careerist robots

I wasn’t going to post about this, because I didn’t really have anything to add, but the incident involving alleged cheaters among students at Columbia’s journalism school apparently has legs—and it’s drawing quotes that confirm what I would have said about this matter if I’d posted about it after I read the Times’s coverage last week.

Namely: that Nicholas Lemann—an excellent writer, whose work I have enjoyed for years—is uniquely unqualified to teach young people enrolled at one of the nation’s premier institutions of learning in the 21st century. Here’s what he told the Times:

Mr. Lemann said that he was surprised that students might have been concerned about how they scored on the pass-fail exam, and that exams and grades at the school were rare.

“We are not a very grade-intensive institution,” he said. “Our school is run on a pass-fail basis.”

“Our students are strivers,” he added. “But they are striving to get good clips. It is not like law school, where fine differences in points make all the difference in the world.”

He is surprised that Columbia J School students care about their grades?

Did he just crawl out from under a rock? Anyone who spends five minutes talking to the kind of overachiever who attends the J school knows that that these are kids who have been programmed, if not hard-wired, to succeed. No matter what.

Want proof? Even now, after the brouhaha—which was about ethics—the students are still concerned only about themselves and how this will affect their future.

“It’s going to affect us for years to come,” said Jack Gillum, 23. “Columbia’s going to have this badge of dishonor.”

“If people did cheat, it makes me really angry,” he added, noting that he pays much of his $43,422 yearly tuition and fees by himself and does not want his degree to be devalued.

“There’s kind of a palpable fear: What’s going to happen when you go for a job interview?” said Caroline Preston, 26.

(via memeorandum)

Well, if she tries out for a job the AP, for example, perhaps she can help them examine the ethics involved in their reporting from Iraq, which is under intense scrutiny—much to the displeasure of the AP, as the NYT reports:

Over the course of last week, an Associated Press article — one subsequently challenged by the military — in which six Sunni worshipers were reportedly doused in kerosene and burned alive by Shiite attackers, became the worst kind of totem.

For bloggers who believe that the media has been drawing false pictures of mayhem in Iraq, the insistence of the American military and Iraqi officials that the burning incident appeared to be a mere rumor was proof that their suspicions were correct.

…

The international editor of the A.P., John Daniszewski, said in a statement Tuesday that the military’s questioning of the original sourcing on the article was “frankly ludicrous and hints at a certain level of desperation to dispute or suppress the facts of the incident in question.”

Kathleen Carroll, executive editor of the AP, is hanging tough too. She

explained that the agency had already done all it could to respond to the uncertainties by vigorously re-reporting the article, and suggested that to engage these questions — to continue to write about them — merely fueled a mad blog rabble that would never be satisfied.

Lots of lessons in ethics—and a lot more—here…for journalists and aspiring journalists. And all the rest of us too, as the NYT’s David Carr notes:

It is important to find out if this really happened in order to separate the hyperbole from the merely horrible in Iraq, so that the horrible will still have meaning. Otherwise it will all become din.

No kidding.