daaaaaaaaamn

“We attract and recruit the very top graduate students in mass communication from across the nation, and of this elite group, only the highest performing students from our own program are granted the chance to work in the classroom with instructors and undergraduates. We take their training and evaluation extremely seriously and we do an excellent job of it, as their consistent success on the job market in teaching positions around the country (and around the world) demonstrates.”

Actually, Columbia, Syracuse, Missouri, the Annenberg Schools, Northwestern and others get better prospects.

As for equating their attractiveness as grad students to their ability to teach —not quite, professor. They are chosen for their research ability, not for their teaching ability. Rather than deciding who to believe, ask your TA where they taught before they came here and how much emphasis was put on developing their teaching skills once they did get here.

Maybe the BH could survey the J201/J202 TAs and publish the results — Who could argue with that?

Nobody outside the BH and DC newsrooms cares. The vast majority of undergraduate and graduate students here have never heard of the classes under discussion.

very true, 6:23, but everyone has had the experience of TAs who don’t teach very well. The UW insists that teaching is on equal footing with research — but the facts show otherwise. That’s a concern that cuts across campus

Well done, Professor Downey. Perfect use of the official UW response-to-criticism template: emphasize how your door is always open, deflect attention from the argument with iffy statistics, and express indignation that anyone would deign to criticize. You’re a credit to the university’s press strategy.

If anything we’ve learned that Kevin is pretty dumb for launching a public attack against the school and professors that will ultimately determine his career viability. I mean, I could see him publishing this as a spring-semester senior. But after just taking j202? Not wise. I wonder if Kevin thinks professors will round his grades up after he basically called them worthless. Time to transfer to the b-school, bub.

Word around the J-school is that Downey sent an anxious all-staff and faculty e-mail at 6 a.m. the day this came out basically telling them to ignore the Herald’s criticism and that they were the best of the best. Additionally, someone in J202 told me that Katy Culver led off her first J202 lecture of the semester with “Now, I know some of you may have read the Badger Herald this morning…” and basically said she was disappointed in the way her course was characterized.

Sounds like a pretty rapid PR response… If the journalism department is truly as outstanding and infallible as Downey suggests, why launch into a full-on damage control campaign, rather than simply letting the quality of the courses speak for themselves?

To 2:01 pm, the reason they don’t launch a full-on damage control campaign is because the courses DON’T always speak for themselves. Rather than address anything that was brought up in the column, Downey has taken the whiny, childish way of dealing with it. Yeah, somebody was critical of what you guys do, so you attack him for being too mean?

Grow a fucking pair, Downey. This is a prime example of poor leadership. If Baughman were still supreme leader of the J-School, as many would prefer, the response would be been both snarky AND substantive. Instead, Downey took the coward’s way out—attack the kid who wrote it and hope everybody forgets about it.

Greg, stick to your Wiimotes and leave the real PR to people who actually know what the hell they’re doing.

Although I thought Kevin Bargnes’s op-ed was a humorously lame attempt at taking on an issue, at least he had the guts to attach his name to his opinion… as did Greg Downey with his response.

Interestingly, the person who suggested Downey “grow a pair” apparently missed the irony of being afraid to sign his or her own name to their unhelpful personal attack.

It’s easy to express an anonymous opinion. It’s also gutless and, to me, greatly lessens the value of the comment.

Grow a pair indeed.

Not mentioned in either Downey’s response nor any of the comments is that this semester, Professor Downey began a new course/colloquium for graduate students specifically to focus on classroom teaching and use of a wide variety of instructional materials to enhance the learning process for students.

As a student in this class, I know first hand Downey’s efforts to further enhance the teaching capabilities of the j-school’s grad students. To slag Professor Downey like 2:40 did shows that person doesn’t really have a current or accurate view of Downey’s leadership… leadership that I find strong, impressive, and refreshing.

@2:01 pretty much only got the time of Greg’s e-mail correct. An e-mail to faculty and staff is hardly a campaign. Communicating within an organization is “internal communications,” not “public relations,” anyway. Huge difference.

“However, I do not welcome mean-spirited attacks on our work as presented in Bargnes� opinion piece.”

Yeah, mean-spirited attacks are only to be allowed by certified “journalists” and the only allowable targets are conservatives!