Dean's Message
Opportunities to teach are not always as fun as we would like them to be

Dean Paul Voakes

Faculty members are always on the lookout for "teachable moments" in the School's everyday activities. This semester we've had no shortage of teachable moments – and not all of them have been particularly pleasant.

I do believe, however, that student journalism at the School has emerged stronger as a result. These young editors have begun to develop a more nuanced understanding of the delicate balance between free speech and journalistic social responsibility. As the story on Page 22 details, The Campus Press published a piece of intended satire in February that just wasn't funny. Now if a satire about the quality of the food at the Alferd Packer Grill falls flat, readers and staffers shake their heads and move on. But this piece was about race relations on campus. Its literary failure was incendiary, to say the least.

• Teachable moment #1: Journalists are accountable to their readers. For a number of reasons, Campus Press editors haven't taken much heat from campus readers in recent years. On this occasion, they were publicly called upon – repeatedly – to explain and to apologize. To the students' credit, they did. They also changed the paper's mission statement from a tone of edginess to one of community-building.

• Teachable Moment #2: The racial climate on the Boulder campus isn't as bucolic as the editors had thought. In the days following the outcry, editors listened hard – possibly for the first time – to students of color describing the unease, the frustrations and in some cases the fear involved in being a student of color at CU-Boulder. With the help of a professional trainer, the staff has begun to understand what it means to cover diverse communities respectfully.

• Teachable Moment #3: Opinion editing is one of the most difficult tasks in journalism. Editors must promote a robust and diverse range of viewpoints, but at the same time they must establish a civil tone for the discourse. The students have adopted a new policy with which to select and edit opinion pieces – and red-flag the pieces that look provocative.

• Teachable Moment #4: This one's for the faculty and the dean. The Campus Press has operated as a course within the School's curriculum, but with a strong ethos of student-editorial independence, for more than 20 years. It's neither a traditional class nor an independent student paper. This ambiguity eventually led to an extremely hurtful, and extremely public, mistake. This spring the faculty has been working toward a new system of student media that will minimize the odds of repeating this incident – without compromising students' editorial autonomy.

And so we teach, and we learn – sometimes in ways we couldn't have planned. That's journalism for you. Whenever student journalists try out new skills in a free-press environment, mistakes will happen from time to time. But this time it was painful. I do want to apologize on behalf of the School for the upset that our student publication created.