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Hampton Journalism School Flunks on 2 of 9

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Site Team Recommends Provisional Accreditation

An accrediting team has recommended two-year provisional accreditation for Hampton University’s Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications, citing a lack of academic scholarship by its newly minted professors and the lack of a faculty voice in decision-making, Journal-isms was told authoritatively today.

The school is a result of a $10 million commitment from the Scripps Howard Foundation to upgrade journalism education at a historically black campus. Just this week, company executives participated in a career-days program on the Virginia campus and Kenneth Lowe, president and CEO of the E.W. Scripps Co., presented the school with $50,000.

However, the journalism program has had three leaders since 2002, and seven professors left after the last school year, an unusually high number.

Jannette Dates, who led the four-person accrediting team from the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, cautioned that the team’s recommendations were just a preliminary step in the process. Another mentioned privately that the team saw “all kinds of very, very positive things.”

The school has an opportunity to respond to the evaluation. An accrediting committee reviews the recommendation in March, and the council itself takes up the recommendation in May.

“I have made a draft of a report and am waiting to hear back from the university,” said Dates, who is dean of the Howard University School of Communications. “There is nothing more to say. It’s still in an early” stage.

The team visited the campus from Sunday to Tuesday and talked with every journalism faculty member, with Dean Tony Brown and University President William R. Harvey, and with students, non-journalism professors and others who interact with the journalism school.

It found the school out of compliance on two of the council’s nine standards, Journal-isms was told.

One was “Mission, Governance and Administration”; the other was “Scholarship: Research, Creative and Professional Activity.”

Members were said to be concerned about the lack of faculty voice in the operation of the school. Without consulting the faculty, Harvey picked Brown, longtime host of television’s “Tony Brown’s Journal” and a former dean of the Howard School of Communications, as dean in July 2004, five days after Christopher Campbell’s resignation as school leader became effective.

In leaving, Campbell described himself as another casualty of the “authoritarian” nature of the university administration.

One of the “indicators” for compliance with the administrative standard is: “The unit has policies and procedures for substantive faculty governance that ensure faculty oversight of educational policy and curriculum.” Another is: “Faculty, staff and students have avenues to express concerns and have them addressed.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote on March 17, 2000: “Hampton never has had a faculty senate, and the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors dissolved shortly after Mr. Harvey’s arrival. He didn’t ban it, but professors say they felt it was futile.

“Mr. Harvey insists that students and faculty members are free to express complaints, and he points to his meetings with students and the monthly faculty meetings over which he presides,” the article continued.

“‘We have a venue for anybody to speak out on anything,’ he says. ‘If any student wishes to speak out about any issue, they may do so, as may the faculty.'”

After last year’s departure of the seven faculty members, Brown announced this year’s faculty in September in a flier proclaiming a “NEW JAC” faculty team that “is stronger at every position.” It was called “Tony Brown’s ‘dream team.'”

However, the accrediting team found that faculty members are high on journalism experience but low on scholarly research, partly due to their lack of academic experience. Such scholarship distinguishes an intellectually rigorous program from a vocational school, this line of thinking goes. One team member said privately that only two of the nine faculty members had been at the school a significant length of time.

One of the council’s “indicators” for this standard is: “The unit fosters a climate that supports intellectual curiosity, critical analysis and the expression of differing points of view.”

The university’s seizure of the student newspaper, the Hampton Script, in 2003 did not figure into the assessment, as that action was taken by the central administration and not the School of Journalism, a team member said.

Members of the team were Dates; Shirley Staples Carter, director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of South Carolina; Steve Geimann of Bloomberg News, a former president of the Society of Professional Journalists; and Sandy Utt, assistant chair of the University of Memphis Department of Journalism.

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New Jobs for Byron and Lyne Pitts; Lyne to NBC

CBS News correspondent Byron Pitts and his wife, CBS News producer Lyne Pitts, received new jobs this week: Byron was promoted to national correspondent and Lyne was named executive producer of NBC News’ “Today, Weekend Edition.”

Byron Pitts, 45, will cover breaking stories and develop a new beat on faith, family and culture, CBS News President Sean McManus announced Thursday. “Since joining CBS in 1996, Pitts worked in the Dallas and Miami bureaus, before moving to New York in 2001. ABC tried unsuccessfully to lure him for a job on the revamped ‘Nightline’ last year, according to published reports,” the Associated Press said.

The announcement about Lyne Pitts was also made yesterday, by NBC News President Steve Capus. She starts her new job Feb. 8.

“Prior to joining NBC News, Pitts led a remarkable 23-year career at CBS News,” the announcement said. “From 2003 to 2004, she served as senior broadcast producer of the ‘CBS Evening News with Dan Rather.’ Prior to that, beginning in December 1999, she was the executive producer of the ‘CBS Early Show.’ From 1997 to 1999, Pitts served as the executive producer of the weekend edition of the ‘CBS Evening News’ where she was honored with a News and Documentary Emmy award for her coverage of the death of Princess Diana.”

Byron Pitts was named 2002 Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists. In his acceptance speech, Byron said he met his wife at the 1997 NABJ convention in Chicago.

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Coretta Scott King to Lie in Honor in Ga. Capitol

On Saturday, Coretta Scott King “will become the first woman and first black person to lie in honor at the Georgia Capitol,” Errin Haines reported today for the Associated Press.

“The state flag she helped to change – now bearing a much smaller Confederate battle emblem – was immediately lowered by Gov. Sonny Perdue and will wave at half-staff until her funeral Tuesday.

“King’s casket will lie in Ebenezer Baptist Church for most of Monday. Her funeral will be held at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, where the Kings’ youngest child, Bernice, is a minister.

“Few details have been released about the funeral, including who will deliver the eulogy. However, the American Jewish Committee said the King family had invited the executive director of its Atlanta chapter to deliver remarks.”

Among editorials about Mrs. King, from members of the National Conference of Editorial Writers:

“Democracies have queens, too. They don’t wear crowns; they don’t need to. Their crown is their presence among us. And when they pass on, it is as though a landmark in time has been erected. A landmark that reminds us to number our own days, and ask if we have been loyal to her majesty.”

“On Monday, a paternalistic headline writer called her the ‘guardian of a legacy.’ She deserves better. Because of her, one of Dr. King’s famous phrases now has broader reach: ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.'”

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Post’s Critiques Open Doors to Race Dialogue

As reported in August, staff members at the Washington Post are participating in a formalized system of internal critiques in which the whole staff is invited to join in.

The critiques have become a vehicle to make further use of the diversity among the staff, and this week, thanks to the FishBowlDC blog, which routinely publishes leaked critique comments that are supposedly in-house only, readers can see how far the racial dialogue has come. One topic Wednesday was a story on the Metro subway system.

“Lyndsey’s story on Metro’s search for a new voice to say ‘doors opening’ and ‘doors closing’ was a terrific piece, really enjoyable and well written, and would have been on A1 on any other day;” Foreign Editor Keith Richburg, a black journalist, wrote Wednesday. “In fact, I might have voted for holding our SOTU package to two [stories] just to get it out there as a reader,” Richburg said, referring to the State of the Union.

“As great as that story is, I have one problem with it: Why are all the 10 finalists to be the voice of Metro all, apparently, white? Did someone at Metro decide they didn’t want a ‘black-sounding’ voice or an ethnic voice to say ‘doors opening’ or ‘doors closing?’ . . . Is that a comment on the suburban reach of Metro? And – more importantly – why was that point not made in the story, since it seemed so glaringly obvious from the photo that it jumped out at me and grabbed me by the throat the second I picked up my Metro front. What a wonderful chance we missed, I think, to write about how in our diverse region, the Metro powers-that-be think that the ‘Voice Of Metrorail’ must be a generically Caucasian voice.”

Others agreed, including Metro columnist Courtland Milloy, who had written: “what I’d really really like is to read about what it means to be white at the Post. And I [don’t] mean read about it in the New Republic, either, with blind quotes from white reporters. White people, I’ve discovered, are as defensive of their identity as black people are [sensitive] about theirs. But exactly what does being white mean? [Privilege?] Mo money? Or maybe its just not being black? Bet this would be a better newspaper if we knew more about that race wall between us. Would love to know what you’re thinking Len & Phil (and Don and Bo),” a reference to Post executives. “Stop peeping and start participating.”

The editors were listening on at least one score: The next day’s follow-up story included this paragraph:

“A committee of Metro managers listened to all 1,259 audition recordings and narrowed the field to 10 finalists: seven women and three men. All 10 were white, despite the region’s diversity. Debra Johnson, a Metro manager who helped choose the finalists, said the panelists were given no information about the contestants except their names. ‘We didn’t know if they were white, black, purple or green,’ Johnson said. ‘When we were listening, we were only focused on whether it was clear, whether it was audible.'”

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Freeman’s Black History Comments Taken in Stride

Actor Morgan Freeman’s December interview on CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes,” in which he challenged the notion of Black History Month, appears to have resonated with the media, if not as much with viewers.

“You’re going to relegate my history to a month?” Freeman asked. “I don’t want a black history month. Black history is American history.”

The story attracted media attention at the time, and last Saturday, as Black History Month approached, became the peg for a front-page story in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Black History Month – Has it outlived its usefulness?”

But viewers appear not to have been as interested. After the piece originally aired, “There were no phone calls. . . . There was a normal amount of emails, appx half for and half against – normal is below 100 and this was way below 100. . . . In a nutshell, there was normal reaction – the same we get for any piece,” Kevin Tedesco, a spokesman for “60 Minutes,” told Journal-isms via e-mail.

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