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A college professor’s advice to incoming college students

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Dear College Student,

First, congratulations on embarking on a great adventure. Whether you are just out of high school or you are starting college later in life, you are beginning an endeavor that can open up opportunities that you had not envisioned for yourself and your families. It certainly did that for me.

No doubt, you are anxious about how to make the most of this experience. You are getting a lot of advice – probably too much to take in at one time. I don’t want to pile on, but I do have some perspective, having worked with students for the last 30 years, as well as having experience in the corporate and health care sectors. Some of these tips are things I found personally helpful, and others are things that I’ve learned from some of the highly capable students with whom I’ve had the honor of working. Many are things I wish I had known when I was an undergraduate.

What’s your dream?

This is the first question that I ask students who come to me for advisement. Here’s what I am really asking: What’s the life you are hoping for, and what do you believe or hope college will do to help you achieve that life? Often, students have only a vague idea of what they hope to get out of college, and that’s fine. Occasionally, (often a nontraditional student in either age or life experience), they have very clear ideas of what they want to do and how college fits into their life plan. That’s also fine, although I do encourage an openness to the possibility that your college experiences may lead you to alter your plans.

When I ask about the life you want for yourself, I am not just talking about the work you intend to do. What lifestyle are you looking for? Do you want to experience other cultures? Is it important for you to have strong ties to a faith community? Are you concerned about taking care of family responsibilities? Are you trying to figure out how people negotiate career, marriage and family? Do you need to figure out how to have the life you want while managing a chronic health condition or physical limitation? Are you concerned about how to achieve academic or professional success in a field where you haven’t seen people from your background? There are things you can do during your college years that can help you work out answers to all of these questions.

The value of articulating your dream for your life is two-fold. First, it keeps the focus on college as a means to an end, not the whole of your life. Second, as a faculty advisor, it’s helpful to me to understand what a student’s expectations, interests and considerations are. I might be able to suggest colleagues, alumni or organizations where the student might find people of like mind and interest.

Plan backwards.

You are more likely to reach your goals if you can begin with the ends in mind. That’s why your academic advisors may try to get you to come up with a tentative four-year course plan. It’s good advice, even though we know that it’s common for students to change majors once or twice before graduation. (By the way, changing majors needn’t affect the time it takes you to graduate, in most instances. Your first two years are usually general education courses that you’ll be able to apply to your graduation requirements regardless of major.) Planning backwards is a good way to help you figure out how to fit in the goals that are most meaningful to you. Want to go on exchange or do an internship? Work the eligibility requirements into your timeline.

Plan forwards.

Here’s something I found helpful during my college years: at the beginning of each academic year, I tried to set both academic and personal learning goals for the year. We each come to college with varying degrees of preparation for life. In addition to learning academic content and skills, we may need to learn a variety of practical, social and emotional skills in order to become the people we are striving to be. One of those skills is learning how to take care of our physical and emotional health while carrying a heavy workload. Learning how to be understanding and respectful of other cultures is another. Managing money and time is another. Understanding, setting and enforcing appropriate boundaries may be another.

List the personal development needs that you have noticed or that have been pointed out to you. Each semester, pick one to prioritize and make time in your week to devote some time learn about that thing. How do you do that with all of the other things you have to think about? Here’s a strategy that worked for me:

  • At the beginning of the semester, take all of your syllabi and make out a weekly schedule that includes the due dates for major class assignments. If not already noted, talk to your professor about interim deadlines for major assignments. (For example, if the course has a final paper and there aren’t deadlines for when you should have topic, bibliography and outline, get feedback from your professor about when you should set those deadlines for yourself.)
  • Note any formal recurring obligations, such as class time, lab time, work, practice, and such chores as laundry. If you have trouble staying organized, set aside a 15 minute slot in your day to do some basic straightening up. It will help you and your roommates will appreciate it.
  • Note regular seasonal obligations – office hour appointments with each of your professors and academic advisor at the beginning of the semester and at registration time, deadlines for internship applications, etc.
  • Schedule sleep. Take that seriously.
  • Following the 45/15 rule is a great way to approach study time.
  • Include at least one hour a week for personal time. This can be where you focus on your personal development priority. One semester I took a dance class. In another, I read a guide to personal finance.
  • At the end of each semester, assess your progress and use that to refine your goals for the next semester.
  • Take advantage of your college’s student success office, mentoring programs, or counseling center, as needed, to help you manage this list.

Integrate your academic and social lives.

Many of us got into college by developing a habit of sequestering ourselves away from our peers. Some of us – students of color, first-generation college students – come to college without a peer group that shares our interests or that even understands what we are experiencing. We may find ourselves being the only person from our background in a class. When we’re around people who share our cultural or class background on campus, we are more likely to focus on our common social experience, rather than the particularities of how we’re doing in our classes.

But research shows that collaborative learning really benefits college students, and there may be creative ways that you can integrate your academic study with social concerns. That’s another reason to talk to your professors about how to structure your studies and co-curricular activities in a way that supports your development as a whole person.

You will make mistakes. What matters is what you learn from them.

Years ago, I worked for a major research laboratory whose research VP was a Nobel Prize winner. He used to talk about how, when he visited the labs of his research scientists and asked what they were working on, he was always disappointed when they only told them about their positive results. He’d ask them which experiments weren’t working as expected. That, he said, was where the breakthroughs were.

It’s not unusual to have experiences in college that shake your confidence. I keep a folder in my desk that has my essays from my first-semester writing class at Princeton. I’d placed out of the writing requirement, but took Lit 151 anyway, reasoning that it couldn’t hurt to have more writing instruction. I wasn’t prepared for the critical feedback I got. Similarly, I went into my first-semester psychology midterm feeling confident because I had studied diligently, gone to class, and done the labs. I was gobsmacked when my grade wasn’t an A. What went wrong?

What I learned was that my writing class presumed a greater knowledge of formal rhetoric than I possessed at that time. I’d passed my writing sample because I was a voracious reader, not because I knew as much as I needed to know about how to structure an argument. I lost points on my psych midterm because I didn’t provide enough elaboration in the short answer or essay sections. In my high school, a short answer was a phrase or sentence, and three paragraphs was good enough for the essay section. In college, my instructor expected at least a paragraph for a short answer and 1-2 pages for an essay. I knew the material well enough to do that. What I didn’t have was the social capital to understand the difference between what my teacher wanted and what I thought he wanted.

Even now, I am embarrassed to write about those midterms. You can imagine how mortified I was at the time. When this kind of setback happens to high-achieving students, there’s a temptation to beat yourself up and say you have to work harder. After all, putting in more hours worked in high school. But often, that just leads to more disappointment, frustration, and in the worst cases, disengagement.

What saved me was finding graduate students who understood my background and who could help me bridge the gap between my work and my teachers’ expectations. They affirmed that I wasn’t deficient or lazy. I just needed a cultural translator. Thanks to them, my grades improved as time went on. What’s more, my struggles led me to want to enter higher education to help develop and apply the kinds of collaborative learning models that I’d seen work in industry to the challenge of helping journalism students adapt to the growing need for STEM literacy in the communications professions.

Lots of students struggle in classes where they’ve worked hard and had expected to do well. Sometimes they worry that their life plans will be scuttled if they end up without a high grade. Particularly in your first year, this should not be your worry. When it comes time to apply for jobs and graduate school, hirers and admissions committees will be interested to learn about how you met challenges and recovered from setbacks. That’s part of how they assess your maturity and character.

Well, that’s pretty much it. I hope you have lots of fun. Welcome Week is usually a blast – enjoy. Best wishes for a splendid semester.

Prof. Pearson

Lessons from Toni Morrison

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What I want my journalism students to learn from Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison – Nobel prize-winning writer, pathbreaking editor, innovative educator – is dead at the age of 88. Like millions of her fans all of the world, I am saddened that she’s gone and grateful for all of the words she left us in her books, essays, interviews, the documentary about her life, The Pieces I Am. I lift her up as a writing model in my journalism classrooms, especially for those aspiring to be literary journalists. Here are four things I hope they will learn from learning to closely read Toni Morrison’s work, and from understanding her impact on the publishing world.

1. Words have power.

In her 1993 Nobel Prize lecture, Morrison weaves a parable about an encounter between an old woman whose parents were enslaved and young people seeking her wisdom to call out the dangers of “oppressive language.” As with so much of Morrison, one needs to read the whole speech to understand her full meaning. I recall the criticism when she said, “Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represents the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.” There’s an entire course in journalism ethics in this quote alone:

The old woman is keenly aware that no intellectual mercenary, nor insatiable dictator, no paid-for politician or demagogue; no counterfeit journalist would be persuaded by her thoughts. There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.

Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture. December 7, 1993, Accessed August 6, 2019 https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/
Audio recording of Toni Morrison Nobel Prize lecture

Morrison calls upon journalists to do the work of ensuring that our reporting and storytelling practices illuminate and elevate histories, cultures, realities and perspectives that have been suppressed. She calls on us to bring complexity, nuance and depth to our work. She knew then what we have finally acknowledged in the last several years – that it’s all to easy to become the unwitting tool of demagogues and accomplices in miscarriages of justice.

2. Each sentence has work to do.

In the summer of 1978, I carried either a Toni Morrison or Herman Hesse novel with me everywhere I went. Hesse’s books made me imagine and wonder, but Morrison’s words altered my consciousness in ways I found difficult to explain. I couldn’t always tell you what I had just read. I could only tell you about these people I had met and how it made me feel watching them go through what they went through. Sula, and Pilate, and Milkman Dead had gotten inside me, you see. I would tell people that Morrison had the power to put me in that place.

One day in 1987, while reading Beloved, I came across this sentence where she is in the mind of Paul D seeing Sethe for the first time in many years:

Even in that tiny shack, leaning so close to the fire you could smell the heat in her dress, her eyes did not pick up a flicker of light.

Toni Morrison: Beloved: A Novel. Random House LLC, Accessed August 6, 2019

I put the book down at that moment, because I realized that I was reading that sentence as a writer and not a reader. The sentences leading up to it had taken me to a place of such anticipation and caring and anxiety about this reunion that I couldn’t bear to think about what it meant for this mother to have come so far, endured so much, only to arrive at freedom so hollow in her soul that her husband’s best friend could find no joy in her. I had to put the book down and recover so I could come back to it as a reader.

I sometime test the power of that sentence by writing it on the board for students and having them ponder its construction. I ask them to diagram it. I ask what questions it evoked about who this woman was and what had happened to make her this way. What expectations does this sentence create?

Every Toni Morrison sentence is that carefully crafted and then arranged, layer upon layer, to take you into the psyches of her characters.The sentences say concrete things that evoke meaning, but do not pretend to capture meaning. There are deliberate silences that carry portents. Sometimes a Toni Morrison sentence will come to mind as if it were a favorite melody, and I will savor it, think about how she achieved so much texture without overwriting. Ponder these, dear students. :

“Breathing and murmuring under covers both of them have washed and hung out on the line, in a bed they chose together and kept together nevermind one leg was propped on a 1916 dictionary, and the mattress, curved like a preacher’s palm asking for witnesses in His name’s sake, enclosed them each and every night and muffled their whispering, old-time love.” (From Jazz)

“I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.” (Sula)

“James is as comfortable as a house slipper.” (Recitatif)

“His grandmother is a porch swing older than his father and when they talk about streets and names and buildings they call them by names they no longer have.” (Recitatif)

“124 was spiteful.” ( Beloved.)

” They shoot the white girl first, but the rest they can take their time. ” ( Paradise)

“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” ( Song of Solomon)

3. Study your craft.

You can’t exude what you don’t thoroughly imbibe. Morrison was a master of structure, form, and genre. She was also a lifelong student of her craft who thought deeply about the sources and impact of art born of words. Her work reflected her immersion in studies of philosophy, history, religion, mythology, music, and of course, the world’s literary canons and traditions. That was how she could make her work so densely allusive, so familiar, and yet, strange. She could put complicated ideas in the mouth of an unlettered character and make it sound natural. That takes listening and remembering – unlettered people do think and express complicated thoughts – but when we writers acquire formal education, we sometimes lose the ability to recognize that, or when we do, we render it in stereotypical ways. Morrison retained that common touch despite her erudition, and in so doing, she saw with fresh eyes.

Those fresh eyes allowed her to re-conceive Desdemona as something more than the lovely, mute pawn and victim of masculine arrogance, ignorance, and rage. It allowed her to conceive Pilate Dead, a woman with no belly button, who, Emily Paige Anderson argues, “acts as a Christ figure…sacrificing herself to teach Milkman and Guitar about love.”

Read her book Playing in the Dark and you can appreciate how Beloved draws from and subverts the literary conventions developed Faulkner, Poe and other canonical white writers by immersing the reader in the struggle to preserve one’s humanity and agency while enduring the radical evil of chattel slavery. Morrison read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, asked, “Invisible to whom?” and then gave us worlds of visible characters who think complicated thoughts and think complicated lives.

Keeping Playing in mind, read Nobel speech again and then read her short story Recitatif (.pdf), about a black girl and a white girl who become friends at an orphanage, and whose later encounters reflect their differing life trajectories and relationships with the past. She never tells you who is black and who is white, but you know that one girl’s mother dances all night and flouts convention, while the other’s is a joyless Bible-thumper. Whatever inferences you draw about their racial identity reflect what you are bringing to the work, but what you can’t ignore is the way the two characters’ conflicts and identities feed off of each other, and how they struggle to be in relation to each other in order to become whole.

4. Respect your sources.

If you read or watch Morrison’s interviews with journalists, it’s striking how many times she has to instruct her questioner about the inappropriateness of the question that’s been posed. Here she is, schooling Charlie Rose on what’s wrong with asking her why she centered the African American experience in her writing. In her response she explains that she has spent her career repeatedly having to defend the right to write from her particular worldview and cultural perspective – something that white writers are never asked.

And here are a few other comments on the subject:

“What happens to the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one’s race to, or in spite of, a race of readers that understands itself to be ‘universal’ or race-free?”

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark. Accessed August 6, 2019

In addition to being asked to justify what she wrote about, Morrison was often asked to respond to issues surrounding African Americans that were unrelated to her writing. I remember, especially, an interview in Time magazine, back in the late 1980s. Beloved had recently been published and was being deservedly celebrated. For some reason, the interviewer pivoted from asking about this complex, groundbreaking novel to asking Morrison to explain what could be done about teen-aged pregnancy among African Americans. At the time, that was one of the popular explanations among conservatives for African American poverty. Everybody’s grandmother was a teen-aged mother, Morrison replied, but the interviewer’s question was better put to a sociologist, not a novelist.

Students, do the work to understand the people you interview on their own terms.

Appendix: A short selection of articles about Toni Morrison and her work

Interviews

Hilton Als. “Ghosts in the House: How Toni Morrison fostered a generation of Black writers.”

Critical appraisals and appreciations

Roxane Gay. The Legacy of Toni Morrison

Imani Perry. Yearning for Toni Morrison’s Blessing.

Toni Morrison, remembered by writers.

Doreen St. Felix. Toni Morrison and what our mothers couldn’t say.

Angela Davis, Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez. “Toni Morrison will always be with us.”

Angela Davis, Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez on the crisis in America and the death of Toni Morrison

Scholarly articles

John N. Dowell, Naming Invisible Authority: Toni Morrison’s covert letter to Ralph Ellison (.pdf)

Juda Bennett, Toni Morrison and the burden of the passing narrative

Susan Willis. Eruptions of Funk: historicizing Toni Morrison

Introducing the “Whose Facts Matter?” project

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Journalism, increasingly, has become a computational profession, and that brings a new set of questions about core journalism values such as fairness, objectivity, and truth itself.  This summer, I started work on a long-form writing project that engages these questions in a novel way – through a multi-media graphic narrative. It’s still a work in progress, but I invite you to take a look at “Whose Facts Matter? A Cautionary Tale” and offer your thoughts. For an overview of the ideas in the project, here are slides from the August, 2017 presentation I gave at a panel for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

This work builds upon the concerns I articulated in this 2014 talk: “Toward a more perfect Union: The case for culturally responsive computational journalism“

Aspiring journalists, stop with the “email interviews”

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Whenever I give journalism students assignments that require interviews, it’s inevitable that someone will ask whether email interviews are acceptable. And invariably, my responses are:

  1. In-person, Skype, Google Hangout or telephone interviews are preferable.
  2. A text chat is better than an email exchange.
  3. If email is the only option, call it an exchange, not an interview. An interview requires a conversation.

Aspiring journalists need to practice doing the real thing.

That last point is critical. Interviews are conversations between humans. Read Ken Metzlers’ classic, Creative Interviewing, and you will understand that proficient interviewing requires the development of research, affective and narrative skills that you develop over time and learn to apply under all kinds of constraints.  You don’t develop those skills by sending off canned questions and getting back canned answers.  While interviewing by email feels easier and safer, you need to practice taking the risk of asking people you don’t know to open up and share their knowledge and experiences. It’s uncomfortable, yes. It can be stressful, especially when you are on deadline, yes. But the only way to get good at it is to take the risk.

If you rely on email “interviews” usually won’t yield good content.

The email “interview” is also unlikely to the highest quality content, either. The best moments in interviews often emerge from digressions that don’t occur in an email exchange. Email interviews don’t allow follow-ups in real time. You don’t have the visual or aural that might tell you that your source might have more to say, or that you should proceed gently because you are treading on painful ground.

Besides, depending on who the interview subject is, you can’t be sure that your questions are being answered by a source. How do you know that the politician or executive you queried didn’t just fob your questions off on a PR staffer?

Some email “interviews” are really requests to co-author the piece with you.

If you send a series of questions that require a subject to write paragraphs in response that you then reproduce at length, who’s article is it?

 

 

 

Gwen Ifill: A consummate journalist who demonstrated why diversity matters

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Annual book fair and authors night, National Press Club, 17 Nov. 2009. Photo: Michael Foley
Annual book fair and authors night, National Press Club, 17 Nov. 2009. Photo: Michael Foley

There are many reasons to mourn Gwen Ifill’s untimely death today at the age of 61. She was a consummate journalist of the old school variety, who rose through the ranks of newspapers and broadcasting to occupy some of the industry’s most respected positions: co-host of the PBS Newshour and moderator of Washington Week in Review. There will be many tributes and assessments of the way she broke ground by demonstrating that there is still a place for shoe-leather reporting, tough interviewing and striving for objectivity in an industry whose desperation for ratings and clicks has raised fundamental questions about its ability to fulfill its civic responsibilities, most notably in the recent Presidential election. I want to focus on one moment that embodied her excellence, her bravery and the difference that can result when we bring diverse perspectives to our national discourse.

During the 2004 Presidential campaign, Ifill made history by becoming the first African American woman to moderate the Vice Presidential debate between Vice President Dick Cheney and his Democratic challenger, John Edwards. Ifill asked a question that exposed a huge blind spot on the part of both candidates. As she later recalled during a September 20, 2016 “Backstory” segment for Washington Week :

At the time, I was trying to figure out, there’s only one vice presidential debate, how do I get them to talk about something that’s off their topics, something they haven’t rehearsed for, something they wouldn’t expect? And I came across a number, a statistic about African American, I mean HIV infection among African American women.  Sky-rocketing at the time.  No one was talking about this. And I prefaced my question by saying, ‘You’ve both talked about AIDS in Africa, I want to talk about about AIDS in this country.  Please don’t talk about AIDS in Africa. What would you do if you were in this administration about sky-rocketing HIV infections among African American women?’ Very specific.

Neither candidate had a good answer. A statement released by the Black AIDS Institute and Essence magazine took both men to task:

Mr. Cheney’s response to Ms. Ifill’s question was “I had not heard those numbers with respect to African-American women. I was not aware that it was that severe and epidemic there”. … The Vice President’s lack of awareness about the magnitude of the AIDS epidemic in African American communities speaks volumes about the low priority our government places on the lives of African Americans. …

 

As for Edwards, Ifill later recalled,

John Edwards’ response was, ‘Well let me give you my three-point plan for AIDS in Africa.’ I found out afterward from people who prepped him for that debate that that was the question they thought I was going to give them — an AIDS in Africa question.  So he didn’t even hear the distinction.  He just, it just clicked it. It clicked in.

ACTUP, the AIDS prevention and treatment advocacy group, ran an item about the exchange, noting, “You know the chance of that issue being raised by any of the White men who are moderating the presidential face-offs is slim.”

When Ifill talked about that moment, she didn’t focus on her identity. For her, it was about considering important issues being left out of the conversation, and making them visible. She said people would still come up to her years later and say, “I loved that AIDS question.”

People remember when these candidates reveal themselves for what they are — what they don’t know and what they do know.  So I think that’s part of the moderator’s responsibility — to let the viewers at home know what these guys… are capable of.

Godspeed, Ms. Ifill. You were one of the best among us.

https://youtu.be/ctmzeMfwvJM