Although I’m sure we could say this at any point over the 50-some years this lecture has been delivered, but it’s rough out there for high school media outlets and those teachers and advisers related to it. I often see issues of censorship, funding cuts and so forth through the newsflashes SPLC (Student Press Law Center) posts or through current advisers posting their issues on social media. But this year, it really came home for me.
The Northeastern Wisconsin Scholastic Press Association is one of many such high school media organizations at a crossroads. Budget cuts at UW-Oshkosh ended the faculty support that provided NEWSPA with an executive secretary and convention planner.
The president of the board was told his school will no longer offer his journalism class, due to declining numbers but in spite of the school newspaper’s status as one of the best high school publications in the state. The same happened at another NEWSPA-member school, as the long-time adviser was retiring, and no one was either willing or able to continue the journalism program.
I’m sure NEWSPA and its member schools are not unique in this kind of predicament, which is why this division is crucially important to the sustainability and advancement of scholastic journalism. So many of the previous Honors Lectures I read in preparation for tonight reflected this sense of duty.
George Daniels gave an amazing speech last year, in which he provided both a look forward and a look back for the division, helping us to see where we are and the importance of reinforcing our core mission. As we seek to both teach and assist secondary-level teachers in the promise that journalism provides, we both advance our field today and seed it with well-motivated students who will blossom into the journalists we desperately need for tomorrow.
Candace Bowen’s speech ten years ago focused on the importance of the research this division does, as it provides both scholarly explanations for the value of scholastic journalism and practical assistance to journalism educators at all levels.
I even managed to locate a transcript of Lou Ingelhart’s lecture, which he delivered in Boston, to the Secondary Education Division of the old Association for Education in Journalism. If you weren’t there in 1980, you missed a doozie of speech, in that Louie outlined 13 personality types of student journalists, 13 types of journalism advisers and 13 types of high school administrators. You might still recognize a few of the student-types in your own newsrooms and classrooms, including the “Shy Beginner,” the “Stubborn Editorialist,” and “The Dirty Joke Connoisseur.”
If you never got a chance to spend time with Dr. Ingelhart, you really missed an opportunity to connect with a treasure in this field. Two days after I started as the adviser of the Ball State Daily News, Louie was waiting for me in my office. He spent the next two hours telling me about how important it was to work with students, how valuable the Student Press Law Center was and why I should pay attention to the scholastic division here at AEJMC. He was a heck of an advocate for high school journalism, college student media and the First Amendment.
It was in digging through the Louie’s archives that I came to realize why I love this division so much: It is, in the truest sense of the word, the underdog of AEJMC.
I grew up with a heartfelt kinship for those people, groups and teams that defied the expectations of the pundits and refused to give up, regardless of the size of the odds or the strength of the opposition.
My formative years had the 1980 Miracle on Ice Olympic hockey team that somehow dethroned the Soviet Union’s Red Army Squad. I watched Jim Valvano’s 1983 NC State Wolfpack win the NCAA basketball championship by surviving and advancing in a tournament where they barely made the field.
My heroes became Roger Staubach and Doug Flutie, people who never gave up as long as there was time left on the clock.
I could list dozens more of these things, but being in Philadelphia, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the great boxer Smokin’ Joe Frazier, who won an Olympic Gold Medal with a broken thumb and the heavyweight championship while being legally blind in one eye. And of course there is the city’s most famous fictional boxer, Rocky Balboa, a man whose whole life was dubbed “a million to one shot.”
When it comes to AEJ, scholastic journalism was all of these things rolled into one.
In a 1990 speech to the division, Dr. Ingelhart explained how a few years after his 1953 arrival at Ball State, he decided that AEJ should include secondary school journalism as one of its committees. He explained in that speech how he wrote to the officers of AEJ and asked them to consider such a committee and to give him a chance to develop it.
He was turned down with what he referred to as a “resounding letter” in which AEJ officials noted that they “had no concern for fringe areas like teaching journalism in high schools.”
Undeterred, Louie asked a friend to arrange a meeting room for him at the upcoming convention so he could make his pitch to like-minded educators and petition AEJ to create a secondary education committee. More than 50 people showed up at that meeting, steeped in enthusiasm and willing to make the case to AEJ for scholastic journalism. These educators and scholars crafted a logical, thoughtful and compelling petition to AEJ that secondary education in journalism be added to the committee roster.
And AEJ turned them down again.
After some turnover at the top of AEJ, coupled with Ingelhart’s unrelenting persistence, scholastic journalism got its place at the table. Even with that, Louie noted, the division had a number of lean membership years as well as the occasional run in with some officious academic calling for the dissolution of this rag-tag bunch of folks who really had no business being part of such a scholarly organization.
And yet, we have endured, as all good underdogs do. But we also did more than survive.
We grew. We improved. We stretched ourselves.
We became a division among equals within the ranks of AEJMC.
Today, this division serves a symbol of what can happen when anyone decides that they can exceed the expectations of those people around them and refuse to knuckle under to common wisdom.
In doing so, we provide our students, our colleagues and our discipline with significant value in that we grow the crop of the next generation of journalists, develop innovative ways to teach important subjects and expand the understanding of how journalism works.
With that backdrop, I’d like to honor the legacy of this division with a few thoughts that you can share with your students and colleagues when you go home.
When your scholarship isn’t panning out the way you want, or the local schools are cutting their journalism programs or when life generally is going to hell in a speedboat, I hope these maxims can help you remember what it is that this division represents and how you can and will endure.
First, remember that we all started somewhere and usually we weren’t all that great to begin with.
There’s a story I tell my journalism kids that captures my view on the arrogant self-importance of some people. Former baseball pitcher Johnny Sain used to HATE attending Old Timers’ Day after he retired because it brought out the worst in his former colleagues. These men, now well past their prime, would spend time talking about how this current generation wasn’t measuring up or how certain players they knew could run circles around the “kids these days.”
In response, Sain would often say, “There sure is a lot of bullshit going on around here. The older these guys get, the better they used to be.”
I think of this when I listen to people my age talk about people my daughter’s age. In their minds, back in the day, whether that “day” was 50 years or 50 days ago, journalism folks were better, stronger and faster at everything than these damned kids are today.
And sure, there are days I wonder if I’m part of some sort of Milgram experiment, in which researchers keep presenting me with students who are trained to sap my will to live.
However, when I go back to the best gift I ever got from a mentor, it really grounds me nicely. When I was about to teach my first college class, the person who taught me in my own first journalism class took me to dinner. He then handed me a folder that contained the first thing I ever wrote for him in his class.
Steve used to grade in green because he said it was an “affirming color.” Well, he affirmed the unholy hell out of me to the point where it looked like a shamrock patch had thrown up all over it.
“Good god,” I told him. “I really sucked.”
“No,” he assured me. “You were actually one of the better ones in that class. But this is where you started, so keep that in mind when you’re working with your kids.”
What Steve taught me that night was that our field is one of incremental improvement over time and that if we expect to get anywhere in it, we are going to have to persist in the face of repeated failure. However we got to wherever we got, it was one inch at a time and surely wasn’t as easy as we now remember it to be.
We were once the scared sophomore, standing on unsure legs in this field, trying to patch together a lead sentence as we struggled to understand the difference between affect and effect. It’s worth remembering how that felt as we help the next generation of students try to gain their legs, write with confidence and develop into career professionals.
Even if we still don’t know the difference between affect and effect.
Second, what you say has a huge impact on the people to whom you say it, whether you know it or not.
As professors and teachers, we don’t always know the true impact of what we do. We also don’t know when or how certain pearls of wisdom came spewing out of our mouths. How often does a former student come up to you and say, “You really helped me a lot in life when you told me X” and you have no recollection whatsoever of having said that thing? After a number of those incidents, it occurred to me that “caution” should be my new watch word when it came to engaging with students.
Sometimes, our impact is even more opaque than that. In February of this year, I got a random package of trinkets from a former student whom I had expected to have long forgotten about me. I always thought of her a great kid. Strong, smart, driven and dedicated.
The package was followed up by an email in which she disclosed the following:
“Those last two semesters in 2017-2018, were quite difficult. I was silently battling some severe mental health issues. I was contemplating suicide on a daily basis, and I was struggling heavily about not having a purpose in life…
“Words cannot express how attending your course … saved my life. I know that it may sound a tad theatrical, but it truly was my saving grace. The way that you saw so much potential in my abilities as a journalist and as a student, motivated me to not follow through with my suicidal ideation because you saw something in me that I did not, and I refused to end my life without seeing what you saw in me.”
Whether you are teaching your first class or your 1,000th, you have had an impact on the people who sit in that classroom and hear what you have to say. Whether you are assisting your first high school teacher or if you’ve done the secondary learning program so long some of your first mentees are retiring now, you have passed along important things that resonate long after you have parted company.
The thoughts and sayings you provided continue to shape the hearts and minds of the people with whom you interacted.
In short, you matter, whether you realize it or not.
Finally, please frequently ask the most important question in life: “Do you think this will make you happy?”
Students find themselves pursuing degrees and declaring majors for a number of reasons: The job market there is good. The aptitude test said it was right up their alley. Their parents said they should.
They have been taught to run hard after that golden ring, because it will make their lives complete.
However, rarely, if ever, do they stop and ask if what they are pursuing will make them happy. That’s a lot harder to weigh, especially against things like a salary offer or how much vacation they’ll get. However, if they don’t stop and think about it now, they’re going to find themselves in a world of anxiety and regret later when they hit their quarter-life crisis.
As educators, we all know when that happens for them, because about three years after graduation they reach out to us and ask, “Do you have some time to talk to me about maybe doing grad school?”
If grad school is the answer, I shudder to think what the question is.
In most cases, we manage to talk them down off the ledge, get them to see some potential paths forward and refocus them on finding some level of contentment in the lives they are leading.
What I’ll ask of you tonight is to prioritize happiness, not just for them, but also for yourselves.
When I started teaching college journalism a few decades ago, the powers that be decided that I had an immense amount of promise. These powerful people believed I would move up the ladder fast and conquer challenges expediently, reaching a pinnacle that would place me in a pantheon of academia.
From that point on, it became clear I was expected to outwork everyone around me. I had to write more conference papers, publish more journal articles and lead more university committees than those around me. I had to crank out more students at more top media outlets than those in my peer group.
I needed to go from assistant professor to associate professor to full professor as quickly as possible so I could be a chair, a dean, a provost and then maybe a chancellor. To do any less would be failure and would reflect poorly on those professors and scholars who staked me to this life. My failure would serve as an example of what not to do for the next generation of freshly minted Ph.D.s in our field.
What I learned instead was that this wasn’t going to make me happy. I didn’t want to be an administrator. I didn’t want to crank out dozens of pointless studies like I was a copy machine on speed. I didn’t want to don a suit and petition the elites of society for donations to a university.
I just really wanted to teach kids how to write well, publish research that had theoretical and practical value and help as many kids and colleagues as I could along the way. Amy and I also realized that there’s uncertain brevity to life, as many of our friends and colleagues were moving home to watch their parents live out their final days. We didn’t want that to be Zoe’s only memories of her grandparents, so when the UWO job came open, we took it and moved back home to Wisconsin.
I still remember coming to AEJ shortly after I passed up some “elite” jobs to head off to Oshkosh. When I answered the inevitable, “So where are you now?” question for a friend or a former professor, their facial expression looked like I’d told them I was dying of cancer. For a long time, it took a toll on me, as did all the announcements of how my former doctoral colleagues and academic peers had taken new positions, climbed higher mountains and earned the statuses for which I was supposedly destined.
However, somewhere along the line, I started asking myself the question, “Do you think that would make you happy?” and those pangs of regret kind of melted away because I knew that those things were great for my friends, but a terrible fit for me. Plus, being in Oshkosh gave our families plenty of Zoe time, Dad and I got to do a ton of baseball card shows and we always knew that we could get a great fish fry on Fridays.
Don’t let others in this world of academe dictate your path.
If you enjoy workshopping at a conference with a group of high school kids, do that.
If you like teaching basic writing and reporting, do that.
If you want to advise a student media outlet instead of pursuing some higher position in the academic echelon, there is nothing wrong with that.
And, hey, if you truly want to climb every ladder and take on every leadership role this field has to offer, go for it. Somebody’s got to do the administrative work on this planet and it sure as hell isn’t going to be me.
Just don’t do things because that’s what is expected or demanded of you. Find that place and that space for yourself in which every part of your being knows you are doing the right thing.
If you do what you know will make you happy, you will more than help the people that matter most to you, and you will find true greatness in everything you are.
It’s not always easy, but being an underdog never is.
Thank you so much and have a wonderful night.