From my friend Jason, this lovely forward from Slate, which basically sums up the whole shootin’ match (I fit at least two of these descriptions; do I hear three, three?):
Jack Shafer, who says he never considered journalism school, writes: “I fear that [Columbia U. president Lee Bollinger’s] New Improved Columbia Graduate School of Journalism will be an overly academic program, and that other schools, ever impressed by the Ivys, might imitate it. I fear the day that the J-school credential assumes such an aura that it becomes a prerequisite for a newspaper job, the way the B.A. credential has. Journalism depends on uncredentialed losers, outsiders, dilettantes, frustrated lawyers, unabashed alcoholics — and, yes, creative psychopaths — to keep its blood red.”
agunn.com 