Mills is retiring this summer after 26 years as the dean of the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri.

DL: What is journalism today? What should students know and be able to do?

Mills: I guess I would say at one level nothing in journalism has changed, and at another level, everything has changed. What hasn’t changed shouldn’t change: Some things are our eternal verities, the idea that democracies need good journalism to survive, and that good journalism is as accurate and neutral and fair reporting about the issues of the world as journalists can muster. I don’t think that should ever change.

On the other hand, everything has changed in the sense that new technologies have upended every business model we thought we knew, and … we don’t know how to pay for good journalism anymore. I think what that means for journalism schools is that, while not getting obsessed with teaching students every new gadget that comes along or not getting obsessed with turning them into coding maniacs, we do need to make sure that they understand enough about all of these changes to be able to sort themselves out when they begin careers in journalism.

They need to be exposed to some of that stuff, but they also need to be educated in those eternal verities like accuracy and fairness and neutrality. And that leads to the question of how you do all of that in the relatively short amount of time you have with them, whether they are undergrads or master’s students. And that’s hard.

DL: And so how do you do that? If you could start your own journalism school from scratch, what would it look like?

Mills: It won’t surprise you that it would look a lot like Mizzou. It would include teaching hospitals, which we have had forever. It would include a research center, which thanks to the Reynolds [Journalism Institute], we have had since 2008. It would be analogous to a medical school education in that it would have people learning both conceptually and practically what it means to be a journalist … you would also do research on actual journalism and try to feed that back out into the citizens.

Faculty here will tell you that my greatest frustration has been not being able to find a way to organize the faculty in a way that makes sense in the 21st century instead of relying on the old 19th-and 20th-century categories. But we’ve never been smart enough to come up with a way to do that. I think it’s goofy that we divide our faculty, and therefore, to some extent, our students, into these categories of magazine and print and broadcast, when the outside world is not divided up in that way. But for logistical reasons, we haven’t figured out how to do that. We’ve tried to do that, but it’s just been too hard.

DL: But when systems and structures of the institution drive learning in that way, knowing that it doesn’t mirror the world, doesn’t that privilege institutional process over student learning?

Mills: Here’s what comforts me about that: It doesn’t hurt the students. What we did do at some point eight or 10 years ago is that we did abolish departments. We regrouped into faculties, headed by faculty chairs, and we introduced interest areas. They’re not majors, they’re a selection of courses that allows students to get a broad liberal arts journalism education, and to get a collection of courses centered around their particular interests. Some are conceptually based, like international strategic communication, and others are skills-based, like Web design. What actually happens is that students are able to pursue a particular passion and break down silos because they select from the various faculty groupings, and that’s one way we’ve been able to gnaw at those barriers. But it’s far from a complete solution, and we need to find a smarter way to organize ourselves.

We’re also fortunate at Mizzou, with this little media empire we have here, that the faculty can never get too comfortable doing things the way they’ve always been done. The direct day-to-day contact with the media operations forces us to see reality every single day, because we’re yanked into the future whether we want to be or not. It also allows provides the opportunity for everybody to collaborate with everybody else: The Missourian is working with the people at Channel 8 (television), KBIA (radio) and with the futures lab. So we may still have the silos symbolically, but we’re trying to break them down a little bit.

DL: Do the students ever collaborate as a single news organization—the model they’re developing at Arizona State?

Mills: I don’t think we ever could do that because of our size … we have projects in which students across all those platforms collaborate, we’ve done it mostly around elections. We do it sometimes on stories that are developing over the course of a semester, like the News21 sort of story. We don’t do enough of it, but we couldn’t do it organizationally because of our size. We have 150 master’s students and about 2,000 undergraduates. And you don’t want to blow up something that’s working pretty well.

DL: How much flexibility is there in terms of how you deliver credit hours?

Mills: We’ve been doing that for a long time. We offer one-hour credit for a whole variety of short courses, including ones that are long weekends or over the course of a week, or that involve bringing professionals in to teach for a short time. We have been pushing that for a long time. One of the problems of being in a university structure is exactly that: Not everything needs three hours, we need to create other kinds of experiences. We also have variants in which it may be a three-credit course, but you can take parts of it, so you can take one credit of the three.

Another problem working inside the university curriculum is taking two years to get a course approved so you can teach it, and by then you don’t want to teach it anymore. So we created what we call “emerging technologies” in which faculty and students are encouraged to create a course around something new that’s happening out there, and to be able to offer it right away instead of waiting for it to go through the full curriculum process. It’s a template to allow faculty to create new courses. Sometimes a course is introduced as an emerging technology, and it finally gets approved as a formal course because its topic is going to be around for awhile. I think we did that with data, for example.

When you’re working within a university system, you have straitjackets, and you can adjust the straps to give yourself some more room to move, but you can’t really get out from under them entirely. If you did have a chance to start from scratch,

you would want to have a much more fungible system of credits that you would redesign every year. Even at a large operation like ours, you could use the skunk-works approach.

We did something like that once that I was really excited about, but we found that we couldn’t sustain it. … One of the things that I do is have lunch with students to see what’s on their minds, to see if they have any new ideas. They always have good ideas, and many we eventually put into the curriculum.

At one of those lunches, one kid said, “What I’d really like to do is design my own course and figure out a way to get students from all the various faculties into that course—the strat comm, the broadcast, the print students—designing a major story and working on it and producing it, and students would run it, would that be possible?” And I said, “Are you kidding? Of course we can do that. How can I aid and abet?” They designed a course so that the first semester, they recruited students from all of the sequences and the idea was to research a topic; the second semester, they would actually do the project. It was wonderful, two faculty agreed to sign on as coaches, and the kids were just great. The ultimate story was not a blockbuster, but the learning that took place among students, how much they learned about leadership and interaction, was just wonderful.

What we found out is that it wasn’t sustainable because you can’t depend upon the ability to recruit students who have that kind of initiative. … It was the initiative that allowed this to happen in the first place. When they tried to replicate it, we found that you can’t count on it; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. In theory you could probably find a way to do that, to allow students to take that kind of leadership. But it was logistically very hard.

DL: Currency is a huge challenge for programs across journalism education. Is there a way to create a structure or program that would allow even less-resourced programs to remain current?

Mills: It’s ironic, because never has it been easier to stay current. Missouri was Missouri for years because it was a university willing to invest millions of dollars in the program, to invest in a printing press and a television station, huge capital investments. And now you can do the work without any of those things, so it’s actually more possible to stay current than it’s ever been.

… We do know that it’s probably only by accident that [graduates] actually end up in a career they pursued while they were here. Graduates go into advertising, or newspapers, but the value of a good journalism education is critical thinking skills and liberal arts education. Once you figure out how to find out what matters and how to tell people about it, you can get a job doing almost anything. We dissuade students in their belief that the career world is narrow and they have to choose right now whether they want to be a copy editor or an advertising exec. That’s another problem with our 20th-century labels. I wish we could do away with them.