Knight-Bagehot Fellowship Curriculum

The Knight-Bagehot Fellowship provides an intensive, sharply focused study experience for accomplished journalists.

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The core of the Knight-Bagehot curriculum consists of courses offered by Columbia University. Fellows are required to complete at least 30 hours of university credit during their two semesters. They receive a certificate in economics and business journalism upon completion. By taking two additional required journalism courses, fellows may also qualify for a Master of Science in journalism.

Fellows may select any university course relating to business, economics, or finance. In practice, Knight-Bagehot fellows take most of their courses at Columbia’s highly regarded Graduate School of Business. Other popular courses are taken through the Law School and the School of International Affairs. The most commonly chosen courses cover such subjects as microeconomics, macroeconomics, accounting, corporate finance, business law, international economics, marketing, business finance, and securities analysis. Some fellows have structured their course work to fulfill half the requirements for a Master in Business Administration, which they obtained after two additional semesters at the business school.

The course work is supplemented by a program of seminars, dinner meetings, briefings and field trips organized specifically for the fellows. In one-and-a-half-hour sessions held twice a week, seminars have covered tax reform, monetary policy, accounting trends, financial regulation, and bankruptcy law. The subjects are flexible and are adjusted each year to accommodate news developments and the interests of the current fellows.

Once a week, fellows meet over dinner with prominent guests. The dinners are off-the-record so that fellows can gain insight into the thinking and personality of important individuals in the field. Guests are senior corporate executives, well-known economists and academicians, ranking government and union officials, and others with a special perspective on business affairs. Past guests have included Warren Buffett, Abby Joseph Cohen, Jamie Dimon, Michael Eisner, Mario Gabelli, Carl Icahn, Andrea Jung, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Sallie Krawcheck, Edward S. Lampert, Sumner Redstone, Amartya Sen, Saul Steinberg, Joseph Stiglitz, Ted Turner, Paul Volcker, Bruce Wasserstein, Walter Wriston and Dr. Muhammad Yunus.

The Knight-Bagehot Fellowship scrupulously avoids any ideological predisposition, striving to invite speakers from all parts of the political and philosophical spectrum in order to expose fellows to a broad range of viewpoints and perspectives.

Because of the demanding nature of the curriculum, fellows are not permitted, except under unusual circumstances, to take on outside assignments while school is in session.