Entries associated with the tag "Medill School":

The president and provost of Northwestern University held a meeting Thursday afternoon with the dean and faculty of Medill. President Henry Bienen responded to the polite hand he got when he was introduced with the ominous “I’m glad you’re clapping now. Some of you may not be in a few minutes.”

Bienen and provost Daniel Linzer made it clear they stand behind Medill dean John Lavine, who Bienen said was appointed to bring the school “into the modern world” after a couple of academic audits three years ago prescribed major change. NU has committed millions of dollars to the process, said Bienen, and “something good is happening.” Bienen concluded by citing a famous book written by Albert Hirschman in 1970, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States.  There are three ways a worker can respond to unwelcome change, Hirschman said: he can buy into it, he can speak out and mediate, or he can leave. Faculty members familiar with the book felt that Bienen emphasized the third. “It’s a big world," Bienen said. "Find another university.”

Then Linzer commented on what Medill students have taken to calling Quotegate--allegations that last year Lavine made up a quote and claimed it came from a student praising a marketing class. Linzer appointed an ad hoc committee to look into the matter and two weeks ago announced that the committee had cleared the dean. At the faculty meeting, Linzer refused to say if the committee had actually turned in a report, let alone what criteria it had used and what evidence it had reviewed. Linzer’s reply was that the process confidential and he had no intention of saying a word more. “Once a decision has been made it has been made,” said the provost. “Then we move on.”

The faculty’s sense of aggrievement runs a lot deeper than Quotegate, which might not have amounted to much if so many professors didn’t already feel Lavine was running roughshod over them as he overhauled the curriculum. Professor Jack Doppelt asked Bienen one of the few questions; he wondered why it was necessary for Lavine to suspend faculty governance in order to revamp the curriculum. Doppelt called that a “toxic statement” from the administration to the faculty. Bienen replied that he didn’t think faculty governance had completely disappeared, but that at any rate Lavine was under orders to move with dispatch.

Bienen also said he was puzzled by why the Chicago press has been paying so much attention to Medill recently. He supposed it was a good thing, in that it shows that people care. It's really not such a good thing. It's possible that Quotegate has run its course--there’s probably no way of proving or disproving that Lavine was quoting someone, and Linzer made it clear that as far as NU concerned, the subject’s closed. But the provenance of a quote is one of those niggling details that do matter to journalists, and the failure of Lavine and his superiors to show they even understand that is a big reason why the press has been so relentless--consider these pieces by Eric Zorn --and so damning.

PS: Isn't Exit, Voice, and Loyalty a book that belongs on every newspaper person's desk?

A couple of inaccurate headlines in Saturday's papers stand as tributes to the power of weasel wording. The stories reported on the findings of an ad hoc committee created to look into allegations that Dean John Lavine of Medill fabricated a quote that appeared a year ago in his "Letter from the Dean" in the alumni magazine.

The Tribune story was headlined in print "NU panel exonerates Medill dean" and on-line, "Northwestern panel says there was 'no evidence' that Medill dean fabricated column." The Sun-Times story was headlined "Panel clears Medill dean / Finds no evidence he made up quotes." The story by Eric Herman, quoting Northwestern Provost Daniel Linzer, reported that "a committee of three prominent Medill graduates found 'no evidence to point to any likelihood that the quotes were fabricated.'"

Herman wrote the sharper story, quoting Linzer more fully. "No evidence to point to any likelihood" sounds like a cute way of saying there's evidence, but not enough of it to drag this matter on. Of the quotes in question, the money quote had Lavine claiming that an unnamed junior had said about a marketing class, "I sure felt good about this class. It is one of the best I've taken." David Spett, a suspicious Daily Northwestern columnist, said he talked to every student in the class, including all five juniors, and all denied making that statement. Northwestern professor David Protess and Tribune columnist Eric Zorn later said that they'd reinterviewed the five juniors, with the same results. That's evidence. 

The Tribune story didn't even identify the members of the panel. Herman's did. They were Jack Fuller, former editor and publisher of the Tribune, and Northwestern trustees Teresa Norton and Paul Sagan, who is also cochair of the Medill Board of Advisors. A  Boston businessman, Sagan is the son of Chicago publisher Bruce Sagan,  a close friend of Lavine's.

Here's the key graph from Linzer's letter "to the Medill Community" Friday trying to put the Lavine matter to rest: "The committee unanimously concluded that although a record of the student statements that were quoted cannot be found, sufficient material does exist about the relevant storefront reporting experience and marketing course to demonstrate that sentiments similar to the quotes had been expressed by students. Thus, the committee found that there is ample evidence that the quotes were consistent with sentiment students expressed about the course in course evaluations and no evidence to point to any likelihood that the quotes were fabricated. The committee further stated that the author of a piece like the 'Letter from the Dean' could not reasonably be expected to have retained for a year the notes or e-mails documenting the sources of quotations used in the letter; nonetheless, the committee advised that in the future such meticulous archiving might be desirable given the heightened awareness of the problems that can result."

This passage is a travesty. Lavine's sin was to publish a quote that he did not attribute and later could not support. Linzer's sin is the opposite. His letter is all unsupported attribution and no quotation. He does not produce the report whose conclusions he's announcing. He tells us the committee concluded that the quotes in question were true to the spirit of student sentiment -- but that's never been the issue. He writes "no evidence" when there is. He speaks of "heightened awareness" as if to reduce an angry confrontation to a golden teaching moment. Until they speak for themselves and say differently, I will not believe that Fuller, Norton, and Sagan fully approve of the way Linzer construed their work. And until Linzer produces it, I will not believe they even submitted a formal report. Linzer's letter has the ring of something spun out of -- well, not whole cloth, but conceivably a telephone call from Sagan saying Lavine has egg on his face but let's get past this.

Northwestern isn't past this. Despite what headlines said, Lavine wasn't "cleared" or "exonerated," not even in Linzer's account. Lavine's aggression in changing Medill has made him a lot of enemies among the faculty, alumni, and student body They won't let this drop.

UPDATE: Paul Sagan responded Sunday morning to my e-mail asking him to comment on Linzer's letter.  "I respect that you have a job to do, but I'm afraid I can't help you," he wrote back. "I am a trustee of the university and my obligation is to serve the shared interests of the students, faculty and administration.  I believe I've done that in this case by offering my views to the provost, and I don't think I would be helping any more by giving an interview.  I can refer you to the provost's office for additional comment."

Sixteen Medill present and former faculty members have signed and released a letter calling on Dean John Lavine to show his hand. They want a "more complete accounting than the dean has thus far provided" of the unattributed quotes Lavine used in a letter to alumni published in the Medill alumni magazine last year--quotes that it's been suggested the dean concocted. "This matter has become a crisis for the school. The principles of truthfulness and transparency in reporting are at the core of Medill’s professional and academic mission," says the faculty statement. It was delivered to Lavine with a cover letter signed by professors Craig LaMay, Donna Leff, and David Protess, all of whom teach ethics classes and who told Lavine "it would be unconscionable to maintain faculty silence on such a widely covered public issue."

Medill students and alumni have weighed in by the dozens online and overwhelmingly they gig the dean both for using anonymous quotes and for asking the school to take his word for it that they were legit. (He says they came from e-mail he's since deleted.) Lavine sent his faculty a memo that insisted, "They are real quotes, a fact that was demonstrated by my including in my letter to the alumni a link to a student video that showed students making the same kind of points. There was no shortage of material from students for these quotes."

This video showed sophomores being interviewed about their experiences working in storefront newsrooms. They were apparently enthusiastic in roughly the same sort of language used by Lavine's anonymous junior, who said about a marketing class, "I sure felt good about this class. It is one of the best I've taken." But while one excited student might sound like another, video about one class is hardly proof that the anonymous quotes about another are bona fide. Tuesday's letter from the faculty bluntly points that out.

If Lavine feels he doesn't have a friend at Medill, the fact is he had precious few before this scandal erupted. The journalism faculty feel disrespected since he became dean two years ago and ripped up the curriculum. Now they've got a chance to publicly disrespect him back.

UPDATE:  By early Wednesday afternoon, a statement posted online by the "Concerned Students in the Medill School of Journalism" had been signed by 175 persons, according to one of the four authors, Medill senior Emmet Sullivan. The students endorsed the faculty statement and added that they felt students "have been ignored" by Lavine in the matter. The statement concluded: "We believe the dean, the faculty, the alumni, the students and ALL members of the Medill community should come together, come to terms with the issue and use this unfortunate situation as a teachable moment in our journalism education. In our eyes, this has yet to happen." For more, go here.

UPDATE: On Thursday Dean Lavine issued an apology for his "poor judgment" in quoting a student's letter "without naming the student. I should have asked permission to use the student's name with their comment about the IMC 303 class." Is that what happened? David Spett, the Medill senior who broke this story in the Daily Northwestern, says he interviewed all 29 students in that class and they all denied having said the above quote. The school might want to poll those 29 students again, ask them if they said or wrote anything to Lavine about the class, and if they did ask them what. And while the school's at it, it could find out how many, if any, of those students thought it was one of the best classes they'd taken. Perhaps the dean's being dodgy because it was actually a quote he heard secondhand.