Fat, Fifty & Still Fertile

Most U.S. journalism schools suffer from mild inferiority complexes, because both editors and intellectuals tend to re gard them as trade schools. But there are exceptions. Most notable among them is Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, which has only to survey the communications field whenever its self-confidence needs bolstering. Last week, at the start of a month-long celebration of its soth anniversary, Columbia could--and did--note that among its 2,700 living alumni are 132 newspaper publishers and editors, 46 magazine editors, a score of journalism school deans, ten Pulitzer prizewinners and a raft of New York Timesmen (78 at last count). To celebrate, Columbia lured three big-name journalists to the campus for Doctorates of Humane Letters: Alu nus Herbert Brucker ('24), Hartford Courant editor, newest president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors; Atlanta Constitution Editor Ralph McGill; and New York Times Washington Bureau Chief James Reston.

The Yellow Kid. The idea for the school goes back to 1892 and New York World Publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who helped usher in a new era of U.S. journalism, replete with screaming headlines and a cartoon character called the Yellow Kid who gave the era its name. But Pulitzer dreamed of higher things and a college that would help achieve them. "It will be the object of the college to make better journalists, who will make better newspapers, which will better serve the public." Harvard was approached, but its faculty considered journalism on a par with lathe turning. Columbia finally got the nod, along with some $2,000,000 that became available after Pulitzer's death in 1911. The next year, the first class of 77 men and women entered the school--and al most immediately threatened to quit.

The school's first director, Talcott Williams, son of a Congregationalist missionary, was a stern taskmaster and a finger-wagging moralist who admonished his girl students not to go around arousing the boys. Williams so burdened his class with assignments that two of its members--Morrie Ryskind, whose lyrics for 1932's Of Thee I Sing won him a Pulitzer Prize, and the late Hearst Columnist George Sokolsky--went on a brief strike.

Under Carl W. Ackerman, a member of the first graduating class ('13) and a veteran foreign correspondent who returned in 1931 to serve as dean for a quarter-century, the Journalism School won graduate status in 1935. Ever since, it has insisted that candidates for its M.S. degree first get a solid undergraduate grounding in the liberal arts and sciences before turning to journalism. Thus, Columbia has escaped a criticism that is leveled--with some validity--against undergraduate-level journalism schools. Rather than study journalism, Washington Post Vice President and Managing Editor Alfred Friendly once said, "a boy would be better off reading Carlyle or studying the pigmentation of butterfly wings."

Indefatigable Horn Tooter. Though it is now 50 and fat--at least in terms of its $1,588,100 endowment and a scholarship program capable of aiding 60 of its 100 students each year--Columbia is still fertile. Dean Edward W. Barrett, who was editorial director of Newsweek and Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs under Harry Truman before his appointment in 1956, has been an indefatigable fund raiser for new projects and horn tooter for old ones. Among the latter: the annual Pulitzer Prize awards, established with a $500,000 bequest from Joe Pulitzer.

A breezy, gregarious man of 52, Barrett has coaxed $300,000 out of the Ford Foundation for an advanced international reporting program, $370,000 out of the Sloan and Rockefeller foundations for a science-writing course. Last year the school started publishing the Columbia Journalism Review, a 7,000-circulation quarterly of criticism. Now under way is a $1,500,000 drive for a National Journalism Library and still more fellowships.

To some of its critics, the trouble with the Journalism School is that it remains little more than a hiring hall--but the complaint smacks faintly of resentment. A more cogent criticism is that it has never quite filled Joseph Pulitzer's tall order. "Journalism," he said, "is or ought to be one of the great and intellectual professions." If it is not, Columbia cannot be faulted for not trying.

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