"The highest temple of a religion in decline"

We were struck with something that Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism -- "the highest temple of a religion in decline," according to Hugh Hewitt in The Weekly Standard -- said about our own alma mater: "Harvard is filled with this sort of humiliation." Oh, yes. It took us years to work through that. (Chipboard model of a Landscape Architecture design for the lower forty of the Wellesley College Campus hard won with great damage to our x-acto-cutting finger, not to mention our psyche, in a Michael Van Valkenburgh studio course at the Harvard Design School last century)

"PC has become almost a comic catchphrase of late," writes Clive Davis, putting his finger on the horror -- "Oh, the humanity" in the real sense -- of where post-modernism's moral relativism has taken us:

But the case which directly led to the writing of the pamphlet was literally a matter of life and death. Researching a story on the spread of AIDS, Mr. Browne published an article stating that an exponential increase in the number of cases of infection was mainly caused by HIV-positive immigrants from Africa. The response from ministers, civil servants and large parts of the media establishment was incredulity. No one, you see, wanted to be thought of as racist.

As Mr. Browne puts it:  "There was endemic dishonesty towards the public, but because everyone was in denial to each other, few realised it because their virtual reality had become the widely acknowledged truth. This received wisdom was in fact easy to disprove -- it just required looking at some government tables -- but everyone had an emotional investment in not disproving it . . . . The only people who phoned me up to thank me about it were HIV doctors, who lived in the real world, not the politically correct virtual one."

Back to Hugh Hewitt's take on the pipedreams of Columbia School of Journalism's new dean, Nicholas Lemann:

There is too much expertise, all of it almost instantly available now, for the traditional idea of journalism to last much longer. In the past, almost every bit of information was difficult and expensive to acquire and was therefore mediated by journalists whom readers and viewers were usually in no position to second-guess. Authority has drained from journalism for a reason. Too many of its practitioners have been easily exposed as poseurs.

Lemann understands completely what has happened. I think he regrets it. He is certainly trying to salvage the situation. And there is simply no way he can succeed.

Like the truth, the real world -- as opposed to the politically correct virtual one -- will out.

Update:  A link from the great man himself, with more links to other bloggers commenting on Hewitt's Weekly Standard article. For a compelling piece of  journalism -- not to mention a great read in any category -- be sure to check out Austin Bay's insightful and anecdotally superb "Will regression analysis save journalism?/A memory of Columbia J-School, Spring 1980":

In a war some things you discover you can’t write, because of the damage they’d do to the military effort.

Too bad the New York Times doesn't read Austin Bay Blog.

Update II:  Mark Tapscott weighs in on the debate, expanding on Dean Lehman's call for regression analysis in the education of journalists:

What Lemann is talking about is what is otherwise known as Computer-Assisted Research and Reporting (CARR). I left a daily newspaper in 1999 to start just such a program at The Heritage Foundation's Center for Media and Public Policy . . . My enthusiasm for CARR is grounded in the belief that it holds the potential to change the basic journalism paradigm based on anecdote and selective quotation to one based on objective data-driven analytical reporting.

Not that it will do any good, of course, as long as -- in Tapscott's words -- "journalists blindly accept as gospel the essential goodness of government programs in solving societal problems."

Comments

[goomp]

And a good thing it is. Television made it to easy for poseurs. People became lazy when they didn't have to read the news and were led where the fabricators of the news wished them to go. Now Fox News has broken the monopoly of the broadcasters, and the internet has made it impossible for false written news to go unquestioned.

[Teresa]

No one would be worried about PC if this was Bird Flu... If Africans were carrying that to other countries and spreading disease it would be quashed immediately! But since it's AIDS - the most politically active disease out there... being carried in by Africans (one assumes people of color) - well God forbid we do anything to stop that... it's discrimination I tell you!!!

[amba]

Here'a a real idiot late-night me-too comment: Harvard's (well, "Radcliffe") my alma mater too! And I instinctively avoided the Pill too!