Unsettling The Pulitzer Effect: Investigating Changes to the Columbia Journalism School from its Undergraduate Origins to National Influence

Abstract

Within the Ivy League, and indeed the rest of American higher education, Columbia’s Journalism school stands apart in many ways. Its founding history, connections to Joseph Pulitzer’s media empire, and rising prestige in the world of professional reporting begs questions about the evolution of the school from an idea to an institution of renown. This research paper traces that history, documenting the early proposals of Pulitzer to the Columbia board of Trustees to establish the school and exploring the curricular changes enacted by school leadership during its early years of operation. Though other scholars help provide the background and shed light on some critical questions in this article—including the reasons why the school was established despite profound bureaucratic delays—, further primary source research helps explicate the perilous standing of the Journalism school. Guiding this investigation of the school, this paper posed three domains of study concerning: (1) how and why the school was established, (2) why it became a graduate institution, and (3) currently, how it perceives its own renown, prestige, and national standing. Archival material from the correspondence of Nicholas Murray Butler, Joseph Pulitzer, and institutional records from former Deans of the Journalism School and Trustees reveals more complicated answers to these guiding questions. They show how the school stumbled into existence amidst unprecedented change and challenges. Alterations to its curriculum, academic standing among other graduate schools at Columbia, and tenuous balancing act between vocational and liberal arts education characterizes Columbia’s Journalism School as a site of complexity and pedagogical uncertainty. This paper therefore argues that Pulitzer’s vision of the school was abandoned—to a degree—amidst the school’s shift to a graduate institution. The Pulitzer Prizes, however, attempt to recoup this vision by emphasizing journalism in the public service while simultaneously reinforcing the vocational identity of journalism as a discipline. As such, the Journalism School, as it exists today, stands as a physical and academic locus with conflicting credos: a professional school, determinant of exceptional journalistic contributions, site of scholarly excellence, and prestigious academy for academics of journalism and reportage.

Introduction

When Joseph Pulitzer proposed a journalism school at Columbia in the late 19th century, he ignited a century-long struggle over whether reporting belonged in the academy at all, or in the streets where news was made. The speculation about journalism’s role in the university prompted a slew of questions that interrogated the founding, curricular development, and professional awards that have come to characterize the school as a prestigious site where journalists are trained and educated. These moments comprise the early considerations within this research manuscript that explore (1) the school’s founding, (2) its change from undergraduate to graduate programming, and (3) the role of its Pulitzer Prizes within the larger landscape of journalism education and professionalism in America. However, although these questions were initially proposed, the bulk of secondary scholarship provided in this paper offers direct answers. In brief, the urban locale and prestige of Columbia offered the perfect place for Pulitzer to endow a school honor of the profession to which he devoted his life. During the financial troubles of the Great Depression, the Journalism School’s first dean, Carl Ackerman, swapped the undergraduate curriculum for a one-year graduate program to cut costs and combat the Trustee’s uncertainties about an open-door admissions policy proposed by Pulitzer. The prizes, awarded within several different genres and media categories, helped establish the project of journalism as both an industry and practice that served the public. These questions are tackled in the literature portion of this research project.

 These questions, though widely discussed, offer new territory that this research will cover, outlining the tumultuous history of the Journalism School and its journey from being a simple idea to a prestigious institution. Given the bulk of primary source material that expounds on the rocky history of the school, this research project seeks to unearth the reason behind this tumult and explain the impetus for the challenges that plagued the Journalism School since it began operations in the fall of 1912.

By pairing secondary scholarship with archival documents, this paper finds that the troubles within the Journalism School were catalyzed by its struggle to balance professional and vocational training with formal education in the academy. The Columbia Journalism School’s evolution from Pulitzer’s civic-minded vision to a graduate institution of national prestige reflects enduring tensions between professionalism and academic legitimacy. These tensions are compounded by the school’s position within New York City, where its dual role as a site of scholarly training and urban reportage creates ongoing conflict over its educational mission amidst the city’s prominent role as a magnet of industry, talent, and intellectual wealth.

Literature Review

To help provide context for the primary source research in this manuscript, the following literature review explores a variety of secondary scholarship that outlines the history of the Journalism School at Columbia. This paper considers a wide range of authors writing during the time when the school was established in addition to well after the fact. The following background is organized into three main thematic sections. The first explores the early origins of journalism education in the United States, Pulitzer’s vision for the school, and the administrative challenges that delayed the arrival of Columbia’s Journalism School. The second section delves into the inter- and postwar history of the school and its graduate-only education. It also centers on the internal reforms that positioned it within a changing university structure marked by financial pressures and professionalization. The final section considers post-1980 critiques and reform efforts, including President Lee Bollinger’s intervention in the early 2000s, that revisited the journalism’s civic mission and intellectual status at Columbia specifically. These three clusters frame Columbia not only as an institutional case study, but as a site where broader debates over journalism’s academic and democratic purpose have unfolded.

The Founding Vision and Early Resistance

This review of literature begins with the early history of the Journalism School, its founding vision, and early resistance to its establishment when Pulitzer first took his proposal to Columbia. Richard Terrill Baker provides an important overview of the way journalism rose to become an important scholarly discipline taught in universities around the country.

Despite the presence of journalism around the nation through daily reporting and the proliferation of print newspapers, the industry itself experienced some early, painful adjustments when it came to integrating the industry in university education. Discussions about this endeavor—of placing journalism in the academy—centered around the “conflict of interest between the rugged, gifted newspaperman of native aptitude and the college man with his book learning” (Baker 1954, 8). The debate around “book learning” versus professionalism came to a head at Washington and Lee University when one of its founders, Robert E. Lee, introduced proposals for “journalistic training” to aid in southern reconstruction after the civil war (Baker 1954, 8). Though it placed a heavy emphasis on the craftmanship of publishing, the program’s early successes prompted other schools to take notice. Kansas State College launched a similar program in 1873 focusing on printing; Cornell’s president Andrew Dickson White expressed similar intentions guided by the university’s motto of “instruction in any study.” But the subject eventually dropped after a journalism course planned for the 1888-9 academic year at Cornell never came to fruition. Even amidst the widespread shift among American universities—transitioning from the classical English tradition to a Teutonic foundation—that signaled the rise of professional education, the project of journalism in collegiate education was considered a failure (Baker 1954, 8). The foundations for such a course in the professional discipline of journalism, however, would remain intact and several lectures and classes on newspaper writing arose gradually in the aftermath. 

Baker credits the firm establishment of journalism in university education to the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and its alumni community. During a meeting on March 2, 1888, Philadelphia Times Editor Eugene M. Camp read an article called “Journalists: Born or Made” while contributing his own points of view to the conversation. Five years after, Camp’s ideas would propel Wharton to offer its first course for journalists. This moment catapulted the question of journalism education in colleges to the forefront of Joseph Pulitzer’s attention—media magnate and founder of The New York World—as his prominence within the industry rose. Columbia College, in many ways, was primed for the arrival of this discipline on its campus as changes to its curriculum and educational offerings proliferated. President Barnard began to not just grow the undergraduate offerings of the college but provide for graduate training in a host of disciplines. John Jay—an alumnus of the college and spokesperson of the university—continued to advocate for these changes and a shift away from Greek- and Latin-based educational traditions in place of a more “contemporary curriculum” (Baker 1954, 17). He would even go so far as to say that the broad foundation of this type of contemporary education would make Columbia through journalism:

“The Alma Mater not alone of the coming editors of this section, but of the teachers and professors, who, in the academies and colleges of the republic, may hereafter assist in the training of accomplish conductors of the American press” (Acta Columbiana, V, No. 3 (November 1887), 40).

Jay’s remarks are the earliest record of Columbia’s interest in the education of professional journalists and his wishes to establish such a school was widely published in the tri-weekly publication Acta Columbiana in 1887. In the years following, Pulitzer made every effort to help make his journalism school a reality: he made substantial gifts to support the college, allocated an endowment for the building that would house the school, and collaborated with Trustees on the proposal. Beyond these financial contributions, Pulitzer continued to push his ideas about the school even as he neared the end of his life and began working more feverishly with Columbia President Seth Low to realize his intentions. Although Pulitzer persistently adhered to his vision for the school, Low presented his proposed project to the Board of Trustees with lackluster enthusiasm (Barrett 1941, 260). However, Low’s failure to pitch the project was not the only reason why Pulitzer’s vision fell short. Trustees also expressed widespread hesitation about the project and the notion that Columbia would be “teaching journalists under the Pulitzer-World auspices” (Barrett 1941, 260). For them, creating a school influenced and funded by Pulitzer’s journalism enterprise might undercut Columbia’s integrity by allowing a businessman to weigh in on academic affairs at the school.

Negotiations around the Journalism School completely soured after a series of three clashes. The first surrounded Pulitzer’s desire to have an entirely new building made for the school and the Trustees were hesitant to allocate over three quarters of his endowed funds to building a new place to house his school. They solved this issue by amending the cost of the building to just half of his endowment. The second concerned the admission process for students and the academic reputation of the University. Pulitzer hoped that admissions standards for hopeful scholars at the school would be minimal and their combined two years of college level work in the “liberal arts and sciences” coupled with two years of “professional work in the School of Journalism” would lead to a Bachelor of Science degree. The Trustees, hesitant to implement an open-door policy, had to compromise. They settled for two different degree tracks at the Journalism school, one allowing well-qualified students to skip right to a certificate program in professional training and one for college-educated students that would culminate in an official university degree (Baker 1954, 31). The third disagreement surrounded Pulitzer’s vision for an advisory board of journalism professionals to supervise the school, which proved worrisome to Trustees who enjoyed their authority on campus.

Without enough support from the university, the Pulitzer’s plan was rejected in 1892. Ten years later, however, Pulitzer approached Columbia again with a proposal that had a “firmer outline and stronger detail[s]” (Barrett 1941, 261). He presented the plan to Columbia beginning in 1902 and started negotiations with President Nicholas Butler. Without Low in the way—having left the university years earlier—Pulitzer’s plan was viewed more favorably and negotiations proceeded with smaller delays (Barrett 1941, 261). While Butler still worried about the negative public criticism that Pulitzer’s plan could incite, staff at The World were angry that Pulitzer’s financial favors had turned away from his enterprise and toward Columbia instead (Barrett 1941, 262).  Nonetheless, the first agreement for the school was signed in 1903 and a new will was signed a year later to create endowments from the Pulitzer estate to found the school and its prizes, ones that would come to emphasize journalism’s role in public service (Barrett 1941, 261–63).

For Pulitzer, the mission of the College of Journalism was deeply personal. He hoped the school could “raise the standard of the editorial profession” as well as “mark the distinction between real journalists and men who do a kind of newspaper work that requires neither culture nor conviction” (Pulitzer 2019, 194). His essay on the matter, published in the North America Review in 1904 helped to demarcate not just the motivations that inspired the School of Journalism, but what the very act of teaching journalism could do for the industry. He envisioned a journalism school that would not only teach the craft—news writing, editing, composition—but also champion a deep understanding of politics, constitutional government, economics, literature, and public opinion (J. R. Boylan 2003, 4). He explicitly argued that journalism should be treated “exactly as if it were the profession of law or medicine,” anchoring it within the intellectual and ethical frameworks of a liberal education (J. R. Boylan 2003, 4). This idea was both progressive and radical for its time, setting the future Columbia Journalism School apart from emerging trade-oriented programs though its liberal arts focus. Pulitzer’s determination to create a system of annual prizes for journalistic excellence—that would later become the Pulitzer Prizes—further underscored his belief that journalism served a democratic function and the public interest (J. R. Boylan 2003, 5). This idealistic model created enduring tensions—with university trustees, skeptical editors, and even Columbia’s early presidents—who worried about vocationalism diluting academic prestige (J. R. Boylan 2003, 5–6). Yet Pulitzer’s philosophy remained central: he saw journalism as a means of cultivating civic literacy and safeguarding democratic life. He hoped that building an institution could help professionalize the press while holding it morally accountable to the public it served.

Inter- and Postwar Institutionalization and the Graduate Shift

The next cluster of literature provides a detailed explanation about the internal transformations within the school of journalism during the interwar and postwar periods. As it adapted to professional standards, academic legitimacy, and its shift from undergraduate to graduate education, the character of Columbia’s Journalism school was redefined and challenged over time. The first dean of the School, Carl Ackerman, details the early purpose behind the Columbia’s Journalism School from his perspective as its first official leader.

During one of his reports to President Butler, Ackerman wrote that within the industry of journalism, “there have been fewer merges and failures, proportionally, in the newspaper field than in any other organized business and no scandals or financial losses to large bodies of individual investors” (Ackerman 2019, 163). While he wrote with an attention to the stability of the journalism field, Ackerman was convinced that this stability could be supported through formalized—rather than experiential—journalistic education. This makes quite a bit of sense given that Ackerman increased admission standards to the Journalism School during his tenure despite considerable backlash (Ackerman 2019, 159). Ackerman justified these more stringent standards by pointing to the type of people working in the industry. At the time, Ackerman argued that journalism was in need of “men of character” despite public perception that cast reporters as “boys” (Ackerman 2019, 164). This personnel shift—from “boys” to “men”—frames the larger shift happening within the field that increasingly disincentivized sensationalism storytelling while valuing practices that served a social need for truth (Ackerman 2019, 166–67).

Under Ackerman’s leadership beginning in 1934, the Journalism School made the shift to a graduate-only institution. The high cost of hiring faculty from across the university and the limited flexibility of Pulitzer’s endowment led to mounting financial pressure, particularly during the Great Depression. In response, Columbia’s administration and trustees sought a more cost-efficient approach, prompting Ackerman to propose a streamlined two-year graduate model. Though only a one-year Master of Science degree was ultimately approved—due to university president Nicholas Murray Butler’s concerns over cost and academic prestige—, it marked a decisive shift toward professional, newsroom-centered training. The undergraduate degree was eliminated entirely by 1935, making Columbia the first journalism school in the U.S. to operate exclusively at the graduate level and establishing a structure that would define the school for decades (J. Boylan 2006).

Reforms, Critiques, and Contemporary Reckonings

These questions, posed by earlier scholars that tackle the history of the school, surface within later scholarship that addresses how Columbia responded to this crisis of legitimacy. This conceptual conundrum is best contextualized through the early intellectual history of journalism that experienced a fundamental change between the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Kathy Forde and Katherine Foss examine how the practice of journalistic reporting was redefined and debated within American print culture between 1885 and 1910. They framed their analysis through James Carey’s influential argument that journalism history should prioritize the evolving “idea” of the report—how it rendered reality and shaped collective consciousness (Forde and Foss 2012, 123). Drawing on trade journals such as The Journalist and Editor and Publisher, they explicate the profound conflicts over narrative voice and factual representation that characterized the industry. These ideological changes allowed the practice of journalism to be restructured around neutral, third-person objectivity and strict factuality (Forde and Foss 2012, 126). The growing dominance of a fact-based style over interpretive or narrative reporting helped concretize an ideal of what a journalistic report should be: detached observation removed from storytelling (Forde and Foss 2012, 128–32).

Michael Camp shows how early 20th-century university leaders, rooted in classical traditions, viewed journalism as vocational and transient. They thought journalism education was better suited for trade schools than elite universities. This largely resisted Pulitzer’s efforts to elevate it to the same status as law or medicine despite his substantial financial support. Camp further discusses the modern paradox within journalism education and professional life (Camp 2012). Rising journalism school enrollments amidst industry decline highlights how Columbia, as the symbolic and material realization of Pulitzer’s ideals, occupied a central place in debates over journalism’s civic, professional, and academic purpose. With an industry retreating from widespread hiring, the issue of a one-year journalism education and its larger intellectual positionality in the academy supplements Forde and Foss’s research about the changing culture of reporting in America. Camp justly interrogates journalism’s academic status within the U.S. university system, but Alice Koshiyama expands the lens to a global scale, exposing how neoliberal reforms pushed journalism education toward vocationalism and market responsiveness—often at the expense of critical civic training.

Quoting multiple scholars, Koshiyama concludes that journalism is best taught within a flexible curriculum that fosters critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and practical skills while remaining open to intellectual traditions beyond narrow vocational training. This perspective largely agrees with some of the changes within the journalism school and the way it was founded in Pulitzer’s vision of the liberal arts. Despite this original intention, however, the shift towards professional training when the school shifted to graduate education skewed the school towards a vocational identity. Isabel Macdonald adds to this by underscoring how efforts to professionalize journalism education aimed to uphold journalistic integrity against corporate and neoliberal pressures. However, they placed undue responsibility on individual journalists while downplaying the structural economic forces degrading the field (Macdonald 2006).

Historical Methodology and Positionality

While much of the early history of the Journalism School is well documented by other scholars, primary sources from the Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML) at Columbia University help to position these secondary accounts of the Journalism School within the real-time events on campus from around the time of the school’s founding in 1912. Using Richard Terril Baker’s book about the history of the Journalism School, primary sources were solicited and viewed at RBML. Early archival materials—especially from Trustee reports and letters between Butler and Pulitzer—forced the scope of this research to narrow. An earlier version of this project considered the fundamental role of the Columbia Scholastic Press Association (CSPA) and the Pulitzer Prizes in the unfolding prominence of the school. However, because of the numerous developmental challenges that arose throughout the school’s history, the focus of this project shifted to consider the tenuous relationship between academic and professional education in relation to the larger landscape of Columbia’s prestigious graduate schools. Consequently, this research relied on archival materials from the records of Nicholas Murray Butler, administrative records, and statements from the school’s first director, Talcott Williams to produce its chief findings. Most of these primary sources were read in depth, photographed for continued analysis, and then synthesized through hand notes and digital annotations after visits to RBML concluded.

Seeing that the subject of this research concerns an institution that the author currently attends, this paper also pays mind to the positionality of this article within Columbia’s institutional environment and among other scholarship of similar scope and focus. Though the nature of this research deals with the history of the Journalism School more than a century in the past, this research project successfully mobilizes a concept called “critical distance.” This mode of analysis allows the researcher to maintain enough distance from the subject matter to be analytically critical while ensuring the right amount of proximity to take an authorial stance. The author, for instance, is not a current student at the Journalism School but attends the institution in which it is housed (as an undergraduate). This relationship ensures diligent and unbiased historical analysis while imbuing a sense of intellectual “authority” about the subject matter—Columbia University—that frames the specific topic of this paper. The methodology of the paper thus triangulates between secondary scholarship, primary sources, and critical positionality to form its central thesis and guiding approach to the subject matter at hand.

Results and Archival Findings

The large quantity of archival information unearthed through this research project is divided into four main categories. The first documents the early history of the school during its planning through correspondence within the Nicholas Murray Butler papers. The research then centers on the work of the school’s first director, Talcott Williams, his statements about the school and later changes to the Pulitzer Prizes. It focuses mostly on the elimination of the Arts Traveling Grant during as an indicator of the Prizes’ shifting from commending all forms of media to privileging writing. The third section explores the historical changes in the university and the imperilment of the Journalism School during President Sovern’s tenure. This portion of the findings mainly explores the widespread plan to merge different schools at the University to create categories of faculty and students grouped in common disciplinary focuses. The final segment of these results synthesizes these primary sources while paying mind to the contemporary challenges of the university after the 1990s.

“Faithfully Yours:” Nicholas Butler and Pulitzer’s Vision

In the first half of 1907, momentum for the Journalism School at Columbia gradually increased and Butler began making inquiries to help find an individual who would be qualified enough in the field of Journalism to help establish the school. Dr. George W. Hosmer was one of the first people Butler reached out to about the status of the search for such a person and by February 1907, five years before the official opening of the school, Columbia still had no frontrunner to help steer the project (Butler 1907d). About a month later, Butler made inquiries to Alfred Holman, an editor of the San Francisco Argonaut. In his letter, Butler was hopeful that he could find someone who might “provide for a careful study of the whole situation by a competent man” to help Columbia create its Journalism School by drawing on work being done elsewhere “in America and at Columbia” (Butler 1907c). Butler hoped that Holman would work for a period of four or five months to help bring the Pulitzer’s ideas to life on the Morningside Campus, but Holman expressed substantial hesitation about his ability to guide the school’s scholarly endeavors (Holman 1907b). Later that same year, Butler reached out to another candidate named Will H. Irwin, who completed his training in journalism at Stanford University and began working in magazine and print journalism thereafter (Irwin 1907). Butler would later interview Irwin for the position and expressed in an internal memorandum on June 5, 1907, that he was “very favorably impressed” with his qualifications to help steer the founding of the Journalism School (Butler 1907a). Holman was also a top contender to prepare a report on the establishment of the school and, like Irwin, had “a very high conception of the possible usefulness of the School of Journalism, and would be honored in being permitted to work for it” (Butler 1907a).

By mid-June, Holman had agreed to author the report to help guide Columbia’s new Journalism School into existence and Butler was quick to send word to Pulitzer that he had secured a candidate to bring his school to fruition (Holman 1907a; Butler 1907b). But that is largely where the conversation ends; Butler would write to Pulitzer once again on October 11, 1907 sharing news of an article Holman published in The Argonaut about the emerging Journalism School at Columbia (Butler 1907f). Butler wrote again a few days later asking Pulitzer to help refinance some of the university’s funding deficit which increased after the campus was moved from downtown New York up to Morningside Heights. Making no mention of Pulitzer’s plan for the Journalism School, Butler asked for a yearly $100,000 donation over the next three years to help Columbia “continue its work without reduction either of education opportunity or of salaries, either of which would be fatal” (Butler 1907e). The next time Butler reaches out to Pulitzer about his proposal is nearly one year later, in October 1908 when the University of Missouri announced that it would be opening its own School of Journalism. Even then, Butler seems to taunt Pulitzer, expressing that both he and the Trustees “think we could do something even better” (Butler 1908).

The detailed correspondence between Butler, Holman, Irving, and Pulitzer surfaces several key moments in the development of Columbia’s Journalism School in the five years prior to 1912 when it opened. In the early part of 1907 and through the middle of that year, Butler seems adamant to find someone to help guide the construction and establishment of the school. He writes often about various candidates he is speaking with to devise a report that would outline the mission and purpose of such a school at Columbia. But in the final quarter of that year on October 14, 1907, Butler is consumed with the more urgent need to refinance Columbia’s operations and avoid cutting back on salaries. He appeals to Pulitzer’s financial capital and asks for a three-year funding commitment that could be provided either from his personal estate or the fund he established years earlier for the Journalism School (Butler 1907e). As a result, while earlier scholarship highlights three different points of disagreement between the Trustees and Pulitzer when President Low was in office at Columbia, Butler’s personal correspondences show how the financial strain of moving to the Morningside Campus delayed the Journalism School’s creation. The need to prioritize the daily operation of the College seemed more important to Butler than creating an entirely new institution at the university to work on different educational priorities. But despite this setback, Columbia’s Journalism School arrived in full force in 1912, and the Trustees hired Talcott Williams as its first director.

On the Record: The Start of Journalism at Columbia

One of the most important characters in the unfolding history of the journalism school at Columbia was Talcott Williams, the first appointed director of the school who helped to commemorate its founding in 1912. His remarks prior to the opening of the Journalism School are interesting for a few reasons, not only because Williams points to the fundamental reason why such a school was founded specifically at Columbia, but also the overarching mission of the school. Williams cites three main factors that he hoped would propel the school to prominence: (1) the large sum endowed to the school by Pulitzer, (2) the fact that it would be the first school of journalism in the country to use a “great city as a laboratory,” and (3) its position within a “great university” that could give depth and accuracy to the training of its students (Williams 1912, 235). Williams triangulates between three central elements of the school’s history but emphasizes on the relationship between Columbia and New York City twice in his statements. While he recognizes the unique and important role that Pulitzer’s funding played in the founding of the school, in his eyes the Journalism School benefited from the laboratory environment of the city and Columbia’s academic resources that too, drew substantial benefit from its urban surroundings. At the same time, Williams emphasizes the mission that the school would be shouldering: a responsibility to not just provide training on a vocational level, but the education of “professional knowledge” relating to the practice of journalism itself (Williams 1912, 238). His speech therefore has the unique effect of outlining the particular benefits of Columbia’s Journalism School while providing context for the essential balancing act that it would have to undertake over the coming decades to establish itself as a meaningful institution for journalism education. Extracts from Pulitzer’s will provide a bit more context and background for the original mission of the school that somewhat departs from William’s characterization outlined above.

While Pulitzer alludes to the important urban advantage that Columbia offered, his focus was more on the discipline of journalism and its standing among other professional fields. Extracts from his will published by the university highlight how Pulitzer wanted to raise the discipline of journalism to equal standing among other professional institutions that instructed “lawyers, physicians, clergymen, military and naval officers, engineers, architects, and artists” (Pulitzer 1911, 4). To achieve this, Pulitzer endowed one million dollars to the Trustees of Columbia to build the Journalism School during his lifetime and provisioned another sum of the same amount to be paid after his death and only after three years of successful operation (Pulitzer 1911, 4). Pulitzer’s endowments to the Columbia did not end at his wishes to establish a school of journalism; later parts of his will outline the flagship award given by the school, the Pulitzer Prizes. At the time when his will was authored, Pulitzer provided endowments for ten different awards that the Journalism School could distribute:

1. Best essay on the development and future of the Journalism School.
2. Most “disinterested and meritorious public service rendered” by an American Newspaper during the year.
3. Annual award for the best “history of services rendered to the public” by the American Press during the year.
4. Five annual traveling scholarships, three for graduates of the Journalism School with high honors, one for a student in music, and the other for a student in the visual arts.
5. Annual award for the best editorial article.
6. Annual award for the best “example of a reporter’s work.”
7. Annual awards for published works, including best novel, best play, best book on US history, and best biography “teaching patriotic and unselfish services to the people.”

(Pulitzer 1911, 4–5)

Despite the explicit allocation of funding for different awards, including traveling scholarships for music and visual arts, the nature of the awards changed substantially as the Journalism School continued its work on campus. In 1960, the Advisory Board on the Pulitzer Prizes met to establish an appropriate alternative to the traveling arts scholarship citing general “dissatisfaction” and “criticisms of the quality of the work done by persons whom the National Academy of Design has chosen” (Kirk, Pulitzer, Jr., and Hohenberg 1960). The committee chose to eliminate the scholarship and allocate an annual award to assist an American student “of superior qualifications to prepare for a career in critical writing on art” (Kirk, Pulitzer, Jr., and Hohenberg 1960). While such a shift might be deemed unimportant, it represents a larger change within the Journalism School that doubled down on text, writing, and narrative as the main types of media and manifestations of the reporting discipline that could be awarded by the Prizes. Such a move placed a disproportional emphasis and primary on the written word in the field of journalism and represented a stark shift in the original plans detailed by Pulitzer in his will. Indeed, two decades after the art scholarship was eliminated, the Journalism School Received an unprecedent influx of funding—a combined $4 million sum—for its magazine program and an institute to study the First Amendment (Adler 1984; United Press International 1983). Although the school’s influx in funding came as a positive omen, things began to take a turn three years later. The Journalism School and its faculty—perhaps ironically so—would find themselves confronting challenges to their autonomy and independence levied by their allies in Low Library.

Merging Schools and The Faculty of Fine Arts and Communication

Nearly three decades after the Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship in Art was replaced, the Trustees of Columbia began working on a larger plan to merge various graduate schools at the university according to similarities across their disciplines. A report published by the Trustees outlined a few of the central goals of this report and strategic initiative; it detailed eighty-two different recommendations that rested on several key assumptions. These goals included international standards of “scholarly, scientific, and professional excellence;” cosmopolitan principals, liberal temper and commitment to “human value;” dedication to research and teaching, the responsibility of each individual school and a global “horizon” of the university.” Above all else, the report sought to establish Columbia among the ranks—in “fact and reputation”—among the top “three or four centers of learning in the United States” (The Trustees of Columbia University 1987). These lofty ambitions meant that the university began a new effort of “organizing the academy” and separating different schools across seven different faculties that would unify disparate departments and faculty members teaching across various fields within the university. Alongside their recommendations to establish a single residential college for undergraduates, the Trustees wanted to establish a Faculty of Fine Arts and Communication that would “[embrace] the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, the School of the Arts, the School of Journalism, [and] the School of Library Service” (The Trustees of Columbia University 1987). This attempt to organize the faculty and schools across related disciplines—in this instance, Fine Arts and Communication—was met by harsh criticisms by alumni and faculty who thought that such a move would jeopardize the independence of the Journalism School. The impetus for such a faculty was driven by “economy” and the notion that consolidating the relatively small faculty among the different schools would help support “general university business” while promoting interdisciplinary collaboration (The Trustees of Columbia University 1987).

In response, then-President Michael Ira Sovern (1980-93) and his team of administrators received countless letters from graduates and overwhelming pushback during meetings with faculty at the Journalism School. Some of the staunchest criticism against Sovern’s plan came from faculty at the Journalism School who voiced both practical and pragmatic concerns of the proposal. Dr. Frederick T.C. Yu, appointed dean of the Journalism School back in 1970, voiced one such concern directly to Provost Michael Mooney during a meeting of the faculty:

“We don’t really need some special person to be created to look after our interest or to fight a battle for us. There’s also a matter of implied unfairness. The assumption is that the Law School dean and Business School dean can directly negotiate with the central administration and take care of their interest but that we—the four deans—are somehow incapable of doing that and must need someone to represent us at Low. There’s another thing: You always use Law, Business and Medicine as examples. You don’t talk about the School of Social Work. Social Work is not terrible large. What is so special about Social Work that it has to be treated as Law and Business, and not like Journalism?” (Columbia University Office of the President 1987, 7).

In response to pushback, Mooney drew attention to the fact that such an aggregation of faculty would not affect public perception of the school and the way it could solicit donations from alumni to help continue its mission forward. In fact, Mooney went as far as to say that the “public posture” of such a change in the university’s faculties would be minimal if at all:

“We distinguish very sharply between the infrastructure. Who knows about, finally, the office of Arts and Science? No one. Everyone knows about Columbia College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Who, for that matter really thinks about the faculty of Medicine. They don’t. They think about P&S” (Columbia University Office of the President 1987, 19).

Mooney was quite sure that public awareness of such a change in the faculty would go largely unnoticed, even ignored, but an article published in the New York Times on October 18, 1987, made public the immense faculty criticism against the proposal. It included testimony from Richard Schaffer, Acting Dean of the Architecture School, who argued that schools “could cooperate without each other in a number of ways without relinquishing any autonomy and without merging faculties” (Carmody 1987). The article incited a flood of responses from alumni of the Journalism School who were angered and afraid of what such a merger would do.

Letters came pouring in from around the country, written by professors, journalists, and interested alumni of the Journalism School who were deeply against the merging of the faculty. One letter from Don Oliver, a Correspondent at NBC News and graduate of the Journalism School in 1962, humorously complained about needing to tell people that his degree “is actually from the Columbia School of Terpsichorean Trends, Home Design, use of the Dewey Decimal System and News Purveyance” (Oliver 1987). Pat Herman, a 1953 alumna of the journalism school and benefactor of the Alexandar C. Herman Memorial Scholarship, wrote that she would “not be contributing” to the award because of “the Presidential Commission’s inane suggestion to place Journalism under an ‘academic entity known as Fine Arts and Communications.’” She writes further that her anticipated contributions would have been in the “five figures” with the sum increasing “on a yearly basis” (Herman 1987). Dozens of other letters, varying in intensity and frustration, streamed in from around the nation, expressing deep sadness and frustration over Sovern and his Committee’s choice to establish a combined faculty of Fine Arts and Communication at Columbia. Perhaps for that reason, the idea of joining the faculty was eventually dropped. Dean Yu wrote a letter to alumni of the school in April of 1988 affirming that President Sovern had rejected the proposals of the Commission while noting the unprecedented “indignation” expressed by “alumni, faculty, and students of the school” (Yu 1988).

Synthesis and Retrospective

The primary sources utilized in this research paper help to paint a picture of the tumultuous development of Columbia’s Journalism School. Personal correspondence from the office of Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler reveals a frantic search for someone to help devise a report that would guide the establishment of the school in 1907. But only a year later, Butler would appeal to Pulitzer to finance the operations of the school from 1908 to 1911 given the debt the university incurred during its move to Morningside Heights. Perhaps it was Pulitzer’s willingness to support the university at such a dire time that prompted the Trustees to look past their qualms and move forward with the opening of the school, at long last, in the fall of 1912. Talcott Williams, the first director of the Journalism School, explains the unique benefits of the school that drew upon the resources of Pulitzer’s estate, New York City, and Columbia’s larger academic atmosphere. Unfortunately, Williams said little about Pulitzer’s intention to found the Columbia Journalism School as an institution that could elevate the practice of reportage to a similar level of renown as law, medicine, and business. Such ideological disagreement—and maybe general disregard for Pulitzer’s vision—is documented well in the abrupt changes to endowed awards established at the school at Pulitzer’s bequest. The Journalism School advisory board’s choice to eliminate the Traveling Scholarship in Art and replace the award with a prize for art criticism confirmed a shift in the school’s operations. The Journalism School, amidst an influx of funding for its magazine program and First Amendment center, would no longer place an equal emphasis on the visual arts. Instead, it would center on the written word its various forms, from essays and biographies to plays and novels.

These conflicts—in its founding, mission, and operations—seemed to move from the internal to the external when President Sovern began to consider merging the journalism faculty with other schools to create the Faculty of Fine Arts and Communications. Widespread criticism from numerous alumni, students, and faculty decried Sovern’s choice to undercut the autonomy of the Journalism School and its counterparts across Morningside Heights. The plan was eventually abandoned by Sovern given the controversy, but the questions surrounding the work of the Journalism continued. The school successfully evaded Sovern’s plans for a merger and after its 75-year anniversary, appeared to be on stable footing as Columbia entered the 1990s.

However, Columbia President George Rupp (1993–2002) began to restructure university governance by pushing professional schools—including Journalism—toward greater financial and administrative autonomy, a model known as “tubs on their own bottoms” (McCaughey 2003, 564). Under this system, schools were expected to manage their own budgets, generate independent revenue, and align more explicitly with the university’s strategic goals. This reconfiguration responded to growing demands for transparency and efficiency, but it also intensified internal competition and placed pressure on smaller schools like Journalism to prove their relevance and sustainability within the broader university framework. A short time later, Columbia’s new President, Lee C. Bollinger, would pause the search for the Journalism School’s new dean to rethink and reconsider its educational principles. This abrupt move halted a nearly completed process that had yielded two high-profile finalists: James Fallows, former editor of U.S. News & World Report, and Alex S. Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter. Instead of appointing a new dean, Bollinger issued a now-famous campus-wide email declaring that Columbia needed to “rethink the mission” of its journalism school before making any further leadership decisions (Reaves 2007, 1). Bollinger’s statement framed the suspension not as administrative indecision but as a philosophical intervention. He declared, “there is a yawning gulf between the various visions of what a modern school of journalism ought to be,” and suggested that appointing a new dean without addressing these foundational questions would be “unwise” (Reaves 2007, 2). This decision, described by some as a “political spectacle,” reignited a century-old debate that traces back to Joseph Pulitzer’s original vision: should journalism schools prioritize craft training, or should they aim to integrate journalism into the broader intellectual fabric of the university?

As a result, during the 113 years since its founding, the Journalism School appears to have constantly grappled with conflicting missions, ideas, and principles behind its existence and unfolding educational obligation. This paper offers that such an internal conflict—that even continues to weigh on the school—is contextualized even further within a “spatial-urban” question that reckons once again with Columbia’s role in the city. The next section of this paper discusses that question with the hope of providing a possible explanation for the school’s embattlement with Pulitzer’s original vision.

The University in the City: The Spatial-Urban Question

To frame the ongoing challenges within Columbia’s Journalism School, this paper returns to the founding purpose of the school, its transition to graduate education, and the titular Pulitzer Prizes, three questions that inspired the early foundations of this research. These three questions are posed separately but are well captured by the singular dynamic between the Journalism School’s professional and academic role at Columbia University. After all, Pulitzer’s vision for the school was always to elevate the profession of journalism among the ranks of medicine and law while providing for vocational training for new reporters and a prize system to award professional journalism in the public service. This section frames this central debate between professionalism and academia within the idea of Columbia as “the University in the City,” burdened—or perhaps endowed—with a particular spatial-urban valence.

The ongoing internal problems within the Journalism School are caused by the tensions between professionalism and the academy; but Columbia’s urban backdrop only made drawing the line—or even balancing between—these two priorities even more challenging. Pulitzer’s vision for a school of journalism was motivated by his love of the industry and belief that it could rise in national importance and educational renown. His eventual decision to house the school at Columbia was driven by this vision and supported by the knowledge that such a school, housed in one the largest cities in the world, could draw from its surroundings and support the education of new students. But this in and of itself would set up the Journalism School’s identity crisis. It could not effectively toggle between its focus on professionalism and prestigious legacy of academia without sacrificing one for the other. In other words, if it focused too much on the liberal arts, it would neglect the surrounding industry of journalism in New York that would put its school on the map and fulfill Pulitzer’s aspirations. But if the pendulum swung too far back, subordinating academic study for pure vocational—or apprenticeship—training, Columbia’s critics and administration would question the school’s role at such a university with a long track record of excellence within the American Academy.

Ackerman’s choice to eliminate the undergraduate Bachelor of Science degree in place of a graduate-level Master of Arts program tried to solve this issue while accounting for the financial difficulties of within the school during the Great Depression. It could, in theory, offer a one-year program with both academic and professional opportunities that build on the liberal arts curricula at the College and other undergraduate institutions around the nation. Columbia’s Journalism School rose in renown and its Pulitzer Prizes helped reinforce its reputation as a prestigious site of professional and academic excellence by doubling-down on both of those values as core to the school. It is, in theory, possible for such a school to incorporate professional and academic focus areas in its central ethos. The Business School seemed to do so as the need for professional study of economics and commerce rose alongside the growth of industry in the city. But the stagnation in hiring despite the rise journalism degree enrollments would necessarily—without the profit-driven justification that the Business School could assert—draw criticism from folks like Bollinger whose defining contribution became Manhattanville, the site of Columbia’s newest campus for scientific research, its Business School, and new public venue. Thus, Columbia’s Journalism School operated and continues to remain in the ultimate “grey space” of the university, never drawing completely from its surrounding city nor its partner schools, powerhouses of research, intellectualism, and academia.

Discussion and Conclusion

So, what does this mean for the Journalism School? Does it need to rethink its mission and purpose, or can it continue to survive with one foot in the city and one foot firmly planted inside the Morningside gates? Possibly. The findings of this paper—with substantial contributions from secondary scholarship—help put to rest some of the early questions of this research project while surfacing new considerations about the role and history of the Journalism School. It shows Pulitzer’s clear motivations to establish the Journalism School at Columbia to advance the profession and draw on the success of the industry within New York City. Scholarship by Richard Baker and James Barrett provide context for the bureaucratic clashes that caused the significant delays in establishing the school in the years prior to 1912. Similar scholarship helps explicate the financial motivations that inspired Ackerman to transform the educational structure at the school from undergraduate to graduate programming. It also documents Pulitzer’s endowment for the Pulitzer Prizes that hoped to recognize the work of journalism in the public service. But in settling these questions, this project also brought to light other questions through primary source research.

The Nicholas Butler Papers show the substantial delays in the creation of the Journalism School, challenges that would allow for the University of Missouri to beat Columbia in creating the first institution to teach reporting in the county. Testimony from Talcott Williams differed in major ways from Pulitzer’s initial vision and the later shifts within the Pulitzer Prizes would underscore the increasing distance between the school and its titular benefact. The elimination of an art award meant that the Pulitzer Prizes would diverge away from recognizing a diverse body of media to privileging forms of written work and narrative projects. Finally, President Sovern’s plan to create a Faculty of Fine Arts and Communication put the internal challenges of the Journalism School back at the forefront of conversation as its autonomy came under fire. But criticism and support from alumni, students, and professors at the school would ensure that Sovern’s idea was abandoned. Given this history of conflict, tumult, and unease, this research offers a compelling case to examine how the challenging nature of Columbia’s namesake position in the “City of New York” came to generate more harms and problems, perhaps, than benefits. The need to consistently balance the academic and professional elements of journalism as both a field of study and vocation finds its way into almost all the historical challenges that this research explores.

With more diligent research into some of these specific events—such as the merging of faculty or even the building of Pulitzer Hall—, scholars may unearth even more complicated findings and further questions about the role of the Journalism School at Columbia and in the broader city of New York. But in the meantime, this research walks the line between the answers provided by secondary scholarship and the questions that primary sources create about the legacy of the Journalism School at Columbia. To proceed with the mission that prompted the creation of the school in the first place requires a more earnest attention to the urgency of professional journalism—and indeed the study of communications—in the world today. This is easy to argue and justify given the current crisis, in leadership, mission, principle, and duty, that surrounds and circles Columbia itself. The Journalism School here on campus grapples with its ability to teach through the city while anchoring the practice of academia within its pedagogy. To bring those two ideals together—the scrupulous acts of reporting and scholarship—requires the simple process of making professional reporting reflexive. The process has already begun, with rising on-campus coverage of protests and rallies that have captured national attention. Other news outlets around the city attempt adamantly do document these events but none know them better than the professional journalists—at the Journalism School and the Columbia Daily Spectator—who bring those stories to light.

In other words, the Journalism School has long grappled with an urban question: to what extent should its educational mission be embedded in the life of the city? Its earliest visionaries, like founding director Talcott Williams writing in Columbia Quarterly, championed the city as a living laboratory for journalism. Yet in Columbia’s current moment of institutional crisis, the most urgent site of observation may be the campus itself. This shift demands a renewed commitment to the kind of student reporting the school has historically nurtured. If the Dean and faculty can assert a narrative authority to chronicle (journalistically) Columbia’s declining interest in and service to the public, it would offer compelling proof of why the Journalism School’s training—professional or otherwise—remains essential today.

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