The Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications is a nonprofit accrediting agency for journalism programs. Bradley Hamm, the dean at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, has called the council’s accreditation-review process ‘flawed,’ ‘superficial,’ ‘extremely time-consuming,’ and ‘sort of a low bar.’
So he’s gotten out. Northwestern University has effectively terminated its relationship with the council, calmly embracing its new status as unaccredited.
The online journal Inside Higher Ed, which points out that the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, has done the same, quotes Dean Hamm as saying that, ‘as we near the 2020s, we expect far better than a 1990s-era accreditation organization that resists change – especially as education and careers in our field evolve rapidly.’
This is a tremendous blow – when two of the most prominent and celebrated journalism programs in the country refuse to acknowledge the authority and legitimacy of an accreditor, it’s tough for the accreditor to argue that the resistant institutions are merely upset about their ability to maintain accreditation. If other journalism schools are frustrated with the council’s obsolete standards, and its tendency to micromanage curricula, more of them will likely follow the example of Northwestern and Berkeley.
This post was published at Ludwig von Mises Institute on June 26, 2017.
Follow on Twitter
Recent Comments