I'm not a journalist, nor did I major in journalism during my time here at Iowa, but I'm going to waste your time by pontificating about the state of Iowa's journalism program anyway. For the past two months, I have seen our community struggle to understand and deal with the flawed instruction, intellectual laziness and generally piss-poor writing emerging from the Journalism program: namely Professor Stephen Bloom's now infamous article in The Atlantic and more recently, Mr. Ted Gutsche's guest editorial bemoaning the state of the Iowa City Transit System.
First of all, let's start with the basics: how to construct an argument. Right from the start, Mr. Gutsche undermines himself: "I do not use the Iowa City transit system..." Then how do you know anything about it? What makes you qualified to talk about it? Are you unable to find 75 cents, fight your way through the apparently rampaging hordes of out of control juveniles downtown and hop on a bus? Forgive my ignorance, but I thought 'reporting' actually meant investigating what you were writing about.
Happily for Mr. Gutsche, I have used the Iowa City Transit System and found it to be efficient, affordable and always running on time. The addition of the Bongo system for area transit makes it even more convinient- I'm only a text message away from finding out just when my bus is set to arrive.
The crux of my objection to Mr. Gutsche is that he exhorts us to be 'smarter than blaming kids' and then proceeds to turn around and blame the school district. (After all, why blame the kids when the teachers are a much jucier target?)
He cries: Nobody works downtown anymore, so why do we need a bus hub downtown? I suppose thousands of University students, staff and faculty don't count.
He accuses: It's the school district and their fussy rules- our transportation system should, after all, be taking these kids directly home! Actually, I'm pretty sure they have buses that do that. They're yellow and have the words 'SCHOOL BUS' written on the side.
He says that downtown businesses will complain that they don't have the money to fund a shuttle- so they're just going to move. He doesn't have a solution to that problem- and why should he? At that point he hadn't constructed much of an editorial.
I think the best answer is for everyone to breathe deeply and calm down. Having used the bus in recent months, I can say that I was not bothered in the slightest by the crowds downtown. The vast majority of this supposed problems is merely kids being kids- and for the minority that escalate things to outright violence, well, that's what the police are for after all. No one's advocating breaking out the riot gear and the tear gas- it seems just the mere presence of uniformed officers has been enough to keep Mr. Gutsche's alleged chaos in check.
Mr. Gutsche does make some vague, somewhat valid points: we could, I expect, do better at providing more service and certainly a study of how our already excellent transit system could be made even better is a matter worthy of consideration. But turning our City buses into school buses? I don't think so. A judicious experiment in creative scheduling could yield some results: stagger the bus schedules to make sure downtown isn't flooded with arrivals within minutes of each other.
Of course, perhaps the most interesting question posed by Mr. Gutsche is the one left unanswered: if the majority of these kids were white and not African American, would he be quite so concerned?
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