I was a skinny, scatter-brained freshman in late fall, 1974, when I found my way to the old office of The Spectrum on the Main Street campus in 355 Norton Hall, now Squire Hall. The newsroom had a casual grandeur. On the tables and desks were old manual typewriters with parched ribbons, but on top of some files along one wall were piled carelessly the august black bound volumes of past years' issues, including the intriguing Spring, 1970 semester with coverage of the student demonstrations and police occupation of the campus.
Leaning back on a chair with two worn boots up on one of the desks was a boy with gold hair falling around his face.
His name was Gary Cohn, one of the campus news editors. His reputation for gung-ho relentlessness and willingness to challenge the authority of the university administration led some of the other editors to refer to him affectionately as Mad Dog. He and the other editors had a junior and senior class hauteur that I admired.
A short while later, in January, The Spectrum's editors put me into a brief partnership with Cohn.
The university was in the process of reigning in its several experimental colleges, where instructors could qualify via life experience rather than with traditional academic credentials. The vice president for academic affairs, a law-and-order educational conservative named Dr. Bernard Gelbaum, took the lead. A mathematician known for his boldness, Gelbaum had actually appointed himself to take charge of running the Colleges. With the 1974 spring semester a couple of weeks old, he canceled more than a dozen classes offered by College E, courses that included Bob Dylan and Bhakti Yoga. He said instructors hadn't filed proper credentials or letters of sponsorship from faculty.
To student editors it looked like a deliberate blow directed at the heart of innovative education—and a grand inconvenience to all students who had registered for those classes.
Some combination of Cohn and Campus Editors Larry Kraftowitz and Amy Dunkin put me on a reporting team to assist Cohn with the story. The next evening we arranged for a tall, cornstalk-thin hippie with waist-length gray hair and beard—his name was Benjamin, no last name—to bring me to a small, basement office belonging to Gelbaum's assistant for the Colleges. Benjamin directed me to a file cabinet.
At a later stage of my college life I might have paused briefly before riffling through the files of a university administrator. But I was a freshman and I was teamed with Mad Dog Cohn.
I found many of the instructor credentials for the cancelled courses in the file and copied the contents. It was Wednesday, January 23.
The next day Gary wrote the main text, documenting Gelbaum's hasty overstepping—there had been miscommunication about the instructor credentials, obviously—and the clumsy responses of other administrators. I chipped in information and typed up summaries of the instructors' credentials. The Spectrum's talented graphic artist, Bob Budiansky, drew an illustration of Gelbaum ripping apart a university course listing. That became the Spectrum cover for the issue delivered Friday, January 25.
Within a few days the university's president, Robert Ketter, restored most of the canceled classes. And so on the cover of the next issue of The Spectrum appeared another illustration of the course schedule, but this time with a band-aid binding the halves that Gelbaum had "torn."
For the moment, The Spectrum had helped to repel the conservative assault against educational innovation. And John Dewey smiled down on us. Gary became an investigative reporter, won a Pulitzer Prize and is now a freelance journalist and part-time faculty at the University of Southern California. Newspapers and media companies these days devote more attention to blogging and opinion than to time-consuming investigative stories, but only some of the slack has been picked up by not-for-profits such as ProPublica. Gary and other investigative journalists, such as Brant Houston of the University of Illinois, have served as role models for this vital but underfunded type of public service. Their work can never be completely replaced by ProPublica, or a website such as Wikileaks, especially at the local level.
As for me, I experienced a visceral journalistic thrill that has never completely faded. It has led to a life of interviews, deadlines, documents, facts, ideas, rejections, triumphs, travel, tweets, and words, mountains of words. I trace it back to the course-cancellation story, the detested Dr. Gelbaum and the Spectrum journalists who generously mentored me.
Richard Korman was editor in chief, 1976-1977. He is managing senior editor of ENR.com and his freelance writing appears on Miller-McCune.com.
Email: alumni@ubspectrum.com
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
