UW-Madison journalism doctoral student Michael Mirer complains in the Washington Post:

You might think that one of the nation’s leading academic communication programs would be a good place to make a long-distance phone call.

Yet there I was on a cold January morning, the interview I needed to get less than 15 minutes away, panic mounting as each attempt to dial out on my department-issued speakerphone produced an electronic wail rather than a ring tone. I’m writing my dissertation on how Web sites owned by sports teams and leagues challenge our society’s most deeply held values about journalism. I collect my data by talking to the people who work for these sites. I need a working phone. My cell was acting as my voice recorder, so I couldn’t use it to make calls — not that the reception in my office is good enough to be trusted.

During one of the many rounds of budget cuts the University of Wisconsin has endured over the past few years, the department ended all nonessential long-distance service. This was essential to me, I explained to the front-office staff. I am hoping to log about 25 hours of interviews with people who are outside the university’s 608 area code. Long-distance phone calls cost less than 4 cents per minute; the entire project would cost about $60, surely something could be worked out? Could I pay for it myself? Write a grant? They didn’t think so.

There’s no using the telephone in, of all places, the communication department. The budget is too tight. The phone jack in my office is a vestige of a time when the state invested in higher education. …

I found a workaround for my phone problem. That day it involved using a phone line that turned out to belong to another unit in our building, so I shouldn’t have used it. The department staff found me a line in one of the research labs that should work, although it didn’t the first time. A professor on my PhD committee had just reactivated her own long-distance calling for research purposes and offered me the use of her phone, when she’s not using it. Or I can use Skype, which is glitchy and takes lousy recordings on the computer I’m holding together with masking tape. I’ll be able to get the job done, but barely. Sort of like what the university has done in the past few years.

 

Facebook Friend and author Virginia Postrel describes this as “self-parody,” and that Mirer’s screed is “beyond stupid. I can only conclude that the guy is somehow in Scott Walker’s employ. It’s like an extended argument for shutting down the UWM school of journalism and communications, or at least its Ph.D. program. They’re letting in idiots.”

If Wisconsin taxpayers wonder how a doctoral dissertation on “how Web sites owned by sports teams and leagues challenge our society’s most deeply held values about journalism” advances mankind, well, you’re not alone.

One person who tried to defend this, and got hammered, had to admit:

Look: this guy’s kind of a schmuck. Let’s not paint all student journalists with the schmuck brush.

Yeah, well, you’d hope someone who spent at least six years in college to get bachelor’s and master’s degrees, both of which considerably subsidized by your tax dollars, would not be a schmuck.

Another comment pointed out:

He is writing about websites owned by sports teams… I am pretty sure that the closet that comes to journalism is that they both involve words. Give me a guy writing his PhD on exposing public or private corruption or generally making the world a better place. But sports websites? Seriously? Why do I get the feeling his best friend is a PhD candidate over in Engineering that is upset he can’t get enough AA batteries to finish his dissertation on the evolution of Pokemon on Gameboy.

Another person in academia, though apparently with common sense, adds:

I’ve been in this profession for a quarter century, and there has never been a time where we’ve not said “we are barely scraping by.” Your use of resources always expand to what the resources are and then it seems like you are “barely scraping by.” There is lots of fat to cut in academica, folks.

Another comment makes you wonder how much Mirer has learned in his six-plus years at our state’s world-class university:

The danger of using personal anecdotes to introduce a policy oriented article is that readers will conclude from the anecdote that you are an idiot before they get to your argumentation. When I was last interviewed for an NPR story the reporter taught me how to record the interview on my smartphone, took about 20 seconds.

My own smartphone, which is really not very state-of-the-current-art (the purchase price was right), records and plays back all of my pregame coach interviews, whether on the phone or in person. It also includes pregame music. I have even announced games on it. I also chronicled damage from tornadoes onto Facebook, apparently making me the only media person live on the scene (or whatever “live” means online) immediately following the tornadoes.

I note that not to brag about my professional abilities or my technological expertise, because, as Postrel points out …

… as a professional journalist since 1982 I have utter contempt for someone in 2015 who cannot figure out how to record off a cell phone (even without involving Skype or similar services). I do it all the time. It is a basic professional skill, requiring minimal equipment

At some point, journalists have to learn resourcefulness. Media outlets are notorious, and have always been, for not entirely adequately equipping their reporters and other in-field people. (Total cost of my sound and recording and camera apps: Zero.)

But the contempt in Postrel’s previous paragraph pales in comparison to what follows:

Although I do believe that communications (aka rhetoric) is a legitimate and important field of study, it is also the unfortunate case that it exists primarily to provide easy majors for people who want to spend their college years partying or playing sports or both. I’m skeptical about whether journalism schools should exist at all.

 

Arguments against the proposed $300 million in UW System funding cuts should be made by someone who can use facts and logic. That apparently does not include Mirer. On the other hand, if the saying “Those who can’t do, teach” is accurate, he’s perfect for academia … unless the UW System takes up Postrel’s proposal.