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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

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?

 

 

 

Practical advice for journalism students

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In every journalism class I teach, I have a session or two on some practical matters that fall under the heading, “Things I wish someone had told me when I was your age.” The tips often have to do with issues I have confronted on the job that weren’t part of the curriculum or management agenda when I started out in the early 1980s – how to deal with racial or sexual harassment, for example. Here are some notes on the advice I gave to my students in my undergraduate courses this semester that is particularly attuned to this moment:

As a discipline within the academy, and as a profession, journalism is an institution as well as an industry. At its best,  journalism has evolved norms, values and practices that are vital to a functioning democracy. It’s important that you understand these norms, values and practices and have your own informed positions on them. It’s also important that you develop a historical curiosity about these norms, values and practices, because these norms are being challenged. For example:

      1. Objectivity: Our tradition, at least for the last century, is that we strive to provide the best available version of the truth. As the American Press Institute puts it in their synopsis of The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know, and What the Public Should Expect  put it:

        This “journalistic truth” is a process that begins with the professional discipline of assembling and verifying facts. Then journalists try to convey a fair and reliable account of their meaning, subject to further investigation.

        Journalists should be as transparent as possible about sources and methods so audiences can make their own assessment of the information. Even in a world of expanding voices, “getting it right” is the foundation upon which everything else is built – context, interpretation, comment, criticism, analysis and debate. The larger truth, over time, emerges from this forum.

        In addition to transparency, your journalistic and personal practice should have built-in safeguards against confirmation bias. Be aware of your filter bubbles – the tendency to restrict yourself to  information that confirms your preconceptions. But more importantly, be aware of the implicit hypotheses in your reporting, and make a conscious effort to consider competing explanations for the data you find.  Think in terms of “researchable questions,” not foregone conclusions.

      2. Norms. The  Trump campaign and administration deals with the press in ways that are a distinct departure from the practices of previous presidential candidates and administrations. One reason for studying journalism history is so that you understand why these departures matter. Do a Google search for “Trump campaign journalism restriction” and you will see a slew of 2015-16 stories about ways in which the candidate and campaign kept journalists from obtaining the kinds of information and access routinely accorded during presidential campaigns. You will also see an analysis of how the Obama administration’s aggressiveness toward journalists working with leakers and whistleblowers gives Pres. Trump a precedent for targeting reporters trying to do legitimate watchdog reporting.One of the early skirmishes between the Trump administration and the national political press concerned access to  press briefings typically conducted by the President’s press secretary. In February, the administration reportedly blocked the New York Times, the BBC, the Los Angeles Times, Politico and The Guardian from a press “gaggle” – an off-camera press briefing.

        The White House move was roundly criticized – even by the conservative National Review. My point in bringing this up is that as journalists, you should understand why these norms matter. (Here’s a helpful backgrounder from the Boston Globe about how White House press briefings usually work. Similarly, you should understand what it means when the Senate Press Gallery denies credentials to Breitbart News because of its close ties to Administration officials, including former Breitbart CEO and current Trump senior adviser Steve Bannon. You ought to understand why those norms exist, why journalists think they matter, and why we expect you to uphold them.

      3. Mind your business. Once upon a time, say, back when I graduated college, you could count on getting a reporting or corporate communications job in a company that paid a salary with benefits. More often than not, that company had a mentoring program, and managers had incentives to develop talent. It wasn’t unusual for your employer to invest in your professional development, including graduate school. While you may still land in such a workplace, there’s a strong likelihood that your career will involve a string of freelance gigs. Some of these don’t pay well, while others can be quite lucrative. But what all of them will require is that you learn some fundamentals about managing a small business – from deciding on a business structure, to filling out tax forms, to joining professional associations that can help you grow your business, secure health insurance and help you understand and protect your legal rights. (Tracie Powell has some good practical advice on choosing the organization that’s right for you. ) Poynter has an online course in entrepreneurial journalism that has helped some folks I know. The Small Business Administration also has good general advice on starting your own business.  My employer, The College of New Jersey, hosts a Small Business Development Center that has services specifically for student entrepreneurs.
      4. Invest in your professional development. I don’t have to make the case any more about the need for learning coding, design thinking, or community engagement. There’s lots of good advice on all of these things, and such groups as the Online News Association offer regular training. Since I teach undergraduates, I am often asked about graduate school. That’s a longer conversation, but fundamentally, choosing a graduate program should involve a clear-headed cost-benefit calculation. What return can you realistically expect to earn on your investment? But you should be reading the trades in your field regularly, and you should be participating actively in conversations in your professional associations, whether at conferences, local chapter meetings or online.
      5. Know your rights and responsibilities. In addition to your media law text and your stylebook, you should be familiar with these websites:
        1. The Digital Journalist’s Legal Guide from Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press
        2. Legal Guides from the Student Press Law Center
      6. Take care of yourself. This can be a stressful business. Like law enforcement officers and medical personnel, journalists often see the worst of humanity. The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma has helpful resources.

What would you add?

A personal perspective on the Trenton Makes Music project

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People who know me credit me with a few talents – but musical ability isn’t one of them. Not only am I not a musician, I have no background in music journalism So, it should come as no surprise that one of the questions I’m often asked about the motivation and inspiration behind my current drive to document the musical history of New Jersey’s capital city, known as  Trenton Makes Music: Cultural Memory, Identity and Economic Development. Along with our students, my TCNJ colleague, Dr.  Teresa Marrin Nakra and renowned Trenton-born entertainer Sarah Dash, I’ve been engaged in the development of digital archive, podcast series and public programs highlighting the significant but largely unrecognized contributions of Trenton music professionals both to the music industry and the economic and cultural development of the city.

Over the course of the last four years, we’ve learned that Trenton musicians were part of some of the most popular musical acts of the last century. What’s more, with its location between New York and Philadelphia, Trenton venues were considered important stops on the tours of musicians across decades and cultures: vaudeville, opera, classical, rock, R&B, disco, funk, punk, and hip-hop. Trenton music. The playlist below is just a taste:

So, the Trenton music story is an amazing and largely untold one, and as a journalist, I’m a sucker for a great untold story. But the origins of the project, and our hopes for it, go beyond that.

The Performamatics project

In June 2012, Teresa Nakra and I attended a Performamatics workshop at the University of Massachussets Lowell that was aimed at encouraging the development of collaborative courses that use music to foster computational thinking in students. Dr. Nakra is a professor of music and interactive multimedia at TCNJ who has done groundbreaking work in the areas of human computer interaction and on using computing technology to measure the emotional and physiological impact of music. At the workshop, we learned about such strategies developed by the Performatiics research team as:

Our materials teach concepts such as modularization by breaking songs down into their components, looping and subroutines by noting where musical phrases are repeated intact and with small variations (requiring parameters), logic flow by creating musical flowcharts, and algorithms by writing programs that generate music.  New materials will explore ways to teach more advanced computing concepts such as threads and synchronization by writing programs that play multiple parts simultaneously and use various Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs), allowing us to combine software platforms into systems that to do more than is possible by one alone.

Pairs of faculty working at the same institution were invited to participate, with the hope that each pair would develop a class applying the techniques and concepts demonstrated during the workshop. Teresa and I had discovered a common interest in storytelling during our prior participation in the development and delivery of our campus’ videogame development curriculum.  As we brainstormed about course ideas, we began realized that we’d each developed an interest in the city’s music history.

Teresa’s digital baton research informed Paul Lehrman’s 1999 production of Trenton-born classical composer George Antheil’s Ballet Mechanique, and she’d developed an interest in Antheil’s life. She had also been getting to know some of the area teachers and students involved in local classical ensembles. I had known that Trenton had a history as a place to hear live music. Venues such as Joe’s Mill Hill Saloon were well known even during my undergraduate days at Princeton. And during the late 1990s, my friends and I regularly attended the Trenton Jazz Festival, where we heard such artists as Tito Puente, Patti Austin and Al Jarreau, along with local greats. My late colleague, playwright Don Evans, had created a History of Jazz class that included field trips to some of the city’s noted venues. Don’s son, Orrin, a notable jazz pianist in his own right, played a well-received concert on campus in 2002.

Meanwhile, my daughter Ja-Tun, a professional singer, had moved back to the area after college and was now performing with such local musicians as Grace Little, a former Philadelphia International Records vocalist whose talent garnered acclaim from the Apollo theater at the age of 13, and Kym Miller, the guitarist from the hitmaking disco band Instant Funk. Ja-Tun has since gone on to a career that takes her throughout the East Coast and overseas.

Kool and the Gang’s trombonist Clifford Adams often performed in the area, including at the school his son and my son both attended. I had visited Grant Chapel AME church, where members of Nona Hendryx’s family were still singing in the church choir. I learned that Hendryx’s Labelle bandmate, Sarah Dash, was also from Trenton, and I met friends and family of hers who were also musicians.

Before long, I met musicians who had recorded and toured with some of the biggest names in the music business, from Nelly to David Bowie. Teresa and I found ourselves asking, “What is is about Trenton? What was going on in Trenton that made this creative flowering possible?” Teresa had another question:” Is there a ‘Trenton sound’?” Can we analyze the music to identify a distinct musical lineage?

More questions: Our technology backgrounds had also made us aware of the region’s contributions to the music industry. As a music technologist, Teresa was aware of the legacy of the Sarnoff Center, the old research division of RCA. The Sarnoff Collection, housed at TCNJ, memorializes David Sarnoff and his company’s contributions to recording, radio and television technologies. We were both aware of the important contributions of Bell Labs, the former research arm of the old Bell System, an institution whose innovations in communications hardware, software, networks and distribution systems helped to revolutionize music production. Could the city’s proximity to these R&D powerhouses have played a role?

And of course, there was the relationship between the evolution of the city’s music scene and the ebb and flow of its economic fortunes, migration patterns, cultural sensibilities and social mores.

To answer those questions, it was necessary to document that history in a way that permitted both ethnographic and musicological analysis.

The Trenton Makes Music project is born

We kept talking about the idea over the next couple of years, as we worked on other projects. By the fall of 2014, we decided that I would offer a First Seminar class that would begin collecting oral histories of some of these musicians. Jazz composer and educator Dr. Anthony Branker put me in touch with Clifford Adams, with whom I had several phone conversations about his musical beginnings in Trenton, and the people in the city’s music community who needed to be part of any archive. Chief among them were two men that he cited as mentors: retired Trenton High school teachers Thomas “Tommy” Grice and Thomas  Passarella. I would soon learn that these men taught and mentored a number of professional musicians and educators. What’s more, they are still performing and creating learning opportunities for young people.

Dean John Laughton of TCNJ’s School of Art and Communication offered his support for co-curricular programming, including a campus lecture by Sarah Dash and a concert by the TCNJ Jazz ensemble. Our campus center for Community-Engaged Learning helped us make necessary community connections. As we started digging into archives and talking about the idea with the Trentonians we knew, we began to realize that the history was deeper, richer and more variegated than we knew, but very little of that history is in the scholarly or journalistic record. (Some of the prior online projects in this area that deserve recognition include:

  • Tom Krawiec’s Trenton Makes Music Facebook page: a photo collection that especially focuses on the city’s rock and roll history.
  • Dr. James Day’s  Trenton Soundscapes First Seminar class project on the contemporary Trenton music scene was featured at the Trenton City Museum in 2011
  • The book and documentary about City Gardens, the club that became a favorite destination for such major rock, punk and alternative artists as Nirvana, Iggy Pop and Green Day.
  • The documentary video and photography produced by Scott Miller’s Exit 7A studios.

 

One anecdote: One day in 2014, I was riding the bus from campus to town, and I got into a conversation with the driver about the Trenton Makes Music class. He says, “You have to talk to my sister.” Who’s your sister? Diane Jones, he says. It turns out that Ms. Jones sang backup for Taylor Dayne and Guns N’ Roses, during the 1980s and 90s. She came in and we recorded an incredible oral history interview with TCNJ first seminar students. The unedited audio of that interview is here:

What’s more, the bus driver, Vance Holland, was a session musician at Salsoul – the hot disco label of the 1970s. and became a tour bus driver for several major acts. And passengers on the bus began shouting out the musicians, music teachers, and musical accomplishments associated with the city.

What was most remarkable about that and other conversations that we have had with Trentonians is the near-universal pride and excitement that comes out when longtime residents start talking about their city’s music heritage. Like many faded rust-belt towns, Trenton has taken a beating in the last several decades, and its rare to hear residents speak about their town with pride. Our hope is that documenting and showcasing Trenton’s music history will foster conversations that reinforce and deepen that pride and rekindle the community’s spirit. Also, we hope that an accessible digital repository of both curated and original information about the city’s music culture will assist the city’s goal of strengthening the arts sector as part of its economic development strategy.

This fall, Teresa and I will be teaching two collaborating classes on podcasting in which students will work with Ms. Dash to create a podcast series that will be hosted on the on our project website. The podcasts will be based on our accumulated research and a series of public programs that will take place on campus and and in the community. We are hopeful that community members will begin using the website to share their stories, in addition to exploring the content that we have begun to collect.

We haven’t forgotten our desire to connect this work to our research on curricular models for fostering computational thinking. We’ve got some ideas for which the documentary project is a necessary foundation.

In one of those 2014 telephone conversatons Clifford Adams told me, “This could be a great project, if it’s done right.” Sadly, we won’t get to find out what he thinks of what we were able to accomplish. The innovative musician and educator died in early 2015. (Here’s his entry in our digital archive.)  If this work brings more attention to and support for the Trenton music community, I am hopeful that he would have been pleased.