About that time I got blackmailed into teaching at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Without a degree.
The Best of Perfecting Equilibrium
Editor’s Note: Thursday is the Fourth of July US holiday, and Your Humble Correspondent is taking the week of the 8th off to hang with the fam. While we’re on vacation we’ll schedule issues of the Best of Perfecting Equilibrium from our archives; new content will resume July 18. Have a great holiday!
This piece originally ran July 23, 2023
Just get me to the airport, put me on a plane
Hurry, hurry, hurry before I go insane
I can't control my fingers, I can't control my brain
Oh, no, oh-oh, oh-oh
20, 20, 24 hours to go
I wanna be sedated
I wanna be sedated sedate the students
Editor’s Note: For years I’ve joked that my autobiography, which I am planning to write Real Soon Now™, was entitled Things I Did While Planning To Do Completely Different Things. Perhaps the joke is on me; when I published the chapter “About that time I got banned from the Pacific Rim” it turned out to be the most popular issue of Perfecting Equilibrium. So…here’s another chapter of Things I Did While Planning To Do Completely Different Things. I hope you enjoy it just as much!
I drummed on the desk with my pencil and swallowed the first 16 rejoinders that occurred to me. There is no known way of bum rushing Steve Ross, so there was nothing for it than to play the game and see where it went.
“You could,” I finally said, carefully, “Put a stamp on it and drop it in the mail. I’d have it the next day.”
“It’s on my desk,” Ross repeated. “You can pick it up Friday.
“After you meet the adjunct committee. And if you don’t embarrass me!”
The Things I Did While Planning To Do Completely Different Things have a tendency to cascade. I wanted to be a writer, like Earnest Hemingway, write The Young Man And The Sea or some such. So I became a newspaper writer, like Hemingway. Except they gave me a camera, and I became a photojournalist. Except the newspaper’s systems were a mess, so I fixed them so I could Write. My. Stories. So they put me in charge of computers. Then many, many government people annoyed me, so I figured out how to use those computers to investigate them.
Which Ross and Dean James Brown had decided I was going to teach to other journalists.
Ross was Professor of Professional Practice at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Brown was dean of journalism at Indiana University/Purdue University at Indianapolis, and the founder of the Computer-Assisted Reporting and Research conferences. Together they were the yin and yang of journalism’s technological revolution.
Ross is a transplanted Bostonian who comes across as the stereotypical machine-gun-mouthed New Yorker from Columbia, which is smack in the middle of Manhattan. Brown is the quintessential Midwesterner, steady and deep like the Colorado River and quite capable of carving the Grand Canyon into you or any other impediment. Together they decided they knew better than me what my future should be.
Fortunately for me, they were right. Also fortunately for me, they really didn’t care what I thought about any of that.
I’d worked out a way to investigate government agencies using spreadsheets. (Obvious now; not so much in 1990.) I found Brown and his conference in a journalism trade magazine, and called him up for advice. Which he gave generously and in large quantities. In return, he asked that I come to Indianapolis to his conference and show attendees what I was doing with spreadsheets. That sounded annoying, but it would have been ungrateful for me to refuse after he’d been so helpful. So I agreed.
Brown had failed to mention that he was going to bring Ross to see my seminar. The transplanted New Yorker immediately began kibitzing and heckling, chattering like a verbal machine gun. This was actually helpful; it took my mind off of all those seminarians staring at me and taking notes. As a Native New Yorker, I Just. Talked. Faster. Firing back and forth with Ross, demonstrating spreadsheet functions, then more back and forth with Ross intertwined with more fun with Quattro Pro. Some of the other attendees jumped in:
“You guys have this vaudeville routine down; how long have you been on the road?”
“We just met.”
“During this conference?”
“During this class.”
Here’s everything you need to know about Jim Brown: The conference center was a bit of a maze, so I followed Brown and a crowd of his graduate assistants back to the dinner after that class. One of the grad students said “Dr. Brown-Why would you invite Feola and Ross to the same conference? You’ll never get a word in edgewise.”
We walked up one corridor, around a corner, down another corridor, around another corner, the grad students knowing the Dean too well to interrupt his silence.
We walked for a few more minutes, and then Brown’s basso profundo rang out:
“Precisely!”
OK, one more Brown portrait: One of his children was worried about missing the school bus, so Brown built a spreadsheet with the child, recorded the bus arrival times, and taught his son how to calculate a standard deviation. So every day, the boy went to the bus stop one standard deviation early, and never missed the bus.
Until the bus came super early one day, and he missed it. The angry dean drove his son to school and stormed into the principal’s office waving the spreadsheet: “Your bus was TWO STANDARD DEVIATIONS EARLY!”
After I’d taught a few classes at Brown’s conference Ross asked me out to dinner. “I want you to come teach at Columbia,” he told me.
“I’d be glad to come do a seminar on spreadsheets.”
“No. I want you to come be my adjunct.”
I absolutely was having none of that. For better or for worse, I’d always done things my way, and that included dropping out of college and joining the Army to go be a photojournalist for Pacific Stars & Stripes. There was no way I thought a college dropout like me was qualified to teach at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Or so I thought, anyway.
Brown and Ross figured this out, and found it quite funny. For one thing, they didn’t care; they’d already seen me teach a bunch of seminars and decided more journalists needed spreadsheet skills. For another, they knew about John Schultz, and I did not.
Schultz was not a college dropout like me. That was because he had dropped out of high school. And yet he lectured at Columbia for years on film editing. Why? Because he was the film editor for Edward R. Murrow's legendary documentary, "Harvest of Shame" (1960), which portrayed the dismal circumstances of American migrant farm workers. Because he won so many Emmy Awards for film editing documentaries on the 60s Civil Rights movement and other news stories that they made him an Emmy judge. So my “It’s ridiculous for me to teach graduate school when I don’t have a bachelor’s degree” objection was brushed aside as irrelevant.
I’d been a professional journalist for a decade, and frankly I couldn’t have cared less about being a college dropout before this imbroglio. It hadn’t hurt my career; I’d spent years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, and was a senior editor at a good-sized newspaper.
Suddenly, I found it embarrassing.
That’s how they got me, of course. Brown had a program I really, really wanted to attend; he said a letter of recommendation from Ross would seal the deal.
So now I had to do what Ross wanted to get that letter off of his desk.
The Columbia Graduate School of Journalism adjunct committee was intimidating. Sitting around a long oval table in the Joseph Pulitzer building basement were a dozen people. There were four professors on the left and four professors on the right. Between them they had only one Ph.D., but enough Pulitzers, Emmys and Peabody awards to furnish a media conglomerate’s board room trophy case. At the bottom of the table were a half-dozen students. Columbia in those days was something you did mid-career; all those students were older than me, had more experience, worked at bigger newspapers, and were paying enough for one year to purchase an exotic sports car.
Why would any of them pay to listen to me?
But as I hesitantly sat at the head of this table the real concern was just to my right – the debonair Dean Joan Konner. Besides being the Dean, she could have furnished a board room trophy case by herself, with more than a dozen Emmys, a Peabody and a duPont Columbia, plus others.
“Mr. Feola,” she said in her elegant drawl, “Please explain your thoughts…on the impact…of technology…on journalism. And be quick…we have many questions for you…and many candidates to see today…”
Now this was before Google, Facebook or Twitter. The World Wide Web was a curiosity then the way 3D printing is now: sure, it sounds cool, and nerds were obsessed, but would it affect real businesses in any way?
I had just given the keynote address at a Brown conference a month earlier on this very topic, so I did what any good New Yorker would do in these circumstances: I gave the same talk; I Just. Talked. FASTER.
So I kicked off with Gutenberg, drove through literacy as the real technological revolution, how the failure of Babbage’s Analytical Engine due to the lack of reliable interchangeable parts was a cautionary tale, then dove into the telegraph as the Victorian Age Internet when the slouching Konner sat bolt upright and waved her finger at me: “stop Stop STOP!!”
I sat back, chagrined, figuring I’d blown it.
Konner sat back, raised a finger pensively to her lips, and said:
“I’m just trying…to picture…you…and Professor Ross…in the same classroom.
“We’ll have to sedate the students.”
This turned out to be the rare occasion where the Dean was wrong. Ross slowed me down by the simple expedient of sitting in the front row and mercilessly heckling me while I tried to explain PERL scripting. So of course I returned the favor when it was his turn to present hand-coding HTML in Notepad.
So that’s how Ross and Brown conspired to blackmail me into teaching. Ross gave me the letter, but I never did get to Brown’s program. That’s another story, about which he is still mad – fortunately, not at me. I was Ross’ adjunct for a while, and then taught a class by myself on computer-assisted reporting. That class of students produced a monograph on Social Security that turned into a special edition of Quill, the magazine of the Society of Professional Journalists. What a great group of students!
And then after all that I finally walked across a stage at the University of Connecticut and picked up a Bachelor of Science degree.
Next on Perfecting Equilibrium
Tuesday July 25th-The PE Vlog: Tutorial: The New Bard-Can Google get back in the game?
Thursday July 27th-The PE Digest: The Week in Review and Easter Egg roundup
Friday July 28th-Foto.Feola.Friday