Journalism educators honor Columbia U.'s 'Chairman Mel'
By Alan Kirkpatrick

Melvin Mencher with his AEJMC award

If you think you had a beef about college-town housing, you should hear about Melvin Mencher's ('47) digs. "I and a buddy lived in a converted chicken coop," he said. "Housing was extremely short as veterans surged to the Boulder campus."

The newly discharged vets heading to college on the GI Bill also swelled journalism classes with an unprecedented – and unparalleled – interest.

"I think journalism studies provided an outlet for those of us who had lived through the Depression and a war. Journalism also opened doors to a profession for the sons and daughters of families shut out of the traditional professions because of race, class and religious barriers," he said. "When we graduated, we were often the first college graduates in the newsroom."

Mencher, professor emeritus at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, has heard the late 1940s described as a golden era in the history of journalism education at the University of Colorado.

"I have always felt privileged to have studied under Ralph Crosman and Gayle Waldrop. They brought compassion and concern to the practice of journalism and high ethical standards as well as a belief in the power of the press to do good," he said.

"Their commitment to good journalism impressed us. There was an experienced and mature classroom for the message of these men. We knew first-hand the danger of unchecked power and the utility of an aware public."

Mencher said Crosman and Waldrop believed journalism education should provide a broad view of the profession and its role in society.

"Our education was wide-ranging and demanding," he said. "Crosman, who had studied at the British Museum the history of free expression, showed us the vital part we could play in making democracy work. Waldrop made us read widely. He emphasized the populist streak in the country and showed us that the good journalist does not just settle for merely being a megaphone for power."

After graduation, Mencher said he worked for The Albuquerque Tribune before being hired by United Press. The pay was so low that he started free-lancing under the pseudonym R.L. Chambers. Mencher said the extracurricular writing eventually cost him his job, but "Chambers" was written up in Who's Who in the West.

He said he took a job with The Albuquerque Journal to cover Santa Fe, the state capital, and while there his work – including stories on the tremendously infant high mortality rate on the Navajo Reservation – resulted in his selection as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard.

After a year at Harvard, Mencher returned to newspaper journalism. He was working as an investigative reporter for McClatchy Newspapers in California when, in 1958, he was asked to join the faculty at the University of Kansas William Allen White School of Journalism. While there, Mencher advised the student newspaper, which was composed of enterprising students who possessed a sense of moral outrage, particularly regarding racial discrimination in the city of Lawrence and what they described as "institutional racism" at the university.

After the college daily repeatedly angered the KU administration, Mencher said, he was told by the chancellor in 1963 not to plan on being employed much longer. However, before Mencher could be dismissed, the newspaper became the first student publication to receive the Brotherhood Award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews. The judging had been done by faculty members from Columbia, and when Mencher went to New York to accept the award, he said the associate dean invited him to join the faculty.

In 1977, his "News Reporting and Writing" was published. Now in its ninth edition, it's a leading college journalism text. In the preface, Mencher credits esteemed reporter and editor Ralph Blagden with teaching him that "the compelling commandment of the journalist is to dig out the truth." He refers to Blagden, who mentored a generation of journalists including Ben Bradlee (who gained fame as editor of The Washington Post), as "my model for this amalgam of artist, sentry, public servant and town crier."

In 1997, the Poynter Institute for Media Studies published "The Poynter Papers: No. 9," also titled "The Sayings of Chairman Mel" and subtitled "Curmudgeonly wisdom on the craft of journalism." In the forward, Poynter writing programs director Christopher Scanlan wrote of the Mencher classroom experience.

"In the world of journalism education, Mencher is famous as a tyrannical teacher, journalism's answer to Professor Kingsfield in œThe Paper Chase.'

"His idea of a compliment was a tiny check mark over a piece of reporting and writing he liked. We prized them like Pulitzers."

The sayings are a compilation of journalistic advice and go on to explain Mencherisms, such as, "If they like you, you're doing something wrong," and, "Make journalism out of your experience."

In August, Mencher was named Distinguished Educator 2002 by the Newspaper Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication and honored at the AEJMC's national conference in Miami Beach.

"I think that the models Crosman, Waldrop and (professor) Zell Mabee provided were instrumental in my slowly awakening desire to pass on their heritage," Mencher said of his academic career. They taught him that people need information from an independent source, and journalists are committed to provide meaningful and useful information objectively, he said.

"After my experience at Harvard and as an investigative reporter in California, I felt that I had something to offer," Mencher said.

Incidentally, those high-minded lessons on the social importance of journalism weren't the only thing he took away from Boulder.

That ex-chicken coop he called home was situated behind a boarding house on old Sixth Avenue, now Forest Street. Sharing a room in the house was Helen Chamberlain, a master's student in psychology, and another woman, both Marine Corps veterans.

"We were living on the GI Bill, which for a while was $50 a month," he said.

"Together we had $200 a month, and so we pooled it for food, rent and an occasional beer at the Sink." Fortunately, recreation was otherwise cheap. "We did a lot of hiking, camping and one memorable trip to Ward, where we went trout fishing."

With so many common interests, the result was a like an episode of "Friends" set in the 1940s for Mencher, his buddy, and the two women.

"He married Helen's roommate, and I married Helen in 1947," Mencher said.

He and his wife have three children – Thomas, who teaches English as a second language at a New York university; Marianne, an art teacher in Maine; and Nicholas, a partner in an investment firm.

Mencher, who lives in New York City, said he is enjoying a satisfying and occasionally isolated retirement.

"I am a birdwatcher, travel a good bit and have spent my summers for the past 37 years on a small island we own on the French River, 200 miles due north of Toronto. It has no running water, an outhouse, electricity only recently provided by solar panels and a cell phone," he said.

"No neighbors for miles. I do much of my writing there on a manual typewriter. I go in by boat every 10 days for mail and supplies."

mm55@columbia.edu