CH-CH-CH-CHANGESThesaurus: give me a new word for LEARNING

I'll be honest (integrity is so hot right now); I didn't read the Medill Honor Pledge either. Well I have now, but I read Kassner's post first.

I'll be honest again; Shouldn't media organizations, and companies, and marketing agencies or whatever, be responsible for their own employees? Or is that really the job of an Alma Mater? I'm not counting on plagiarizing or embarrassing Medill, but it seems like $40,000 should buy a great education, lifelong learning and fabulous facilities. It has -- but now it comes with a metaphorical jail-cell not even Lindsay could rehab her way out of. Is paranoia the new pedagogy?

Also, while we're talking about name changes:

OLD: Medill School of Journalism
NEW: Medill School of Journalism and Integrated Marketing Communications

OLD: Honor Pledge
NEW: Integrity Code

OLD: Teaching Media Program
NEW: Journalism Residency

What's next? comment away.

I'm off to go write the sequel to A Million Little Pieces.

YOU ARE SO FUCKEDMedill consults thesaurus, knows what you did at Time for Kids this summer

It's a sad consequence of our little cottage industry's ongoing transition that not even I bothered to read "john"'s e-mail about the new Medill integrity code. When you get to an explanatory sentence about Jayson Blair, totally unnecessary dependent clause here, what do you do? You stop reading. And you should.

Moving on. The new Integrity Code replaces what I believe was an Honor Pledge, which proves what Michele Bitoun lacks in cerebral matter she makes up for with thesaurus skills.

Surprise, though! There are substantive changes here. I am actually not joking. Now, whatever you do on your time away from Medill, be it p.r. or journalism (the days of those as separate words and not as a market-tested blanket phrase appear to be some time off as yet) will be subject to the code.

Well. This is all because some dumb bitch whose name no one remembers plaigarized a story in the Daily last Fall. This was not her fault! She wrote Devo.

O.K., anyway, everyone was having a Paula Abdul-on-crack reaction to this in Fisk, especially the freshmen. It was all like, Oooh, is she gonna get kicked out?

Now we have our answer! No word yet on whether it's retroactive, but if anyone remembers this girl's name, I will sooooo call her for a quote.

The other interesting thing here is that it applies to marketing. That's going to create a lot of rough situations, don't you think? Like, all those people who work at Mattel, what are they supposed to do when it turns out they totally lied about the safety of the products they market?! The ethical quandaries!!!