Steering the journalism ship

As was covered in the Indiana Daily Student last week, the School of Journalism has a new dean-elect, ready to take over when current Dean Trevor Brown retires after more than 20 years this June.\nYes, that's right. For everyone keeping score, we have a winner after two searches, hundreds of candidates and two sets of three finalists each. A very extensive search this was.\nAll math and politics aside, Bradley Hamm, from what I understand, will make a fine addition to the school. Coming to us from Elon University, Hamm has helped build that program in North Carolina by attracting top-notch faculty, including a Pulitzer Prize winner.\nBut this column isn't about all that. His virtues were extolled in the story that ran Monday. Today I'm putting my advocacy hat on in an attempt to give Dean Hamm some advice on how to deal with the future of student publications, namely the IDS and Arbutus.\nFirst, both publications are important, as outlets and resources. This should be obvious, but it's always nice to have a reminder.\nSecond, please do not force us to either accept student fees or to come under the control of the school's direct governance. Accepting student fees would put us in the de facto position of being controlled from the outside, and forcing student publications to bend to the will of school management would have a chilling effect on much of the news and commentary that goes in our pages. To give an analogy, it would be a little like Congress buying The New York Times. If that happened, it's a pretty safe bet that there wouldn't be anymore negative news coming out of Washington. It would go against everything we've been taught in the school's classrooms.\nThird, the IDS helps make the school look good. The IDS and Arbutus are award-winning, nationally recognized publications that are the envy of many collegiate newspapers and yearbooks around the country. Having a proven winner in one's stable can't help but to boost one's reputation. \nFourth, you must know that there will be, from time to time, calls of outcry from the public about our content. When the people get angry, they sometimes speak only from emotion, or they speak about things that they don't completely understand. On the other hand, there are instances where the public is right, and absolutely justified in their anger.\nIn both cases, however, the calls for the IDS to come under faculty/university supervision come loud, and often. Every year of the four years I have been a journalism student there has been at least one instance of public displeasure at something we've printed or appeared to endorse. Just last week we were on the trailing end of the controversy over Warren Freiberg's column. Two years ago, the public was angry about racist opinion comics and racist murals in Woodburn Hall. Right before that, some students were outraged (though some were pleased) at coverage of the Shane's World porn scandal. Every week there are letters accusing the IDS of liberal bias, and more letters accuse the IDS of showing favoritism toward one group or another.\nTo all of these accusations we try our best to respond.\nIn the end, it's all about learning. If the IDS and Arbutus were to be controlled by administrators, we would be insulating ourselves from controversy, but we wouldn't be able to learn from it either.\nLearning is what we pay tuition for, right?