Malcolm MacLean - A glance back
By Aaron M. Brim

Last August, journalists united for the Malcolm MacLean session at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) convention in Washington, D.C., as the chairman of the session, Luigi Manca, MacLean's son-in-law and a professor at the Benedictine University communication arts department, led a panel discussion that spoke to more than 30 of the most prolific names in journalism education.

"It was a time to revisit his heritage and legacy," Manca said.

Malcolm S. MacLean Jr. was the director of the University of Iowa School of Journalism from 1967-1972, during a very turbulent period in history.

On April 23, 1972, the UI j-school was denied accreditation by the American Council on Education for Journalism (ACEJ). Almost instantaneously, 46 percent of UI students enrolled in the j-school dropped out. Some prominent journalism faculty members resigned to seek employment at accredited programs.

"It seems a little extreme to say that he was crazy but in some respects that's not entirely incorrect," said UI professor emeritus and former MacLean colleague Al Talbott.

Talbott, alongside Hanno Hardt, Robert Logan, Luigi Manca and several other journalism practitioners, produced a text exploring the life and contributions of MacLean titled

“A Heretic in Journalism Education and Research: Malcolm S. MacLean, Jr., Revisited.” While the text praises MacLean for his thought-provoking schematics, MacLean was a man who supplanted an esteemed traditional journalism institution with a discredited experimental program.

Prior to MacLean's incumbency, journalism students were offered several individual fields of study within the program called sequences, which were divided into tracks. Public relations, news editorial and advertising were some of the sequences utilized by pre-MacLean students.

"He didn't appreciate the way articles were being cranked out with this kind of pedantic language," Talbott said. "He wanted to make it simple and not tedious by the use of language."

MacLean inaugurated an experimental General Journalism curriculum employing simulation and games theory. Within a lab, students were divided into groups to simulate real life media experiences such as the production of a publication or news broadcast.

Groups presented the medium to their classmates who acted as their audience. The audience was given monopoly money to allocate to the group who appealed to their demographics and the groups who received the most monopoly money were also the groups who received the higher marks for the course.

"People didn't understand what he was trying to do and he wasn't able to explain it," said UI professor and former j-school director Kenneth Starck. "He explained it as [doing games in simulation] which sounded obscene.

The public relations, news editorial, and advertising sequences were defenestrated, a shift that was unheard of prior to MacLean's initiative.

Eva Dahm (B.A. '71, M.A. '73) was a student during the MacLean curriculum. "Experiential learning has served me well in everything I have done," she said. "I gained the ability to ask questions and get them answered."

MacLean cut school requirements within the major from 50 hours to 36 hours. Students were mandated to double major or to select a second area of expertise, a requirement that is still vital to the program today.

"MacLean envisioned an education program for students that went far beyond journalism," said UI professor and former MacLean colleague Hanno Hardt. "He wanted journalists to be thought of as intellectuals, who think, write and specialize in certain topics. He wanted to move from merely training students to educating them."

Hanno Hardt was hired by MacLean in 1968 to help with the revolutionary etiquette. Hardt watched as the environment transposed from traditional to "terrible."

Soon the Iowa Board of Regents and the Iowa Legislature were blasting MacLean and his program. UI alumni, newspaper publishers, journalism professionals and media received word on the program's injured condition and voiced their disapproval for MacLean.

"It was all hearsay," Hardt said. "The school received a lot of crap from politicians and journalists who never came to our campus to see what this was all about."

"They wanted it back the way it was," said Robert Logan, dean of the Science Journalism Center at the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism. "They thought he was trying to fix something that wasn't broken."

And it wasn't broken. Before the implementation of General Journal-ism the UI j-school was considered one of the elite institutions of journalism education in the country, Hardt said.

"If you would have taken a straight vote from the faculty on whether or not to hire him (MacLean), he probably wouldn't have been hired. But the president saw some things in him regarding how media should serve the society and the various institutions," Talbott said.

MacLean's ultimate downfall was his immediate request for accreditation. It came less than a year after the first class graduated under the General Journalism sheath. The American Council on Education for Journalism standards required that "accreditation of a sequence should not be sought unless an average of five graduates a year over a three-year period and at least five in the year preceding inspection have availed themselves of the opportunity for specialization."

"Mal and his faculty were kind of sloppy," said Luigi Manca, dean at University of Benedictine’s School of Journalism Science. "I don't think they really cared too much. They wanted the accreditation committee to figure everything out on their own."

The 1972 ACEJ accrediting committee was not fully equipped to evaluate the new system. "They didn't have the tools to accredit such a program," Manca said. "Accreditation was set for very traditional programs that didn't fit our parameters."

The 1972 journalism accreditation report by the ACEJ stated "grades for journalism students seem to be substantially higher than those of other subjects" and these marks "appear to be based too much on the volume of work rather than the quality."

"In the traditional journalism program we weren't getting the brightest students to say the least," Hardt said. "But it was the smart students who stayed when the new curriculum was initiated. Students had to learn to swim, speak up, develop stories and be enterprising. Some students did just that."

The committee's report didn't lack praise for the revolutionary program. Most notably, the report stated that "the visiting team is convinced that this wholly new approach is philosophically sound and has great future potential.”