APRILFeedback

party. It was a fabulous experience for both the students and for us.The university enjoyed the publicity the course received, but I learned that teamteaching is not encouraged, essentially because, administratively, it ties up two facultymembers for a single class of students.The same year, I was approached by a substantial Washington think tank aboutleading a scholarly analysis of journalism written about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.It would be well funded. I envisioned using a few students from each of the academicdepartments in which I had been appointed: English (journalism students), PoliticalScience, and Communication (broadcast news students). Each of the department chairsmade it clear they would not support such an interdisciplinary project, but wouldencourage me to undertake it with students from a single department. Crossdisciplinarycollaboration simply is not a favored scenario on campus.The rarity of collaboration has another strange side effect: professors around me haveno idea what I’m teaching; nor do I know what others teach. This has had somehumorous results. A professor of Geography whose office is a few doors down the hallfrom me decided to use a video camera in her course to record interviews withcommunity members. Her students, none of them with any video or TV experience,had to learn whatever they could about videography and post-production. Meanwhile,in my class (and that of another Communication professor), students being trained invideography and TV production already had the skills the Geography class needed. Butthere was no collaboration. The Geography professor had to drum up money to buythe equipment and to pay an instructor in TV production, while my communicationstudents had no opportunity to use the editing equipment in the Geographydepartment just a few steps away in the same building. The Communicationdepartment lacked the equipment being used by the next-door Geography students.Entrepreneurship LackingA sidebar aspect of this phenomenon is that universities are apparently unaccustomedto faculty with entrepreneurial and management abilities. Most faculty devise and teachtheir classes and conduct scholarly research with little interest in extending thoseexperiences to university-wide audiences or beyond. A broadcaster with an appetite forbroad audiences seems an aberration on campus, and there is widespread wondermentabout how I’ve managed to attract audiences of up to 700 for a speaker series oninternational terrorism.Professional broadcasters considering sharing their experience on a college campusmay discover that students take a long time to appreciate the resource available in theirclassroom. In general, the students I teach are interested in doing whatever’s necessaryto achieve their desired grade in my class; most are not geared to milking their timewith me for whatever my hands-on experience might be worth.There are exceptions, of course, and they are what makes teaching so rewarding.For a journalist like me, accustomed to the fast-paced world of television news,academia is a dramatic downshift. Decisions needed and made “right away” in the TVnews business are almost unheard of at the university. “Soon” might mean in a year ortwo. “Right away” often means sometime during the current semester. And decisions inacademia seem always to be made by consensus. Scholars don’t like being told what todo; I think it’s part of the “tenure” system, a cradle-to-grave concept under whichBEA—Educating tomorrow’s electronic media professionals 3