Journalism: When Chancellor McCormick and the School of Economics began to explore journalism as a course of study, there were (it was said) three obstacles:
- Journalism was a poorly paid profession,
- Additional journalists would only lower salaries,
- Most journalists believe that “you cannot be taught how to be a newspaper man, but that you must get in the newspaper office to learn it.”
This was the argument presented by Thomas Reynolds Williams, who was hired to prepare the courses and to promote connections with local journalists and local dailies (as reported in Chancellor McCormick’s 1911 Chancellor’s Report). Williams argued on behalf of the importance of academic training, however, and concluded that
The men who go out with a solid education and with broad perspective, and who are capable of doing things in a way that no one else can, are the men, after all, that the newspapers most need.
Another argument on behalf of a journalism program can be found in the transcript of a lecture, most likely presented at one of the early instances of the annual Journalism Conference on campus. The speaker said:
We have suddenly seen that the newspapers and press of the country, speaking to all its millions daily at once, might become, instead of the wise director of public opinions, the vast sounding board from which echo words which stir strife and passion, and awake the struggle of class against class. I have the honor to be at the head of the school in which are given courses in journalism. Courses in this training have just been opened in the University of Pittsburgh by one of my colleagues in journalism. I trust that such courses may be the beginning of a wide education in this, to a republic ruled by opinion, perhaps most important of all callings. I trust, I say, that by the creation of such schools it will come about that journalists may look out upon the face of society knowing its laws, teaching its masses through all the years, and so teaching them that these masses cannot be deluded by the sophism of the hour, and that the newspapers themselves cannot be made, as the journalism of this country recently has been, the mere sounding board from which echo words of clamor and strife. This can only come if universities like yours of Pittsburgh continue the work which has been begun in your evening classes, by a wide appeal to those engaged in the work of the journalist.
The principle on which the school to which I have the honor to belong is organized is that it is more important for a journalist to know something than for him to write something.
Unfortunately, we have not been able to confirm the identity of the speaker or his university or the source of the document that contains the transcript of this speech. Most likely this was a lecture at the 1912 Conference on “The Modern Newspaper” held at the University of Pittsburgh, and the speaker is either a Professor Harrington of Ohio State University or Professor Talcott Williams, Director of the Pulitzer School of Journalism, Columbia University.
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In 1910, there were six graduate students in the English department. Enrollment for the University in 1914-5 was 3,695.
Hervey Allen’s novel, Anthony Adverse, was made in to a Warner Bros film in 1936, starring Fredric March and Olivia de Havilland.