Former Network Executive Teaches Simulated Newsroom Class at Northwestern

How the Best Universities Inadvertently Ruin Our Schools 207 how to or care to think about their subject as anything other than a research area. Making a real living with what they teach is not on any faculty member’s mind. But students go to college precisely because they think they will get a job afterward that college will have prepared them for. It just isn’t true. Teaching how to survive in the real world is simply not the job of an Ivy League professor. This is too bad because there are professors who really do like to teach. One day I decided that I needed some news video from the ma- jor networks for a project I wanted to start. I called the president of Northwestern and asked him if he knew anyone at the networks, and he told me that the former president of one of them was now on our journalism faculty. So I called him. He said he would help me but only on one condi- tion. He wanted me to sit in on the class he taught. This was really an odd request, and especially hard for me to agree to given how much I hate classes and classrooms. But I really wanted that video. Professors almost never ask other professors to watch them teach. One reason is that they usually aren’t all that proud of their teaching and don’t want to hear the criticism that inevitably follows. Also, it really isn’t something they want to talk about even if they are good at it. It has minor value in a professor’s world. The class I attended was the most extraordinary I had ever wit- nessed. This former head of a network previously had been head of the news division. He had turned his class into an all-day simulation of a network newsroom. Students were charged with preparing and produc- ing the evening news. They got their information from various sources that were used by the networks and prepared stories, played the roles of on air reporter, news writer, anchor, camera person, editors, and so on. They finished and went on air at 5.00. At 5:30 they watched to see what the networks had done that day and compared and judged their own success. The professor was there all day guiding them. I thought this class was fantastic and said so. I then said it would be a loss when he left Northwestern in a couple of years. He said he had no intention of leaving, but I knew what he was doing would never be tolerated. Why not? Let me count the reasons. First, he was teaching doing and prac- tice, and not theory and analysis. While the rest of the world knows that doing and practice is how you learn, this is the exact opposite of HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023947