn’t matter if there’s only one. You have to do your best for that one — and don’t let the others drag you down to their level.

And remember, being surrounded by all that deadwood is a big bummer for the real students too, the same as it is for the professor. For proof, read this.

A friend of mine likes to joke that “students are the only consumers in the world who pay for a product and then hope to be defrauded” (by professors not covering “difficult” material, canceling classes frequently, handing out easy grades, etc.).

What happened to the gung-ho attitude that students used to have when I went to school?

* We don’t require internships, but we strongly recommend it. I personally talk to groups of students 4-5 times a semester, in addition to individual conversations, encouraging them to intern with the professional organization of their choice. Despite those efforts, we might get 5 percent of our students who apply for an internship during their 4-5 years at school.

* We don’t require students to work for the school paper. But of the journalism majors, again, perhaps 5 percent bother to take advantage of the opportunity.

* When we didn’t require our students to take specific classes in journalism, they loaded up on the fun/easy classes and ignored important classes like Advanced Newswriting and Editing, not to mention Media Law.

* I’ve offered to teach Computer-Assisted Reporting, but despite having 300+ majors we cannot muster enough interest for even one class a year (it’s too hard, all those numbers and stuff).

* As a percentage, few students blog about anything of substance. Few take recommended courses in political science, criminal justice, statistics and so on (opting always for the “easy” classes instead).

* I post optional online readings that I gather from the very latest on blogs such as your own. Of my 60 students, I get maybe 3 hits a day.

* Perhaps 1 in 20 reads a newspaper. And perhaps 2 in 20 bother to follow the news in any form. I read the Web substantially more than they do. They know a lot about Spears and Hilton, but next to nothing about Bush and Clinton (not that that stops them from criticizing Bush and Clinton by parroting what others say). They don’t even know who Nancy Pelosi is, so we won’t go there.

I’ve got a lot of experience in journalism. After having taught enough reporters as an editor, I was pumped to get into the classroom. But I never expected that I’d have to be a cheerleader for the profession or deal with the ocean of apathy that is today’s college student body.

I used to think that offering students the opportunity to learn would be enough. I never realized I’d have to twist their arms in order to force them to learn.

Yes, there are always a handful of good students. Students who intern, who work for the school paper, and take the tough classes. They are the ones who are well prepared and have no problem getting a job when they graduate. But the vast majority are more a source of burnout for journalism educators than they are a source of new blood for journalism.

/rant off

So there seems to be a disconnect among faculty who, like many of their former colleagues at newspapers (especially), know so little about new media that they adopt a message of fear or ignorance. That leads to comments like those Paul Conley heard, and to mistaken advisers to collegiate programs.

For this, both the profession and the academy can share blame. But schools at least have what some businesses do not - time and space to come up with solutions. So to hear talk about how hard it is to get a new curriculum in place is disheartening. Process is a really poor excuse, although it has a certain irony to it.

Your comments about funding are especially true. My school decided to start a media program this year, but only budgeted $3K for equipment and nothing for software. No one knows how much good multimedia really costs.

That’s a great point to make, Pat, and I agree. I read Paul Conley’s post, and those remarks he reported are very, very disturbing. Any professor who ignorantly or deliberately mischaracterizes the job market or the industry to students is acting is a very negligent manner.

Note too what Sean wrote in an earlier comment — he’s tired of hearing that the business is changing without learning more concrete skills.

How, then, are other programs like computer programming, information systems and the like managing to keep up with technological advances in those fields. Friends of mine who graduated from programs in those fields had the computer/Web skills they needed to land jobs. I’m not convinced journalism is a more fluid profession than programming.

A lot of the fire in my post came from Paul Conley’s post about some of the asinine things he heard at the National College Media Convention. That’s just unacceptable. And I was generalizing a bit.

There are some very talented j-school educators like yourself and some of your colleagues and some very forward thinking programs. I was very impressed by Berkeley’s new media program when I was out in California earlier this year, and the training I received as part of their Knight New Media program was top notch. I would highly recommend journalists looking for new media training to consider it.

I would say, however, that the average j-school in this country is not very progressive. My school, Lehigh, was middle of the road. I was encouraged by my professors to pursue online journalism. No one ever told me it was a bad idea (I certainly never heard anything like Conley did), and we did have some substantive discussions about the future of journalism and how online media would play into that. Plus, it was my adviser, Jack Lule, who recommended by honors thesis topic on online journalism and newspapers.

I certainly learned a lot from all my professors and they helped make me the journalist I am today, and I would say they were all very strong journalists who the students respected a lot. But I already had online skills, and the professors just expanded my thought processes, while also giving me solid reporting skills. What about the students who weren’t that into computers? What about the students who didn’t know HTML or CSS?
For those students, I feel like they may have been left behind a bit. I have friends who had more impressive internships than me (a few were Dow Jones interns) and graduated with very high grades, and yet they are working at smaller papers making less money than me. The only difference is that I have online skills.

But the point of my post, in its essence, is not about what j-schools are doing or what newspapers are doing. It was an attempt to defend some of the close-mindedness that we see in recent graduates, because I think it’s hard to place all the blame on them for what skills they have or what they are willing to do. Professors have to understand that students look up to them and respect them immensely. If they tell students that online journalism isn’t important or not real journalism, students will believe them.

If they tell students to expand their horizons and try new things, however, students will. I have no doubt. It’s not even a question about teaching students the skills, but rather, it is imparting in them the importance of taking their reporting skills to whatever format a story calls for.