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Following up a post on Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog recently, I argued that journalism sits awkwardly in the higher education pantheon, and there are an awful of a lot of courses on the books – too many perhaps.
Steve Hill has weighed in to suggest, broadly, that journalism should indeed be the subject of academic study, and that we shouldn’t split hairs about defining our courses.

I just get lost with this debate about which courses are considered to be ‘academic’ and which are ‘practical/vocational’. Is medicine academic? Or is that practical? What about fine art? What about engineering?

It’s a good question – but crucially, in referring to medicine, fine art and engineering, it is not comparing like with like. A Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Engineering or Bachelor of Science qualification is very different from a Bachelor of Arts. 
I did a BA in English Literature, and I remember having no more than 10 hours of tuition a week. It was probably more like five hours, certainly in the second and third year. I had some lectures, the odd seminar and tutorials. The rest was research. Because that’s what a BA is, really. 
In the same way that it wouldn’t work for, say, engineering, that doesn’t work for journalism. (Well, it doesn’t work for journalism practice – a culture and media studies-type research degree would be very different.) You need to put in a lot of hours and you need a lot of, well, practical education to be able to do it.
It’s best to learn to do journalism in a newsroom-type environment – being given assignments and then editorial feedback on what’s wrong (and right) and how students can improve. Unfortunately, a BA course doesn’t really have the resources to be able to do that.
This is compounded by the problem that school leavers nowadays don’t necessarily have a solid foundation in English language communications skills. But if you want to address this on a journalism course, you run into a problem.
Basic communications tuition – which is at the heart of journalism practice – will run into problems with course validation. There’s a good chance it won’t been seen as BA standard by whichever panel is approving your journalism course. 
So I guess my problem with journalism education isn’t so much about studying it at degree level as about it being lumped in with the BA qualification. 
Perhaps we should have a separate faculty for comms-type  education – with a BComms at the end of it. Or if we’re going to be really precious about it, perhaps we need a special Bachelor of Journalism qualification. 
Let’s face it – if students know they’ll be getting a BJ at the end of their studies, applications will soar…

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