A heated controversy is brewing at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, which is consistently ranked among America’s top J-schools (full disclosure: it’s my alma mater). The catalyst for the current spat is a recent pledge by the program’s new dean, John Lavine, to scrap Medill’s longstanding fundamentals-based curriculum in favor of a greater emphasis on new media and marketing. A feature article in Chicago Magazine offers a balanced assessment of the issues in play.

The piece explains that Lavine’s opponents are concerned because, “The staple of a Medill education was the ability to identify what was newsworthy and write a story about it, mastering the basics of who, what, where, when, and how. Students were drilled in one of the bedrock principles of American journalism: that a wall existed between the editorial side of a publication and the business side.”

Lavine responds by citing downward newspaper circulation trends and the rise of internet journalism as compelling reasons for J-Schools across the country to reconsider and overhaul curricula: “[Lavine] argues it is worse than wrongheaded to continue to turn out journalism students the old-fashioned way, preparing them for disappearing jobs in print publications and giving them little knowledge of the changing demands of consumers. ‘It is immoral,’ Lavine says.”

According to the article, another top journalism program has taken note of Medill’s new direction and has rejected it:

Columbia University’s journalism school-usually regarded among the top with Medill-has also been re-evaluating its curriculum, but it won’t follow the new direction at Medill, according to Columbia dean Nicholas Lemann, the prizewinning author and writer for The New Yorker. “It’s not going to happen at our school,” he says of the emphasis on marketing, “not on my watch.” He acknowledges that classes at Columbia have become more “Webbie” in response to employer demands that students have technical skills. Columbia has also recently revamped its curriculum, with tracks that go deeper into subject matter, so that graduates emerge with a firm grasp of specific disciplines, such as the law.

In some ways, Lavine is a visionary. The paleo-media is slowly dying and any savvy journalism program will recognize that fact and adapt accordingly. There is, however, some risk in abandoning news reporting basics in a shift toward marketing. It will be interesting to see who emerges on top as this ivory tower bru-ha-ha plays out, and whether the end result affects the future of traditional American journalism.