Category Archives: college life

Driven to distraction in the academy

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Here are a few surprising things about life in the academy. Grading is nearly a fulltime job, distraction is the steady state of things, and knowing whether your students have learned anything is a lot easier than proving it.

On the first point, there’s never enough time during the work week to do a good job of grading and critiquing student work. Now I know why elementary-school teachers spend good chunks of their weekends cozying up to student papers.

It’s a matter of adjusting your calendar. I’ve taken to giving my kids deadlines at 5 p.m. on Fridays. That way I figure I may get their work back to them in timely fashion. I’m not whining about this (though it taxes my wife’s patience). But few folks outside the academy understand this. All they see are summers off and a few lectures a week. Would that it were only so!

Grading, by the way, may be the most challenging part of the job. In journalism instruction this amounts to editing a lot of stories every week. That means finding holes, looking for the great quotes, checking for the sound structure, the seductive lede, solid nut graf, good kicker, etc., even as you suggest — but avoid dictating — rewrites. By comparison, my editing buds at Bloomberg Businessweek work intensely on two or three pieces a week – including takeouts – which now sounds like a day at the beach.

Many of the papers, moreover, are the work of, um, loving little hands that have a long way to go. They’re novices and that’s why they’re in school. Our job is to be tough but encouraging, which is a challenging balancing act. I had to give a 22 to a piece the other day and offer a detailed criticism to explain the poor grade. But will that student come back with something better or shrug it off as a blown assignment? So far, on her first rewrite, she’s done mostly the latter. That led to me kicking the piece back to her and suggesting she take a closer look at all those margin notes I made. We’ll see how it turns out soon.

Taking a hard line with students isn’t easy. Some of my colleagues make Marine drill sergeants look like pushovers. One started a basic reporting class this semester with a full classroom of students and is down to nine. The kids who couldn’t handle the tough grading washed out; they must hope they’ll take the class again with someone they expect will go easier or they’re just leaving journalism. Another colleague who has taught for a couple decades can count those he failed on one hand with several fingers to spare. The Gentleman’s C was a saving grace for many, I suspect.

I figure there’s got to be a middle-ground, a golden mean. Sure, most of our kids aren’t ready yet to handle the growling city editors and magazine section editors I ran across. And some never will be. But I figure part of my job is to make them ready for that. And I don’t have to be an SOB to get them ready for SOBs. I just have to point out the flaws in their work and grade them accordingly, showing them how to make fixes. They’ll learn whether journalism is for them even without a high washout rate, I figure.

Indeed, some of the work that the kids do can make your day. I live for those moments when a piece comes in that almost ready for prime time. One fellow this week did a story comparing drinking-related crime in Lincoln with other places, quoting the local police chief and making it all timely by talking about a recent expansion of the drinking day to 2 a.m., an hour more than before. Good stats, disturbing records of car accidents with booze involved. The piece is solid.

Other students have done pieces that surprise and delight. One looked into a Northwestern University study that showed that religious people tend toward obesity. She looked at local churches and how they’re trying to foster fitness among their members. Another student looked at a new gender gap, the imbalance between women and men in high school graduation rates and college attendance (57% girls on campus nationally and in Nebraska). Such intriguing efforts can make grading far more palatable, even on weekends.

Part of the reason there are not enough hours in the work week for the grade book is that every day is a laundry list of distractions. Some days, this is great. It reminds me of John Lennon’s line from “Beautiful Boy” that life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. There are, for instance, the kids who walk in to talk about their schoolwork (a pause that refreshes because it’s fun to help them iron out assignments and ideas). Our policy at Nebraska’s J School is no set office hours, but an open door whenever we’re not in class. That can mean many surprise visits.

Then there’s email, that modern scourge. The damn computer delivers something else to deal with every few minutes, it seems. And each note requires a prompt response, of course. I do respond quickly to the dean’s notes, I must say. My wife and kids, too, get priority. For others, it’s a challenge.

It reminds me of a high school history teacher who taught us time-management long before Day-Timers made a bundle on the concept. Make a to-do list early in the week, update it often and hope you’ll have checks next to most items by week’s end. Works pretty well, though mine seems to expand every day. I have found that I can’t abide unchecked items, which means a good many-mile run each morning to work off the self-imposed pressure. I hope my kids do something similar and figure the ones who meet deadlines must be doing so.

Finally, there’s another area of academics that is a real challenge. It’s the proof of success. “Assessment,” a term of little endearment, isn’t easy.

Let me spell that out. Take my biz-econ journalism students, for instance. I know they are learning something. They knew nothing about publicly traded companies, earnings, Form 10Ks and 10Qs, etc. They couldn’t write about a company’s quarterly results before spending a couple weeks on the topic (indeed, developing a grasp of income statements, balance sheets, stock market performances, etc.) Hell, they didn’t know the difference between Nasdaq and the NYSE, or the many different animals in the stock and commodities exchange worlds, before we dealt with all that. It’s clear they’ve learned something.

But how much did they learn? What will they take away? How can I prove to outsiders, especially tenure-review committee members, that the kids have moved from Point A to Point B? Even defining those points, as well as measuring the gap between them, is a challenge. Lots of documents. Lots of rubrics and graphs.

Fortunately, at Nebraska some of us have help. A group of us – mostly tenure-track newbies – are working on a peer-teaching experience this semester that is aimed at getting at such answers. We met on Saturday this weekend (no time during the work week for such things) to draft a preliminary version of a statement aimed at measuring our progress.

I picked three students – one star, one middler and one challenged student. I monitor their progress via reporting and writing assignments and tests. Will it become clear that these kids have grown between January and May? Don’t know. Certainly, they’ve learned something, but quantifying and demonstrating their achievement isn’t as simple as recording how they’ve done on an end-of-term test – it doesn’t work that way in journalism or other writing fields.

For folks in the teaching game for most of their careers, a lot of this is workaday stuff. It’s routine. For me, it’s all new. I’d like to think I’m doing A work. But between the grading challenges, the many distractions and the challenge of measuring it all, it’s damn hard to prove that. There are many days when it makes running a national correspondent system for a magazine look easy.

Student journalism — not just for laughs

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Some 38 years ago, Jim Vallely was a New Jersey college student who had a knack for humor and a nice touch with a pen, but he wasn’t sure how to put the two together. Nourishing what he recalls as “a very faint ambition” to become a writer, he’d hang about the school newspaper office. Once, we published a piece he did called “Suicide note from a dog.”

Sadly, the piece seems lost to history. That’s sad because Jim, left in the photo, today is a prolific comedy writer in L.A. His credits are stunning: writer and co-executive producer of Emmy Award-winning Arrested Development, exec producer on Running Wilde, consulting producer on ‘Til Death, as well as various producing spots on The Geena Davis Show, The John Larroquette Show and The Golden Girls.

Jim is a big deal in the world of writing and production.

And this weekend he sent me a touching note crediting the launch of his stellar career to our paper and the piece about the dog. “I was published!, and I decided then and there to pursue comedy writing,” he wrote.

School newspapers can make a huge difference in people’s lives. That’s obvious for future journalists – as employers tell us when they’re considering intern candidates. Outfits ranging from local papers to the likes of Bloomberg put such experience at the top of their list. They want to see the clips. They know there’s nothing like getting out, covering things and having to put your work out – on deadline and with an editor’s oversight — for the world to see.

But school papers also matter whether journalism is in your future or not. Writing, editing, getting a platform for commenting on the world is invaluable for anyone who plans to do anything involving pecking at a keyboard. It teaches you how to look carefully, think critically, organize your thoughts and subject them to the cut and thrust of public debate. Such skills are central to law, politics, teaching, business – really just about anything professional. It’s just also a hell of a lot of fun.

Jim went on to do standup work in New York in the 1980s. That, I’m sure, was his crucible. He honed his craft in a lot of tough rooms. He then found his way to L.A., where he’s been writing for TV for the last 25 years.

Thanks to the wonder of the Net, he tracked me down and wrote to remember our time as fresh-faced undergrads. We had spent a lot of time talking about writing, trying to figure out where our dreams would lead us. He recalls my urging him to specialize in something. “I asked you, ‘you mean, like humor …’ and you said yes,” Jim wrote. Thus, the dog piece.

Jim went on to specialize – in spades. He figured out what fit him and pursued it, despite, I’m sure, huge challenges. His gambles and his stick-to-it-iveness paid off.

But a school newspaper did mark a big turning point in the road for him. Students who don’t make room in their crowded college lives for it may never know what opportunities they are giving up. Think about that the next time you see a hilarious, award-winning show. Look, too, for Jim Vallely’s credit.

Pistol-packing teachers: now that’s an idea

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When a Nebraska state legislator introduced a bill the other day that would open the way for teachers and administrators in schools in the state, including universities, to carry concealed guns, I’m not sure he fully appreciated how visionary the measure really was. It is, without doubt, one of the most far-sighted, politically astute and economically savvy pieces of legislation ever to be floated in Lincoln, Neb.

This bill, sure to be resisted by those blinkered pantywaists in Omaha and the university community in Lincoln, could transform the state’s economy and put Nebraska on the global map. It ought to be cheered from the Iowa border to Colorado. Let’s examine the implications.

First, school districts and the university are straining under budget pressures these days. If teachers and administrators could tuck Glocks under their vests, legions of security guards could be let go. Indeed, the campus police force at UNL and every other university campus in the state could be disbanded. When every academic is packing, criminals are sure to stay out of the classrooms, dormitories and poorly lit passageways traversed by coeds late at night. Think of the massive and instantaneous budget impact. Billion-dollar state budget shortfall? Gone in a flash of gunpowder!

Consider, too, the intellectual and financial benefits. If freshly armed professors chose to settle their disputes like men, instead of in those insufferably genteel discussions at faculty meetings, we’d have a lot fewer faculty members after a while. Odds are, too, that the survivors would be the brainier right-thinking types. Many of the rest are probably tenured, so this move would deal with that problem nicely, too. We’d save a bundle on inflated salaries and wind up with quick-thinking profs who have their heads on screwed on properly.

Sure, there could be some minor problems. Teachers drawing down on one another outside crowded classrooms or in faculty dining areas might be a bit disruptive, at times messy. But students adapt to just about anything and we do have janitors for a reason. Let’s not let such small issues hobble us.

Politically, moreover, this is a brilliant move. A bill like this forces legislators to put their convictions out on display for everyone to see. Not sure if your legislator is a Second Amendment champion? This’ll out him. And this way, we could rid ourselves of the overeducated urbanites who hide behind those wrong-headed complaints about gun violence and crime. You know, many of them are following secret agendas inspired by Moscow and Beijing to disarm Americans anyway. This bill will eventually force them out as voters see their true colors.

The measure is also an economic stroke of genius. When Nebraska becomes a place where real Americans can stride around with holsters heavy and hearts full, more Americans will want to visit. Eventually, many will move here. Our kind of people will desert those decadent and dangerous cities on the coasts and flock to the rolling prairie, where they can fire at will at anything that disturbs them. Our population will swell, first with tourists and then with permanent newcomers.

Don’t underestimate those tourists, either. This is Nebraska, after all – a place where six-shooters on both hips were once commonplace. With no trouble at all, we could recreate the glory days of the Nebraska Territory. People would wander the streets even in places like Lincoln looking for low-down varmints to eradicate. Our bars could reinstall those nifty swinging panels on their front doors. Men could play poker, curse, drink and spit a lot while busty women saunter around in fluffy skirts. Think of the possibilities of evoking a time when real freedom existed in the state and our country, when we didn’t rely on slick lawyers and worry about Miranda Rights and such.

What, you say, this is supposed to be the 21st Century? Gunfights have gone the way of player pianos.  Now, we have laws and police and courts and such. Poppycock. It’s weaponry we all need. The bad guys are packing, after all, and the only way for decent folk to counter that is to carry even bigger guns. Let’s hope our legislators don’t stop at concealed handguns, but let us have assault weapons in our elementary, high schools and colleges. With any luck, someone clever on campus could develop a concealable bazooka – why are we paying those academics anyway, if not to come up with nifty new things? Indeed, Nebraska could become a Silicon Valley for weapons-makers.

But, really, what we should hope for is the ability to drive tanks to campus. Legalize armored personnel carriers and you’ll really scare off the bad element. They would also guarantee all of us right-thinking folks good parking spaces.

This bill, put forward in the wake of a tragic high school shooting by a mentally troubled student, is certainly evidence that some legislative leaders in the state have been bred and reared right – isn’t it? Then again, it could be a sign of maybe a little too much inbreeding in somebody’s family.

Making business journalism sexy (almost)

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Looking for ways to make business journalism come alive for students? How about creating scavenger hunts for juicy tidbits in corporate government filings? What about mock press conferences that play PR and journalism students against one another? Then there are some sure bets – awarding $50 gift cards to local bars for mock stock-portfolio performances and showing students how to find the homes and salaries of university officials and other professors – including yourself — on the Net.

These were among the ideas savvy veteran instructors offered at the Business Journalism Professors Seminar last week at Arizona State University. The program, offered by the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, brought together as fellows 15 profs from such universities as Columbia, Kansas State, Duquesne and Troy, as well as a couple schools in Beijing, the Central University of Finance & Economics and the University of International Business and Economics. I was privileged to be among those talented folks for the week.

We bandied about ideas for getting 20-year-olds (as well as fellow faculty and deans) excited about business journalism in the first place. The main answer was, of course, jobs. If they’d like good careers in journalism that pay well, offer lots of room to grow and that can be as challenging at age 45 as at 20, there really are few spots in the field to match. These days, with so much contraction in the field, business and economic coverage is one of the few bright spots, with opportunity rich at places such as Reuters, Bloomberg News, Dow Jones and the many Net places popping up.

The key, of course, is to persuade kids crazy for sports and entertainment that biz-econ coverage can be fun. The challenge is that many of them likely have never picked up the Wall Street Journal or done more than pass over the local rag’s biz page. The best counsel, offered by folks such as UNC Prof. Chris Roush, Ohio University’s Mark W. Tatge, Washington & Lee’s Pamela K. Luecke and Reynolds Center president Andrew Leckey, was to make the classes engaging, involve students through smart classroom techniques and thus build a following. Some folks, such as the University of Kansas’ James K. Gentry, even suggest sneaking economics and (shudder) math in by building in novel exercises with balance sheets and income statements.

Once you have the kids, these folks offered some cool ideas for keeping their interest:

— discuss stories on people the students can relate to, such as the recent Time cover on Mark Zuckerberg or the May 2003 piece in Fortune on Sheryl Crow and Steve Jobs, and make sure to flash them on the screen (at the risk of offending the more conservative kids, I might add the seminude photo BW ran of Richard Branson in 1998)

— scavenger hunts. Find nuggets of intriguing stuff in 10Ks or quarterly filings by local companies or familiar outfits such as Apple, Google, Coca-Cola, Buffalo Wild Wings, Hot Topic, The Buckle, Kellogg, etc., and craft a quiz of 20 or so questions to which the students must find the answers

— run contests in class to see who can guess a forthcoming unemployment rate, corporate quarterly EPS figure or inflation rate

— compare a local CEO’s pay with that of university professors, presidents or coaches, using proxy statements and Guidestar filings to find figures

— conduct field trips to local brokerage firm offices, businesses or, if possible, Fed facilities

— have student invest in mock stock portfolios and present a valuable prize at the end, such as a gift certificate or a subscription to The Economist (a bar gift card might be a bit more exciting to undergrads, I’d wager)

— follow economists’ blogs, such as Marginal Revolution and Economists Do It With Models, and get discussions going about opposing viewpoints

— turn students onto sites such as businessjournalism.org, Talking Biz News, and the College Business Journalism Consortium

— have students interview regular working people about their lives on the job

— discuss ethical problems that concern business reporters, using transgressors such as R. Foster Winans as examples. Other topics for ethical discussions might include questions about taking a thank-you bouquet of flowers from a CEO or traveling on company-paid trips, as well dating sources or questions about who pays for lunch

— discuss business journalism celebs, such as Lou Dobbs and Dan Dorfman

— discuss scandals such as the Chiquita International scandal (Cincinnati Enquirer paid $10 m and fired a reporter after he used stolen voicemails)

— use films such as “The Insider,” “Wall Street,” and “Social Network” to discuss business issues

— use short clips from various films to foster discussions of how businesses operate. Good example: “The Corporation”

— team up with PR instructors to stage a mock news conference competition pitting company execs in a crisis against journalism students. Great opportunity for both sides to strut their stuff.

We also heard helpful suggestions from employers, particularly Jodi Schneider of Bloomberg News and Ilana Lowery of the Phoenix Business Journal, along with handy ideas from Leckey and Reynolds executive director Linda Austin, a former business editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer. My biggest takeaway: run some mock job interviews with students and teach them to send handwritten thank-you notes.

And we were treated to some smart presentations by journalists Diana B. Henriques of the New York Times about the art of investigative work (look for her new Madoff book), the University of Nevada’s Alan Deutschman about the peculiar psychologies of CEOs (narcissists and psychopaths are not uncommon), the University of Missouri’s Randall Smith’s view of the future for business journalists (it’s raining everywhere but less on business areas). We got some fresh takes on computer-aided reporting, too, by Steve Doig of the ASU Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication as well as on social media by the Reynolds Center’s Robin J. Phillips.

For anyone interested in journalism, especially biz journalism, it was a great week. As I take the lessons from ASU to heart, my students will be better off. My thanks to the folks there.

There, there, dear: do tears belong in the classroom?

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In “A League of Their Own,” that wonderful 1992 film, a young woman player makes a dunderheaded toss and breaks into tears as coach Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) yells at her. “Are you crying?,” he asks, stunned. “There’s no crying! There’s no crying in baseball!”

Boy, can I feel for Dugan. So far, I’ve had to deal with four incidents of tears in school. One time, I believe, the bad toss was mine. In the other cases, well, I’d point to hormones, undergrads facing job-like pressure for the first time or sheltered young women beginning to discover the world isn’t such a kindly place.

Still, I felt as flummoxed as Dugan did. Making girls cry is something only a true jerk would ever feel good about. This is so, even though a wiser colleague at Nebraska, veteran teacher and hard-boiled journalist Kathy Christensen, tells me tears come automatically with breasts. She shrugs them off.

Just under three semesters into my academic career, I don’t find the waterworks easy to dismiss. But, dear reader, you be the judge. Let me know if I blew it or could have handled these situations better:

Case No. 1 – I encourage an outstanding magazine-writing student to pursue an internship with Bloomberg Businessweek, my old employer. Before Bloomberg bought it, the mag had a tradition of taking on bright young interns, most of whom had no business training but who had lots of smarts. A colleague at the mag looks over her materials and says she’d be a wonderful recruit and he could use her skills in projects on business schools; he recommends her, as do I.

But, in myriad ways big and small, BW has changed. Bloomberg has her take a three-hour online test, parts of which are heavy on business knowledge (of which she has none, as everyone involved knows). She fails badly and folks there tell her she’s not a candidate. She comes into my office, crushed and weeping.

So I feel like a heel. I put her into a bad spot, after all, and she suffers for it. It also doesn’t help my credibility with the new BW regime.

Was I wrong? If students are willing to take a test and do badly, is it my fault? I warned her there would be business material on the test, even reviewed some general things with her. But I didn’t realize how much the game had changed. Seems to me I blew it. Did I?

Case No. 2 – As is my normal practice, I flash a student’s paper on the screen from a classroom projector. As a class, we criticize the work. I point out the positives and negatives of the piece, and suggest ways it could be improved. It’s pretty benign and no different from other critiques. We’ve had many such critiques that day. The class doesn’t say much one way or the other about it.

The student waits a bit after the lights come up, but then mutters to me, “you gave me a terrible grade on the paper, then humiliated me in front of everyone. I’m done. That’s it.” And she storms out, furious and in tears.

Her grade, a C+, was not on the screen, though her name was (regular practice in these editing and review sessions). Also, while rushing out, she informs me she will drop another class with me that she had signed up for the following semester and, later, she tops it all of by giving me a scathing evaluation at the end of the course.

Is it wrong to criticize students’ work publicly? The class involved peer-editing, so students criticized one another’s work in every assignment. And, in journalism don’t we face critics every time a reader opens a paper and curses about something he or she reads? In the end, I don’t fault myself for this one, but the drama did throw me.

Case No. 3 – A student has promised a colleague that she would deliver a finished video about a trip the colleague and I took with eight students to Kazakhstan in May. The students are no longer in our classes; some have even graduated, so we have no real sway over them.

The due-date comes and she hasn’t got the goods, but has several legit-sounding reasons. The colleague and I bemoan the fact that several students are behind – a hassle he has had in prior classes – and he gets a bit hot about the general problem. It’s a big thorn in the side for him.

The student, a smart and delightful videographer, breaks into tears. She then begins to apologize, explaining that it’s the time of the month for her (she really said that), she’s got problems with moving to a new city and she’s been working and traveling nonstop for weeks. My heart, frankly, goes out to her. I say, it’s not you that’s the problem here; it’s the general issue of how we can get students to comply with deadlines. I’m sure you will get your work done (which eventually she does, at least most of her work).

When I complain to my colleague later that we shouldn’t be making girls cry, he says, “They make themselves cry.” It’s not his problem, but theirs, he suggests.

So, was she being manipulative? Were we right to rant? Is a deadline a deadline?

Case No. 4 – A top student interviews with an internship recruiter. She says a couple silly things – including asking whether she needs to tell her soccer league that she can’t referee for a week during the internship – and strikes a tone the recruiter says is arrogant. In fact, he tells me afterward that he’s written “humility?” several times on his notes about her.

She comes by and I tell her I’m going to give her some no-holds-barred criticism about her interview. It won’t help her, I say, if I mince words, so I don’t. I tell her precisely what the interviewer had told me, and advise that appearing arrogant cannot help in such settings. You’ve got to seem humble, even it’s just for appearances. She breaks into tears, denies arrogance and says she was not asking for a week off for soccer. He misunderstood, she says, pleadingly.

This is one where tough-love was warranted, I believe. Still, the waterworks were troublesome. My own self-criticism: do mock interviews with students first from now on, giving them pointers that can spare them from making such mistakes. (By the way, she got the internship).

So dear reader, what say you? Are tears something teachers should slough off? Is it better that our kids shed them before they get into the workplace, where the consequences of mistakes can be far uglier? And how would you advise someone, still mystified by the half-adult psyches of undergrads, to deal with them? I’m thinking maybe I’ll just tell the kids that there is still no crying in baseball.

Protected Sources

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When should journalists rely on anonymous sources?

Almost never, most professionals say. Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief, Matthew Winkler, in January slammed staffers at BUSINESSWEEK for quoting them. Bloomberg, which in December bought BW from McGraw-Hill, uses unnamed sources “reluctantly only when the benefit … outweighs the lack of definitive attribution,” the editor said. Without names, he added, “readers have no proof that [the quotes] are more credible than hearsay.”

AP seems a touch more tolerant. Anonymity is acceptable, it says, if “the material is information and not opinion or speculation, and is vital to the news report.” But it holds that the source must be reliable and the information cannot be gotten otherwise.

So, for us at the J School, the question arises: was it right to grant anonymity to a young illegal immigrant arguing against a plan in the state Legislature to boost tuition for illegals at the state university? The piece, headlined “Nebraska lawmakers and education officials debate immigrant tuition bill,” is a leaned-down version of an earlier story that identified the student.

Acting with compassion and prudence, my colleagues yanked that first story off our Website, NewsNetNebraska.org, after the student had second thoughts about her identity becoming known. No one here wants to put a student — barely an adult, really — in the crosshairs of politicians who could make life difficult and much more expensive for her. My fellow teachers here are educators, first and foremost. We’re all here to give students a shot at fuller lives and meaningful careers.

Still, the case is rich with lessons — and questions. The first piece, for instance, put a human face on an otherwise sterile and abstract debate. This came across with power in such details as a photo and audio slideshow where the student made her case — in her own voice — about the value of education to an immigrant. Even the most tough-minded would have to feel sympathy: this girl’s parents braved a desert crossing in the early 1990s to get her across the border at age 2, and she wants nothing more than a good, affordable education to become a contributing American citizen. Our student journalist did a superb job in drawing out such color and detail.

Regrettably, most such details are now missing. The slide show is gone altogether, as are all other photos of the young woman. Instead, readers get only a cold abstraction. Consider the lede — “If Nebraska continues to help educate immigrant college students, the state will benefit in the run, says an undocumented student who attends the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.”

Does this put the argument in human terms? Does it make a reader feel anything? Further, does it meet the tests Bloomberg and AP apply for anonymity? In hindsight, an advocate for illegals, arguing with some passion, could make the same case with his or her name attached (a university official does so in the piece, but as blandly as a lawyer would). Perhaps the student could then have been referred to, with some detail about her situation but no names. Maybe this would buttress the argument a bit.

I believe my colleagues acted rightly in taking the student’s name and photos off the story. The woman — likely under 21 and a promising student — had pleaded that she didn’t understand the implications of going public on our Web site. Fair enough. Fear is a troubling thing, and it’s not uncommon for people to have second thoughts when the stakes are high and the personal cost steep. In a way, this young student has more to lose than, say, Rosa Parks.

But for everyone involved the cost of anonymity is high. For one, readers don’t see the face behind the argument. It all seems like just another bit of legislative yammering. Our illegal neighbors don’t even seem human, but are reduced to colorless terms such as “undocumented student.”

More troubling for journalists, we lose credibility. Every time we rely on an anonymous source, we say, “trust us, there really is a person behind these quotes but we just can’t tell you who that is.” Say that too often and readers will stop believing you. Finding people who are willing to put their names on the line in difficult situations can be hard work. But in the end, it makes for good journalism, the kind that can influence the actions of politicians.

The Google Challenge

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Illegal immigrants live in the shadows. But now that one of our journalism students has put a spotlight on one of them, a hard-working UNL sophomore who has been in the U.S. since age 2, the glare is turning out to be too bright.

The result is something of an ethical dilemma for us at the J School. It is also a powerful illustration of how Google makes it impossible to pull a story back once it’s gone public. All in all, the case is rife with lessons for student journalists, a potent teachable moment.

The immigrant at the center of this tale, a promising young psychology major who hails originally from Mexico, willingly talked with our student journalist. She sat for photos. But after the story went out on our Web site, NewsNetNebraska, she phoned our student journalist to ask us to take her name out of it and to strip it of any photos or other identifying information. Essentially, she asked that the piece be killed.

The young woman suggested she didn’t understand the piece would go beyond a class exercise. This was the case, it seems, even though our student journalist maintained it was made clear to her that the information would be published. What’s more, the photo session alone should have brought this home to the woman.

Out of compassion, and a sense that some important questions need to be pursued, however, my colleague opted to yank the piece off our Web site — for now. He left open the possibility that it may be restored in coming days, with more details, once he and our student journalist can get answers to some crucial questions.

Problem and lesson No. 1, though, is that the piece hasn’t really gone away. True, it’s no longer on our site, and visitors get a message to that effect. But Google caches such pieces, it seems, and it remains available at the click of a computer button. As we’ve learned, once something is out on the Net, it’s out for good.

Lesson No. 2: politicians can make people very nervous. This story is playing out against a worrisome Legislative backdrop. Charlie Janssen, a senator in the Nebraska Legislature, is pushing to repeal a two-year-old state law that permits some illegals to pay in-state tuition rates. As a result, the student our journalist wrote about could be at risk if someone in the Capitol pokes around a bit. So, too, could the UNL Admissions folks who let her into school, perhaps especially because University leaders are trying to shoot down Janssen’s effort.

In short, the student could be tossed about like a political football.

From a journalistic standpoint, however, the situation raises a host of questions:

— did she really not understand that the information about her would be published? If not, why would she sit for photos?
— was it proper for her to be admitted to the University in the first place? It seems she was not permitted in under the embattled two-year-old law, the so-called DREAM Act, but rather just came in without a Social Security number.

Our students will be looking further to see if a follow-up is merited, and if the piece ought to be restored to our site. For now, however, it’s already providing a remarkable case study.

Hard Lessons

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9


When a couple students clacked away on their keyboards during a lecture earlier this week, I crossed to the dark side. “There’s no need to check the Net right now, so if anyone here is, I’d appreciate it if you stopped,” I told them.

But when the clacking resumed a couple minutes later, I kinda lost it. “If you must check the Net, please step outside,” I said, working to keep my voice level and avoiding calling them out by name. “It’s distracting to everyone else.”

They stopped. But the sullen expression on one of their faces seemed anything but contrite. If anything, it said, “how dare you.”

For other classroom veterans, this may be old hat. These kids are undergrads, after all. Some don’t want to be in the class, don’t even want to be in school. And odds are pretty good that they’ve gotten away with sullen looks and rudeness before, at home or in class.

To me, however, it’s all new. When I’ve managed adults, I’ve had to be blunt to set people straight. “Just do the fucking work,” I told one staffer through clenched teeth during a frustrating evaluation session. (Hardly the kind of encouragement HR folks would like. But he later did go on to be a prize-winning investigative reporter.)

Of course, I can’t say precisely that to the kids. Nor do I want to. Instead, I want them to be as excited about journalism as I am. I want them to get the message that what we do and how we do it matters. Pulling the verbal equivalent of a Sister Attila knuckle-rapping session doesn’t seem like a way to get them revved up.

In fairness, the dozen other students were paying attention. Some might even have been getting as jazzed about the topic as I was. When many spoke up at points, I knew I was getting through. (These Nebraskans can be far too reticent.)

And the work that many of these kids do is outstanding — some of it ready to run in just about any newspaper in the country. In another class this week, one on magazine-writing, the work was good, so evocative, and the emotion so potent that it moved me close to tears. No exaggeration. Really heavy subject.

It’s the problem kids, however, that I find hard to shake off. The same sullen-looking Net-checking student, in a later class, turned in work that missed the mark in too many spots. Drove me bats. But it was the student’s reaction — annoyance at my questions, instead of embarrassment at a lack of answers — that really stuck in my craw.

Other teachers tell me it’s a generational thing. Some of these kids have been told how great they are all their lives, one colleague told me, so who are we to question them? If we do that, it’s we who must have a problem, not they. Certainly there can be nothing wrong with their behavior. And checking the Net in class is everyone’s right, isn’t it?

My son tells of how one of his profs at Boston University blew his cool during one talk. A student was reading the newspaper as the fellow was lecturing. The prof walked up to him, told him to leave the class and never come back. He wasn’t welcome in the room. Kid never returned.

Bravo! Before this week, I might have thought the prof was coming down a bit too hard. I might have even believed the problem was that he was a bore who couldn’t keep the kid engaged. Now, I’m with the prof. And I wonder if I should have tossed the students out this week. I hope the day doesn’t come when I’ll have to, but I’ll be ready, ruler in hand.

Bit sad, you know.