Lemann Selected to Be Next Journalism Dean

Nicholas Lemann, a prominent author and writer for The New Yorker, will be the next dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, University President Lee Bollinger announced in a statement released yesterday.

Lemann, whose appointment must be confirmed by the Trustees, was offered the position last week after an extensive national search.

"Nicholas Lemann has had a distinguished career as a journalist and writer for more than 25 years," Bollinger said in the statement. "In all my years in university life, I have rarely met anyone with more promise and ability in assuming a leadership role of a School."

Lemann will become dean at a time of great change for the Journalism School. Last summer, Bollinger made headlines when he halted the nearly completed search for a new dean and announced that he wanted to reevaluate the role of the Journalism School. Two months later, Bollinger convened a 34-member task force to explore the future of journalism education.

Lemann, who served on the task force, took a leading role in those discussions, and eventually wrote a 7,000-word memo at Bollinger's request, outlining his vision for a two-year Master's program. As dean, Lemann will be able to implement many of his suggestions, and he said yesterday that that opportunity played a major role in his decision to accept the position.

"Lee Bollinger has set in motion a one-time-only process in which the new dean gets to think in a very open and creative way about what journalism education should be," Lemann said. "It's a special moment."

Lemann's decision will come as a surprise to many observers, who doubted that anyone would leave perhaps the most desirable job in journalism in the country--Washington correspondent for The New Yorker--to become an academic dean. Lemann acknowledged that the decision had been difficult, but said the unique opportunity to make major, lasting changes to the way journalism is taught was too good to pass up.

"If you're trying to do something in institutional life, the planets have to be lined up in a certain way," Lemann said. "I could not say to Lee Bollinger, 'I'll do this in five years.'"

Lemann said he has not yet decided exactly what changes he would like to see at the Journalism School, but they will almost certainly include a lengthening of the time necessary to receive a degree. Currently, candidates for the Master's of Science degree must study for ten months. Lemann said he would like to see a two-year program, and he said the faculty has already expressed a willingness to extend the program to 18 months. The previous dean, Tom Goldstein, who stepped down last spring, added a month to the program during his tenure.

Yesterday, Bollinger gave the first detailed picture of the direction in which he would like to see the school head, releasing a 10-page statement on the subject. The report, which Bollinger said was informed by his discussions with the task force but represented his own views, laid out an argument for expanding journalism education beyond teaching the craft of writing and reporting.

Bollinger laid out four sets of areas journalism education should focus on: teaching the craft of writing and reporting, developing the "intellectual ability to deal with new situations as knowledge and working conditions shift over time," giving students a background in the history of journalism, and creating in students "an identity as a professional, which includes the moral and ethical standards that should guide professional behavior."

Lemann agreed, saying he hoped to move the discussion beyond the decades-long debate between those who believe journalism schools should teach only the craft, and those who think they should teach only the theory of journalism. He said that he hoped to develop a curriculum that would help young journalists learn the "method of analytic attack" that is unique to journalists.

"You should add to graduate journalism education something more like graduate education in other fields," Lemann said. Journalists, he said, need to learn not only basic skills; they also need to have a broader intellectual framework in which to apply those skills.

To that end, both Bollinger and Lemann believe the Master's degree program must be expanded. In his statement, Bollinger said he believed journalism students should take a variety of courses in basic disciplines that are useful to journalists, such as statistics and economics. In addition, students should be exposed to a number of in-depth courses in major issues facing the nation and the world--including politics, religion, and sciences--taught in ways tailored to the needs of journalists.

Bollinger's report includes few details about what a two-year program would look like, and Lemann said that the process of working out the details is only just beginning. Lemann and Bollinger are likely to face opposition from at least some members of the journalism faculty, who fear that Bollinger will make the program too theoretical and insufficiently grounded in the basic skills journalists need. In his report, Bollinger implicitly responded to those objections.

"Of all the criticisms of the press, one of the most serious--and, happily, the most remediable--Is the lack of context for stories," Bollinger wrote. "At its best, journalism mediates between the worlds of expertise and general knowledge. To do that well--to write for the present and to weave in broader meaning--is remarkably difficult. A necessary element is substantive knowledge, the kind of knowledge you cannot just pick up in the course of doing a story. Having a foundation of general knowledge enhances one's capacity to deal with new areas and specific issues."

Moreover, "the deep sense of personal satisfaction in journalism, as in other parts of life, comes from probing into the heart of a matter. It is the superficial skipping from event to event that produces both sophomoric journalism and unfulfilled journalists," Bollinger wrote.

Lemann acknowledged that he would need to make compromises, noting wryly that "Columbia works a lot more like Washington than like the The New Yorker," and he said that if a vote were taken right now, the faculty would probably oppose extending the degree program to two years. But he also said the faculty has moved significantly towards a longer program, and that if Columbia can keep the cost of a degree down--another issue Bollinger discusses in his statement--there will be fewer objections.

Lemann may have more influence over the faculty than Bollinger, who was criticized by many in the Journalism School last summer for involving himself in an issue that, in their minds, he did not fully understand. The same cannot be said of Lemann, who worked for the The Atlantic Monthly for 15 years before working at the The New Yorker, and who has also been a national reporter for the The Washington Post.

"I don't think there's anyone in this building who doesn't admire his work," said David Klatell, the acting dean of the Journalism School since Goldstein's resignation. "I think he'll get people excited about his ideas."