American pragmatism and Chinese modernization: importing the Missouri model of journalism education to modern China

Journalism education was anAmerican invention, oriented from the beginning toward the training of vocational skills. Older European and elite US universities had rejected journalism education for a perceived lack of a specialized body of expert knowledge. Harvard, for example, turned down an endowment from Joseph Pulitzer for establishing a journalism school; the money was accepted reluctantly by Columbia to launch the now-renowned Journalism School in 1912. Boorstin (1978) argues that applied vocational fields (notably, agricultural colleges) gained their academic legitimacy mostly in Midwestern land-grant state universities, where one of the proclaimed missions was community service, which was regarded as being as important as teaching abstract knowledge. The development of journalism education might have paralleled the legitimization process of applied fields in American universities. Missouri founded the world’s first journalism school in 1908, and by the 1930s journalism education was firmly established in major Midwestern land-grant universities. Part of the impetus came from strong lobbying efforts of state press associations and publishers who saw a university journalism curriculum as a way to enhance the occupational prestige of the trade (Carey, 2000). Even though many countries came to adopt American journalism education, it has continued to be met with suspicion. None of the Ivy League institutions in the United States has joined Columbia to offer a degree in practical journalism. What’s most intriguing is that US-style journalism education