Jaargang / Année 10, 2004, nr. 2 - Gewina

74 Nieuwe publica ties I Publications recentes
the profession, but would also immerse them in a broad liberal arts background.l
Because Pulitzer kept changing his mind about exactly what he wanted, it was not
until after his death that the school could actually be launched.
If it were not for its New York City location, Columbia University would not
have seemed a likely place for a journalism program. Ivy League universities did not
normally welcome such "trade schools." Harvard rejected a feeler from Pulitzer about
establishing the school there. Cohunbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler
once referred to journalism as "a province in Bohemia" (p. 27).
Succeeding chapters describe the administrations
and activities of the various leaders of the school and
accompanying faculty politics. On several occasions
Boylan profiles faculty members in considerable detail.
By and large, the earlier chapters are better than the later
ones. This could reflect the lesser availability of material
about more recent years, that Boylan has been less
directly involved with the school in recent years (and
thus we get fewer anecdotes), or that the school's
activities are more complex today than they were in the
past and thus are not easily subject to narrative
presentation. Perhaps it is a combination of all three.
On at least two occasions Boylan's concerns should
have been placed in a broader perspective. The first
involves the various machinations designed to limit the
enrollment of Jews in the journalism school in the first half of the century.
Unfortunately, such activities were not confmed to Columbia University, but were a
serious matter at a number of universities, especially private ones. 2
In the second case Boylan describes in detail the establishment of a Columbia
University School of Journalism in China in the latter years of World War II during
the deanship of Carl W. Ackerman. The project was funded by the Office of Strategic
Services, forerunner of the CIA. Ackerman took precautions to make sure that the
funder of the project would not be known, aware that the profession's leaders would
express concern about accepting government support of journalism projects. The
acceptance of the money (again, Columbia was certainly not the only journalism
program with such international projects with government funding) reflected different
values of a different time. After the war, eighteen countries approached Columbia
1 Pulitzer elaborated these arguments in his famous 1904 article, "The College of Journalism,"
in: NorthAmerimn Review, 178 (May 1904), pp. 641-680.
2 Talcott Williams, the school's first head, was an early advocate of equal opportunity for
women in journalism and journalism education; later head Carl Ackerman was opposed.
Already at a late 1950s faculty meeting, the dean raised the issue of African-American
recruitment.