Does going to university make you a better person?

[Tim Holmes]

Second marking the Ning blogs has been an interesting experience. Not only has it given me a chance to review the various arguments that exploded during the course of the module, it has also revealed a pretty persistent strand of thinking that can be characterised as:

"I have paid a lot of money to go to university and this puts me in a superior position to the people who have not done so.

"Therefore I will make a better journalist than those other people."

I make no comment about this, I do not want to start an argument about it, it is not restricted to one strand – but it is there and I really don't know how to react to it.

[Ollie Leach]

doesn't make me a better journalist. It makes me a journalist, and those other people, other people.

Yeah, citizen journalism great fun, and nOkia can get their rocks off selling swish phones to help it. But journalism does require training of some description. NOT necessarily at university. You can train on the job...but that's not really doable any more - agencies don't want a half-whit, they want a journalist.

As i said in my blog. "The Others" (John Locke, LOST, Series 1-4) are not held to account in the same way journos are. So do I appologise for wanting a professional telling me balanced news?

[Ollie Leach]

yeah

[Ollie Leach]

yeah

[Katherine Cowan]

I think some of us have taken umbrage to Tim’s revelation because firstly, as Matt says, we don’t hold or recognise the ‘I go to uni so I’m the best’ attitude ourselves and secondly because it’s worrying to know that someone who’s marking your work finds it disturbing.

I also think it’s slightly disingenuous to make public an attitude that some of us apparently hold by paraphrasing it (concentrating everything that is offensive about it into two lines) and then saying that you make no comment about it and that you don’t mean to start an argument.

By writing about it Tim is commenting on it (no one would glean from his opening blog that he agreed with what ‘we’ have written) and I doubt that he expected to do anything other than start, if not an argument, a healthy debate.

I can only imagine that Tim’s has found what he believes is a, ‘I’m a graduate so I should rule the world’ attitude in blogs about citizen journalism.
Without seeing the offending blogs myself it’s difficult to comment but I suspect that the offending ‘attitude’ is not exactly as Tim’s paraphrasing suggests

Yes, we’ve all spend a lot of money on a course that is sold to us as a fast track route to professional journalism.

[About the money thing – no one thinks’ ‘I could afford to take a postgrad course that cost over five grand therefore I am a better person than someone who can’t’. Rather people think ‘I’ve somehow managed to pay for a course that teaches me X, Y and Z so I should be better at doing A, B and C’.]

We’re all being taught things that before we came here we didn’t know. We’re being stretched and challenged on a daily basis – working long hours, having numerous mini-‘I can’t do this’- breakdowns, and generally slogging our guts out and for what? Even if the reality is that we’re still as good or crap at journalism as everyone else , human nature dictates that we constantly try to rationalise our own existences. If the last six months has had has zero impact on our ability to be good journalists, if we are no better at journalism than anyone else, then what has been the point?

I sincerely doubt people think that a degree makes you a better person but I’m not at all surprised that people think going on a course like this might make them a better journalist or that at least it gives them a head-start.

I would think that our course leaders would be more worried if we didn’t think that training and education was worth the time, money and effort.

[Catherine Bolsover]

Oops, we didn't mean to sound so aggressive (we broadcasters are obviously more at home with the spoken word...). I think we just thought that we didn't all want to be tarred with the same brush. Naming names may not be the solution either.

[matthew yeomans]

I'll back Tim up as the primary marker that that attitude is indeed there....not in everyone and not in the majority but in enough cases to have made me quite surprised.

Cara, that you are outraged by the suggestion is testament to the fact that this POV is a surprise to you as well. Same goes for you Catherine.

That said...."back up your argument and name your sources".....what is that supposed to mean?

This isn't a news story and no-one is named or accused, Tim wrote a general blog post that deliberately didn't name names......most probably because after marking 90 pieces of work a lot of individual comments meld into one.

If we're getting all primary and secondary sourcing on an abstract observation well I back up Tim and stand by what he said.

And no, I'm not going to name names. Take my word as the official course tutor who has read all of the work or reject it.

[matthew yeomans]

I'll back Tim up as the primary marker that that attitude is indeed there....not in everyone and not in the majority but in enough cases to have made me quite surprised.

Cara, that you are outraged by the suggestion is testament to the fact that this POV is a surprise to you as well. Same goes for you Catherine.

That said...."back up your argument and name your sources".....what is that supposed to mean?

This isn't a news story and no-one is named or accused, Tim wrote a general blog post that deliberately didn't name names......most probably because after marking 90 pieces of work a lot of individual comments meld into one.

If we're getting all primary and secondary sourcing on an abstract observation well I back up Tim and stand by what he said.

And no, I'm not going to name names. Take my word as the official course tutor who has read all of the work or reject it.

[Tim Holmes]

OK, but I will have to go back into the blogs that I have just surveyed. Fortunately, being a semi-organised kind of fella, I have a record of them.
Just one other point I crave your advice on - is it OK, do you think, just to quote from people's blogs or should I ask permission first, explaining fully and frankly that the quote may form part of a long item that could show them in a bad light (arguably, subject to interpretation and so on.)
Or should I quote anonymously?
Finally, Catherine, I am not even sure that it qualifies as "arrogance"; I think it may just be an engrained attitude.

[Catherine Bolsover]

Going to university doesn't make you a better journalist - and many would argue that this course doesn't make you a better journalist. Those skills come with experience and understanding - something you don't get from books and lectures.
I don't think the brand of arrogance that you cite exists with the people I've met during my studies here, so back it up.

[Cara Berkley]

You may not want to start an argument, but as I understand it the right to reply is a key part of the democractic digital age.