I will be graduating from this fine institution in less than two weeks. As a soon-to-be alumnus, I feel I have earned the right to make a serious suggestion to the administration at Ohio State.

About a month ago, it was announced that the School of Journalism and Communication was changing its name to simply the School of Communication – a move that angered those of us in the journalism program.

School Director Carroll Glynn does not want to “imply that we are a large School of Journalism when we do a wide variety of things.”

Ohio State is the home of the third largest college newspaper in the country, and with its 125-year history many would beg to differ, but that is beside the point.

It is pointless now to debate about the name change. Glynn has made it clear that this is what she intends to do. Never mind that there was no interaction on the subject with students or alumni.

Instead of ranting about the name change of my precious school, I would like to offer a modest proposal to the academic decision-makers at this university.

Journalism and mass communication are not related fields of study. Mass communication is an offshoot of sociology and psychology – an attempt to understand how and why people receive and interpret media messages. It has nothing to do with news writing.

Journalism is a practical field with the purpose of providing accurate reporting of the news. Not one thing taught in any mass communication class has anything to do with practical journalism.

Therefore, I would like to put forth the following:

The journalism program should abandon its ties with the School of Communication. There is no longer any reason to stay.

Because journalism is too small to be a department of its own, I suggest that the program hook up with the Department of English and have a joint English-Journalism degree program.

The most important journalistic skill is writing. There are no mass communication classes that provide training in writing. Read the course bulletin. Let me know if there is one mass communication class that focuses on writing, because I cannot find it.

Partnering with English would allow journalism students to take more classes that will improve their writing skills. Allowing students to take a class about grammar will make them much better journalists than forcing them to take classes on mass communication and society.

As part of the English department, students would not only be able to take many more writing classes, but they would be taught by people who actually know a thing or two about writing.

I have much more faith in a writing instructor who has studied English than a communication professor who has spent his or her career doing surveys and compiling statistics.

Ask any journalism student, and he or she will tell you that there are really only two classes they take that focus on intense, practical journalism. That’s seven credit hours in four years. Disgusting.

This university needs to stop pretending that journalism and communications are two related fields. Across the country, journalism schools are being swallowed by mass communication schools for no good reason.

I say it is time for the OSU community to Do Something Great. Let us use our role as a large university to remind the public that journalism is an important field that does not deserve to be engulfed by a branch of pseudo-psychology.

A journalism degree from OSU has become an embarrassment. The university needs to take this opportunity to make that degree something to be proud of.

Erik Johns is a senior in journalism. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].