Six Ignorant Men

The toughest critics of U.S. journalism schools have always been journalists. They range from the self-taught reporter who resents any man with a college degree to the well-educated editor who objects to watering down college curriculums with courses in headline writing. Last week the University of New Mexico's Keen Rafferty, 59, chairman of the smallest accredited journalism department in the U.S. (two faculty members, 45 students), talked back to some of journalism's biggest critics with some rip-roaring criticism of his own.

Addressing the American Association of Schools and Departments of Journalism at Ann Arbor, Mich., Rafferty, the group's outgoing president, accused six U.S. editors and writers of befouling their own professional nest by belittling journalism schools. The six and their views:

-WALTER LIPPMANN, 71, syndicated pundit for the New York Herald Tribune, who has said: "There is nothing to teach at a school of journalism. What a journalist needs is an education."

-ALFRED FRIENDLY, 49, managing editor of the Washington Post, who considers most journalism courses worthless, accuses journalism schools of training students in the same way that "the department of home economics teaches the fu ture dietitian."

-Louis LYONS, 64, curator of the Nieman Fellowships at Harvard, who argues that journalism education "steals time from the broad-based education the journalist should have and . . . drills the student in conventional forms that may already be out of date."

-RALPH McGiLL, 63, publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, who once said: "I am fearful that while Russian satellites may force us to bring some measure of reform to education, the schools of journalism will go merrily along, turning out . . . misfits."

-EDWARD WEEKS, 63, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, who apparently aroused Rafferty's ire by printing Lyons' criticisms of journalism schools.

-ROBERT CHASE, 56, managing editor of Denver's Rocky Mountain News and husband of Playwright Mary (Harvey) Chase, who says it is "a waste of time for a kid to go to college to study vocational subjects when he ought to spend the time studying humanities."

Fairly potent criticism. But Rafferty called the journalists "ignorant men when it comes to knowing what it takes to educate a man for their profession. Even a brilliant man like Walter Lippmann seems never to have been able to realize that a journalism graduate has the most liberal of educations, and is much better prepared for the start of his career than some fellow who stumbles out of history, or literature, or sociology."

Rafferty, who left college to become a reporter, copy editor and public relations man, finally earned a B.A. degree in 1944 from the University of New Mexico, suggested that these critics were biased because they either went to liberal arts schools or never received college degrees.- To this, Chase's Rocky Mountain News replied with a snicker. Said the News: Rafferty's "own biography says he received a bachelor degree at the age of 42 from the fourth college he attended."

-Of the six singled out, Lippmann and Weeks are Harvard men, Friendly an Amherst man, Lyons a graduate of the Massachusetts Agricultural College (now the University of Massachusetts). Chase had to quit Notre Dame as a freshman because he ran out of money, and McGill was asked to leave Vanderbilt in his senior year after he and his roommate disrupted a fraternity dance by sending phony invitations to Nashville belles of dubious reputation.

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