‘What we’re dealing with are journalism students who don’t read newspapers.’ : Notes From a Citadel of Lerning

For those eagerly awaiting the next generation of journalists to improve the sorry lot of today’s newspapers, I bear grim tidings. They can’t spel and they think Desmond Tutu is a ballerina.

That may not mean a hell of a lot out there, since good spelling is not a requirement for pumping gas or repairing furnaces, but to those of us in the business of accurate information, an ability to spell is, to say the least, essential.

Similarly, you might ask who gives a rat’s whisker about Desmond Tutu, and I reply that, while you don’t care, we ought to. If nothing else, Des may perform someday at the Music Center and we may be called upon to cover his act.

But rather than debate that which you obviously know very little about, I offer proof of the sad state of today’s California journalism students. Weep along with me.

It all began with a test of 100 undergraduates at Cal State Fullerton. Sixty percent of them didn’t know who Alexander Hamilton was, while 60% did know who Erika Kane was.

(Erika Kane, I will tell you, is a soap opera character, but I’ll be damned if I’ll tell you who Alexander Hamilton is. Look it up.)

The students were similarly ignorant of Geoffrey (Jeff) Chaucer and Mikhail Gorbachev, the main characters on television’s old “Man from U.N.C.L.E.” series, and Dante Alighieri, the Italian gymnast.

Obviously appalled by this, a teacher at Cal State Northridge gave the same test to 44 undergraduates and was delighted that, at least, a lesser percentage knew who Erika Kane was. Teaching, I suppose, has some triumphs, however dwarfish they may appear.

While looking into this, I came upon a journalism instructor at CSUN who each week gives her students a quiz of current events, news being an area of interest one would expect to find among journalism students.

An element of the test was a requirement to spell Gov. George Deukmejian’s name. Of 15 students, only two spelled it correctly, three who obviously knew him personally called him “Duke” and the others tried with Deukmagien, Dekmajan, Dukemagen and so on.

Well, I hear you cry, it’s a difficult name to spell, and I agree. But it isn’t exactly a little-used or unfamiliar name in California, and since these are journalism students and he is, like it or not, the governor, one would assume the majority would get it right, right?

The same for Nancy Regan and Lt. Gov. Leo Mckarthe and Mayor Tom Bradly, names that they also managed to boot all over the campus.

Incidentally, in another test, nine out of 14 had never heard of U.S. Atty Gen. Edwin Meese while 13 out of 14 knew that a California teen-ager was not chosen for her high school cheerleading squad because her breasts were too large.

“It’s both funny and sad,” the teacher said. She asked not to be identified. “What we’re dealing with are journalism students who don’t read newspapers. In a question on the prior week’s news, one said a B-52 had overflown SALT II. He thought it was a geographic area.”

Questions involving history are also lost on most of them, she said, especially recent history. Some, for instance, believe Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to be the mother of U. S. Sen. Ted Kennedy. Close but no cigar.

The teacher added somewhat wistfully: “They have to be among the top third of the students in their high schools to get into a state university. I can’t help but wonder about the other two-thirds.”

One must understand, I suppose, that these are, after all, young people and it is difficult to divert their attention away from sex and beer in order to get them to concentrate on the dynamics of social change.

Who cares, for instance, about the fate of the “Diary of Anne Frank” in Greenville, Tenn., (obviously a hard porn flick banned at local theaters) when there is a prospect of getting drunk and laid after tonight’s party? First things first.

All right. I was young once, though not for long, and can well understand the intensity of an undergrad’s interest in passions other than those found down the cool corridors of academia.

But you’d think that, since they know they’re going to get the same basic test every week, they’d at least study for it, a process by which one reads and thinks about major items relative to one’s field of interest.

What bothers me, I guess, is not so much dumb journalism students but what appears to be a growing disregard for the basic tools of communication, i.e. knowledge and the ability to transmit that knowledge beyond grunts and mumbles.

But, what the hell, with Ronald Reagan running the country and Sylvester Stallone defining the new American Syntax, sex and beer may, after all, be the destiny of the mind, and probably ought to be encouraged wherever college students gather.

So bottoms up in both instances, kids, and the devil take tomorow.