Hamm is the dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

Hamm: If you’ve done journalism history, you will realize that you can go back. I used to have a letter from Roy Howard that I would read at our introductions about how this is a challenging time for the press, and the professional world is changing, and the next paragraph is about advertising and how the new media forms are stealing our stuff for free, and then later I’d reveal that the letter was from 1933.

So given that, I do think in terms of journalism education, there is a sense of tremendous outside pressure saying “You don’t get it,” when I think it’s possible that reasonable people do get it.

I actually think most journalism schools are doing much better than they are given credit for. I also think, the biggest difference is, while there are still people in any department who are “old school,” the students change. The students are coming in and still saying that they want to work for a specific network or magazine or new place. They have it very clearly in their minds. As we’ve discovered over time, we think that the early adopters are the teenagers because they have all the latest gadgets, but they often aren’t all that cutting edge in their minds because they are responding to what they see rather than thinking about the next model or a newer world. We often have faculty who are cutting edge. We’re dealing with more challenges, but I think journalism education is doing very well today.

I’m not sure that a lot of the specific programs or technology we train people for today won’t be obsolete in a couple of years. If you come back to what I think schools have always been good at doing: We train people for a lifetime.

DL: Then why teach the tools at all? There are people who would argue vehemently that the best education for a journalist is a liberal arts education. To be liberally educated allows you to understand the world. Why the tools?

Hamm: Because I think what you are doing is developing a way of thinking. … You have to have some level of exposure, you have to be introduced to it to advance with it. And the tools allow you to do special things.

The ability to pull out the right tool is important, but to know every tool and every moment, I don’t see the longer-term value in that. I hear all the time that the students can’t graduate unless they know every tool. I don’t buy that. I do believe in the liberal arts, but I also believe that journalism schools have the ability to take these two things and marry them together.

DL: People say you cannot graduate from this school unless you know … How would you finish that sentence?

Hamm: If I were the czar of curriculum, I would put history back into every curriculum. I don’t believe an educated person can leave a journalism program and not know about journalism history because it helps so much to understand where you are and how people thought and reacted at times of crisis and opportunity. It’s why these conversations occur. People say, oh, this change is revolutionary. You should have some ability to say, not exactly. Would it surprise people to know that people in the 1920s and ’30s wrote for newspapers, they were on the radio, they were sometimes on film, they did books and magazines.

You look at Will Rogers, even though he wasn’t a traditional journalist. Any major person in a major NY newspaper was likely on the radio at some point in the ’30s. So if I were to say that you brought in a Medill student and said they’ve had law, ethics, history, the kind of issues-based classes, realizing the kinds of issues going on currently, and then had the ability to understand the skills of writing and visual communication and the work in our Knight Lab. You match that with professional experience, internships, student media, with study abroad and other leadership opportunities, and in an accredited world with a second major or minor or special emphasis, I think it’s as good a degree as you could possibly get, whether you choose to go into journalism or not.

DL: There’s no such thing as a private mistake, I always told my students.

Hamm: That pressure actually makes you so much better because you’re getting critiqued outside of the classroom. You’re being forced to consider things, issues and other things, across campus. I think that’s an extremely valuable degree.

There are two missing parts. We are having a terrible time teaching about the business of journalism. We always have. I also don’t think our classes are sophisticated enough or challenging enough. People do leads and basics and then move on. Pick three sources. We seldom get in and challenge the choice of these sources, or the choice of this anecdotal lead. The sources have serious repercussions. … Journalists should at least acknowledge or recognize that we are not sophisticated enough with data, that we often produce stories through the same process: Here’s a controversial topic, here are three viewpoints, pat yourself on the back and no one as a reader has learned a thing. In fact, some may be dumber by the time they finished that story. Where are the real solutions?

We don’t have an approach where people read the story and say, every other paragraph, “I didn’t know that. I’m thinking differently now.” We are the equivalent of typing up nighttime talk television in a way. Do you believe the president should have done this or that, quote 1, 2, and 3, others say, opponents say. [Readers] didn’t learn a thing.

DL: How do you build a great journalism school?

Hamm: Let’s think about the way journalism schools hire. They often hire assistant professors in tenure track and it takes 10 years to get them to a certain level. If I think that we want to be the best in the world, I should look around the world to find the best. But journalism schools typically don’t hire that way. And, you know, chemistry programs at major research universities will do that.

DL: Right. They want this individual and his body of work, and everything that goes with it. It’s going to cost us, but we are going to invest in it.

Hamm: Right. So let’s say, for example, that we need somebody to do PR. I don’t want somebody to do PR. Who is the best PR person in the world? I have never had someone come and rate my program. I would actually like that, because that would tell me that journalism schools are playing at the highest level. So if I’m looking at how journalism schools could get better, it’s not so much about the environment changing, it’s that no journalism school is rated and they aren’t evaluated annually in any category.

The Knight Lab was one of the few attempts that I’ve seen at a major university to say, “Let’s take a great school from another part of the research university and match up with them.”

Journalism schools, in my opinion, have to compete within the university and perform within the university at a much higher level. [Journalism schools can be] out of step with the profession, but that is less dangerous in a way than it is to be out of step with the university. I think we have to commit to being the best school within the university.

I think if we perform at that level rather than telling ourselves that we are good, then our program is more sophisticated and more competitive and our students are better and more challenged. Our scholars need to be more challenged. We have played almost no part in the transition; if a big transition happened in the business world, you could have picked up the phone as a CEO and called business professors who you knew are experts and you would have brought them in to work with you. You may not agree with them, but you brought them in as consultants. When [the digital-first shift] hit our world, I don’t know who you called and brought in. Were you calling [anybody in journalism education] to help you? You know, these are people who were publishing on topics in their field, but overall the field and the scholars weren’t particularly beneficial. If you want to have thought leadership, in my opinion, you would have gone to the students. I think we look at the program, and then say we are going to set these measures, and we are going to be the best compared to the rest of the university.

You know that whether you are flush or it’s a difficult time for resources, you have to invest strategically. That’s what is missing from our world, that understanding. The notion of measurement and the notion of mapping against excellence in an intentional way is the goal here.

DL: And what, exactly, are you mapping? Is that about creating an excellent faculty? Bringing in exceptional students?

Hamm: Yes. I believe you need to hire at a level that is better than the rest of the university if you want to make your program known. I think you have to recruit the students who are better than the rest of the university and there are ways to do that.

DL: And those are?

Hamm: Most journalism school hiring is done at the entry level. So you get a former reporter. Rarely are we hiring the industry leaders. It’s not as if schools intentionally went [out] and stole the best and brightest, because we don’t run the searches that way. We run the ad and say we need an assistant professor to teach public relations and then we form a pool. Then, whoever is the best of that pool, they usually look good, and then you spend the next 10 years deciding if they can publish or not, and they might do a good job, but I don’t see that as a model for success at the highest possible level for great schools in any field.

Things will shake out to be much better. My feeling has always been that there are two things when you look at history. One is that if we had said 20 years ago, you can get the NY Times, pay for it and walk out in the cold Chicago winter to get it, and it’s probably wet and you’ll have to dry it out, or you could get it for free. How long do you think that paid model will stay in business? You would have said it would be wiped out. There would be zero subscribers. How are there hundreds of thousands of subscribers, including me? So that business model works, even though we say it doesn’t work. I could be a contrarian in this sense, but I am shocked that newspapers have held onto what they’ve held onto. And, given that, I think we can question a lot of simple management models that suggest we should be gutting all newspapers without even considering that metros and community papers are two different groups.

I do think J-schools should be teaching the business of journalism. Whatever you call it, we should be teaching students to understand the kinds of market conditions you should analyze, here are the opportunities, here are the threats—all the things you should be looking at. I don’t think you see a lot of that in most standard journalism curricula.

I agree that journalism education as a whole is saying we are not going to change and we don’t have to because we are a university, or we are too slow, I agree with all of that. But in some ways, I think many places have done a good job; if you visit them, they are doing a good job. They could be better but have done a good job. But they haven’t taken on this part [about really being excellent], which is why I think we are vulnerable across the country.