THE NORMS AND STANDARDS OF THE PROFESSIONS

(This was part of an address given on the challenges of the new millennium.)

By the “norms and standards” of a profession, I mean the rules the profession lives by. The norms prescribe what the profession should aim at. The standards prescribe what is a good or bad performance. Together, they’re sort of an internal compass that guides each individual member of the profession.

I’m going to talk about two professions in particular, namely journalism and college teaching, which I’ll call academia. These are the two professions that I’m most interested in, because they are involved, or should be involved, with helping individuals come to well-reasoned decisions about public issues. I’m going to argue that these professions serve society poorly, not because they fail to live up to their norms and standards, but because their norms and standards are themselves misguided.

Before I get into that, let me make a couple of explanations and qualifications

First, when I criticize the professions, I’m talking about the professions collectively, not the individual members of the professions. Individual journalists, for example, are intelligent and conscientious, as far as I can tell. But recent history has shown us that honorable men and women can fight for honorable reasons in dishonorable wars. Similarly, intelligent individuals can work, for conscientious reasons, in misguided professions.

But how can this be? After all, what is a profession except the individuals who compose it? Well, as far as I can see, the reason is that the professions, for all the good they do – and they obviously do an enormous amount of good – also make their participants a little crazy. They make their participants a little crazy by inculcating the norms and standards of the professions, not only the intelligent ones but the stupid ones as well. This process is called “socialization” by those in the profession; others might call it “brainwashing.”

As mentioned, I’m interested in journalism and academia, and those are the two professions I’ll be talking about. When I first thought about these two professions, other professions looked good by comparison. As time has gone on, however, I’ve read and heard things here and there that made me think that what I see in journalism and academia may also hold true of the other professions.

So I offer journalism and academia as examples of professions whose norms and standards are open to question. I’ll leave it to you to determine whether the same is true of other professions.

What’s wrong with journalism and academia? Let’s start with the purpose they’re supposed to serve. One of the important purposes both of these professions should serve is to help individuals make good decisions – well-reasoned decisions – about public affairs and other matters. In the case of journalism, I would say it’s the most important purpose. In any case it’s certainly the rationale for journalism’s First Amendment protection.

What, then, is required for a well-reasoned decision? Basically, you have to consider arguments on both sides, bringing in both the ends to be achieved and the facts relevant to achieving those ends. You have to test and evaluate the arguments. You have to identify the issues arising from the arguments. You have to make distinctions, and so on.

Now let’s look first at journalism. If journalism were serving the public interest as it should, it would do the things I’ve just described. Does it? Obviously not, as we can all recognize just by reading the newspapers or watching TV or listening to the radio. The evidence is all around us: Helping citizens make reasoned decisions is simply not what journalism is about.

To gauge how poorly journalism does in this respect, we should not look at the worst efforts but at the best efforts, the cases where journalism is explicitly trying to help people reason. The best example I know, at least on paper, is the feature on the Plain Dealer Op.Ed. page called “Taking Sides.” As the name implies, this is an attempt to present both sides on some controversy of public importance, in the form of opposing op-ed columns written by persons involved in the controversy. The Plain Dealer should be commended for this effort, I suppose, but the results range from the pathetic to the laughable. The two opposing authors just have their say – period. There is no attempt to insure that the opponents engage one another, nor to test the arguments presented, nor to identify issues and address them. The two authors usually go off in different directions, and what one says may be completely irrelevant to what the other says. Readers, to be sure, may get some new ideas, but seldom with any basis for judging the two sides of the controversy. If this is the best that journalism has to offer – and apparently it is – then we can be assured that journalists neither appreciate nor understand what it is to make reasoned decisions.

In short, we know just from looking at the media that journalism for the most part doesn’t even try to help citizens make reasoned decisions. What does it do? What are the norms and standards of the journalistic profession? And how do they explain journalism’s malfeasance?

This is how I would sum up those norms and standards: To convey factual information quickly, accurately and fairly. It’s expressed in the slogan: “Get it fast, get it first and get it right.” Or the NBC motto of some years back: “Wherever it breaks. Whatever it takes.”

Of course, these norms are not all bad. But they lead away from reasoned decision making in two ways:

First, they say nothing about what information should be included – what is the “news that’s fit to print.” Therefore the media give us what is interesting, regardless of whether it’s important to our real concerns or not.

A case in point is the lead story in a recent edition of The Plain Dealer. The large headline, across the page, said: “Third trial for Sheppard.” Now, the Sam Sheppard trial and all that went along with it is certainly interesting, and it may have a slight relevance to our concerns with the justice system. But the one event – the granting of a new trial – certainly isn’t important enough to our real concerns to warrant being the lead story.

Second, the norms of journalism imply what I call the worship of the current event. Journalists focus on particular events – particular events that are happening now – and the standards of journalism say that the primary goal is to get the story out first. But why would we want to know what’s happening as quickly as possible? Not for the sake of understanding or decision making, because we don’t need to understand or make decisions instantaneously. Rather, it’s for the same reason we want to know what’s happening in a football game – we’re just curious about and excited by the outcome. In other words, journalism treats events of public concern as if they were sports events.

Thus, the very norms and standards of journalism lead away from its proper function of helping us make decisions about public matters. Let me repeat that I am not talking about bad journalism; I’m talking about good journalism, about journalism that fully lives up to its norms and standards. The norms and standards themselves are faulty.

Nor am I talking about the business setting that journalism operates in – newspapers and the growing number of one-newspaper towns, or the TV industry, etc. However journalism may be corrupted by the industry it works for, I am saying that the profession itself is misguided.

Now to the other profession I want to talk about, college teaching. What I have to say applies especially to the liberal arts, where one of the proper goals is to teach students how to reason out their decisions in the political and perhaps in the personal sphere.

Two things work against academia’s achieving this purpose. One is the lecture method, which is still predominant, though in fairness it’s not universal. A lecture consists of one-way transmission of information from teacher to student. It is faulty in two ways. First, it is an ineffective way to transmit information, Second and more important, lecturing prevents the valuable class time from being put to some use in which the instructor leads the student in actively thinking about the subject. Only through active thinking can a student learn to reason through to a decision; thus the lecture method works against such reasoning.

Various defenses of the lecture method have been put forth, of course. Almost all of them seem to be rationalizations rather than real justifications. For example, it is said that the instructor has something to say that can’t be garnered from textbooks. This is true, but irrelevant. The instructor can have his or her notes copied and passed out to the class. This would be a much more effective way of transmitting the valuable information and would leave the class time available for student-teacher interaction. Or if personal presentation is really considered to be valuable, the instructor could videotape her lecture. Again, this would be a more effective way to transmit information, since students could replay parts of the lecture as needed.

In fact, videotaped lectures might be effective in another way, for one lecture could be given to any number of students. Thus each instructor in a department could lecture only on his or her own specialty. The organization of the curriculum would be more flexible and productive, which brings me to the second complaint against academia.

The college curriculum, as we all know, is almost always divided into separate subjects – history, political science, etc. This is so accepted that it seems natural, but why so? Not because it helps the student to understand the world around her. Any real-life problem in the political arena, and in other arenas as well, involves a number of different disciplines which need to be synthesized if the problem is to be understood. Consider the problem of health care, for example. Disciplines impinging on this problem include economics, political science, political philosophy, sociology, and probably others. The student must apply these disciplines to the problem of health care and, in addition, must learn how to synthesize them. And she must know how to reason about the problem. This is not accomplished if the subjects must be studied in isolation from each other.

Why, then, is the college curriculum divided as it is, into the traditional subjects? The answer is obvious: Because those traditional subjects are what the college instructors learned in graduate school. There is a cart-before-the horse situation here. Academia does not design the teaching of college instructors so as to provide the best college education. Rather, college education is designed to fit what college instructors have been taught. It would almost seem as if college exists to provide jobs for professors.

Let’s put this another way: There is a great difference between two questions a college instructor, or potential instructor, might ask.

He might say, “Given my intellectual talents, what can I learn and teach so as to be of greatest service to society?”

Or he might say, “Given what I have learned, how can I teach the material I have learned so as to be of greatest service to society?”

These may sound like the same question, especially since they both bespeak a desire to serve society. I would guess the typical college instructor would see them as the same question, since he assumes the learning of his discipline as a given. But they are not the same question. One asks how college and university may best be organized for the greatest benefit of students; the other assumes the conventional answer to that question.

And that is my case against journalism and academia. I see a hard knot of irrationality at the center of these professions; their norms and standards are thoroughly misguided and in need of examination and revision. I invite you to wonder whether the same holds true of the other professions. To start the critical process, I’ll make some quick remarks about a couple of the other professions.

In medicine, we are becoming aware that the heroism – the drive to keep patients alive against all odds – may do a disservice not only by using up resources that could be better employed in more modest ways, but also by extending lives beyond any benefit to the patient.

Or consider the legal profession. How can lawyers be surprised at the public’s disdain of them? We all have the right to equal justice for all, and yet anyone involved in the legal system, even if innocent, has to pay a great deal of money to receive justice. We have to pay lawyers to receive what is – or is said to be – ours by right. Another fault of the system is evident to anyone who watches the excellent TV program “The Practice,” which constantly displays the self-loathing of the chief characters, not because they are bad lawyers, but because they are good lawyers, good lawyers who use their ability to defeat the cause of justice. It’s hard to say whether the fault lies with the legal profession itself or with the adversarial system that lawyers work under. In any case, the norms and standards governing the profession bear examination.

For these and any other profession, we need always ask, “What is the proper purpose of this profession, and are its norms and standards designed to achieve that purpose to the maximum degree?”