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Are We What We Enroll?

Most of the readers of this journal are professional educators, and we operate in a culture that supports, promotes, and in many ways defines our work. Despite the fact that we spend our days and lives working in that culture, it is a struggle for us to see and understand its key features. Of course, this only supports the general observation that one of the most difficult things for any of us to do is critically analyze what we do. For the last twenty years, I have consciously tried to understand at least some aspects of what I do as a professor by drawing on the literatures of labor force economics, the sociology of work and occupations, and the sociology of education. Working with a group of student and faculty colleagues, including Jerry Kosicki, Tudor Vlad, and Wilson Lowrey, I have tried to understand journalism and mass communication educational institutions as the provider of labor for a specific labor market. As such, it is influenced by feedback from that labor market, but also is influenced by broader forces in society that affect higher education and labor markets generally and by forces within the university. In other words, the culture that surrounds journalism and mass communication education is a product, at least in part, of broad forces in society. We may think we develop our curricula and include content in specific courses because we are clever people with good ideas. We may be. We also develop our curricula and fashion our courses in response to the labor market, as a result of educational trends in society, and because of competition within the university. This is not to say that strong leaders and innovative faculty members do not matter. It only is to argue that all individuals are constrained by forces that have great impact on the organizations for which they work. This point is illustrated well through a discussion of enrollments and their influence on the culture of our organizations. By culture I mean the broad set of values and orientations that surround and define our work. Within the university, two distinct types of academic subunits can be identified. The first type gains and maintains resources by virtue of its responsibility for and control of the general curriculum of the university. Examples are the English department, the Sociology department, the Math department, and the Biology department. Because, as a result of negotiations in the past, these units were able to place their course offerings in the general curriculum of the university, they get resources to hire faculty and staff in their departments regardless of how much general interest there is on the part of students in their course offerings. They are, as the language goes, "central to the core mission of the university," and are to be given resources and protected accordingly. The second type of unit gains resources because of student interest, that is, because students choose to specialize, or "major," in the offering of the department. Journalism and mass communication units are examples of this second type of university academic subunit. So too, generally, are business schools, law schools, and other units, many of which are often identified as professional in nature, that is, educate (and train) people for specific careers. It is possible and reasonable to argue that the media are central to society, that a well-educated person ought to know about them, and that the experts on campus about the media are housed in journalism and mass communication units. Despite that, journalism and mass communication administrators and faculties have not done a very good job of arguing the case. Often they find that they can make case one (that the media are central) and case two (that students should know about them), but not case three (that journalism and mass communication educators are the experts). Sometimes the "experts" in political science or sociology are better positioned in terms of research activities and tradition to make the case that they are the "experts" on the media. …