India’s unofficial motto could be “Doing a lot with a little.”
A coconut isn’t harvested just for its sweet flesh. The fibrous husk is woven into rope. The shells are made into cups.
Even cow dung patties – ubiquitous on the narrow, dusty streets – are collected, dried, stacked and used for fuel.
We noticed a similar resourcefulness at SHIATS, a university we visited in Allahabad, a city in the populous and poor northern state of Uttar Pradesh. The university’s School of Film and Mass Communication squeezes an impressive amount of work from a small amount of resources.
My journalism colleague, Randy Smith, and I visited with three faculty members in the department. Its offices reside on the fourth floor of a large, concrete building with a central open-air atrium. The rooms are unheated, despite cool winter nights averaging just over 50 degrees. During our visit, people simply went about in wool hats, jackets and scarves. Even the dining hall was not heated.
The Film and Mass Comm department, just 7 years old, exemplifies a trend in India. Print and electronic media are rapidly expanding as the society becomes more urban and literate. Many universities are opening schools of journalism and communication. The SHIATS faculty asked what they could learn from us, the oldest journalism school in the world.
Randy explained the Missouri School of Journalism’s famous “Missouri Method,” in which our students learn through working at the school’s newspaper, magazine, TV and radio stations and other outlets.
SHIATS assistant professor Nishant Singh responded, “We must be using the Missouri Method then.” The department publishes a daily newspaper and runs a 24-hour community radio station, in addition to producing programming for cable TV. He gave me a copy of the newspaper, an eight-page broadsheet that had color photos inside.
Randy and I were amazed. We know how much work it takes to put out these publications. The Missouri School of Journalism has about 90 full-time faculty and more than 2,000 students.
The SHIATS mass comm department has just 200 students and eight regular faculty members. In addition to journalism, the department teaches film, animation and business communication.
We toured the department’s film shooting floor, recording studio, radio station, library and computer labs equipped with FinalCut Pro, the same editing software we use at home. The facilities were modest but adequate.
We felt the school could use help with online and social media training (none of the publications has a website) as well as courses in journalism law and ethics and specialties such as business and environmental journalism.
Randy and I told our new friends we’d be happy to help in any way we can, and we promised to Skype. I have a feeling we would learn as much as we would teach.