Scandalous observations

Dean Paul Voakes

Conflicted.
That’s how I would describe the way I’ve felt this year about the events that are playing out on a national stage involving the University of Colorado at Boulder. After several conversations with students at our School and professional journalists who share a love for CU, I think I’m not alone in feeling conflicted.

As a believer in the excellence that has characterized the University of Colorado for decades, it’s agonizing to see CU’s public image plummet the way it has over the past five months. Who would have thought that last August’s raging tempest over being named the nation’s No. 1 party school would seem so halcyon in comparison to this year’s events? As disturbing as the accusations of criminal sexual misconduct are, and as disturbing as the implications are for the athletic program, the students and faculty at the School seem to agree that the scandal represents only a small segment of the life of this University. The bright spotlight on the Dal Ward Center seems somehow unfair.

And yet, and yet — more than 400 students in this School are at some stage of training to become professional journalists. How often does a journalism student see a national story unfolding a mere drop kick away from the reporting classroom? As journalism educators, we want our students to learn to recognize the important public issues, the ones with broad public impact, and to learn to dig for information independently. In the football recruiting story, we’ve had an entire semester’s worth of instructional material on investigative reporting, on journalism ethics, on public relations campaigns — not in theory, not in hypothetical cases, not in distant cases, not in historical cases, but right here on campus, now.

In my travels to meetings this semester with other educators, the favorite joke about Colorado was that the SJMC had emerged with the true recruiting advantage: We should tell our prospective journalism students that if they come to CU, they can cover a national scandal up close and personal. My sense was that the advice was only partially tongue-in-cheek.

See what I mean by conflicted?

To complicate these conflicted feelings, this ongoing story pointed out an unusual, and to me uncomfortable, situation at CU-Boulder: There is no daily student newspaper. With the news media breaking stories on a daily basis for four months (and counting), it was rare that our SJMC community got to take part in the actual journalism. There were notable exceptions. Brittany Anas, a News-Editorial senior with an internship at The Denver Post, wrote a remarkable story about the female “ambassadors” who accompany high school football players during campus visits. Several weeks later, the athletic department announced the termination of the ambassador program. Several CU journalism alums working at Front Range media have been covering the scandal. And our own Rick Reilly (‘81) broke one of the most damning stories about the football team in Sports Illustrated.

But in the day-to-day nurturing of sources and researching of documents that makes investigative reporting so rewarding, our students by and large have been excluded by virtue of the lack of that daily outlet. It’s a situation that I hope the School and campus can remedy in the not-too-distant future.

The football story has created an unusual year for the School and for the University, but I don’t want to leave anyone with the impression that the ongoing pursuit of excellence ground to a halt because of this scandal.

One of the saddest ironies is that this has been a year of extraordinary achievement for this campus, but these points of pride rarely made headlines. A few quick examples:
• The Boulder campus was ranked, in a study published by The Economist, 11th among all public universities in the world.
• A Boulder faculty member was awarded a fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (the so-called “genius grant”) for the fourth time in four years; only Harvard equals our recent record on MacArthurs.
• Research grants and contracts topped $250 million in 2003 and are running at a 10 percent increase over 2003 so far this year.
• Seven of Boulder’s graduate programs are now ranked in the nation’s top 20 in their fields.

We’ve had a good year at the School as well:
• We’ve hired two talented new faculty members: Bella Mody, a world-renowned scholar and professor at Michigan State University, will join us as the first James de Castro Chair in Global Media Studies; and Maura Troester, who comes to us with a Ph.D. in business from the University of Wisconsin, will join our advertising faculty.
• “Pre-journalism” interest in the School remained at record levels this spring; the average GPA of the successful applicant to the School was 3.4.
• The School’s efforts to improve its diversity were recognized this spring when David Martinez received the campus’s Equity and Excellence Award for a staff member and Professor Polly McLean received the same award for a faculty member; also, the School received the chancellor’s Diversity Service award.
• Our Advertising students continue to shine in national competitions; in this spring’s The One Show, nine SJMC teams were named as finalists – more teams than any other school, more even than the graduate “boutique” programs that tend to dominate the student competition.
• The School underwent an external Program Review Panel, whose concluding report underscored the centrality of the School in the overall excellence of the campus.
• Students in the School secured internships at a record number of Colorado newspapers this year.
• We received clearance to hire an additional full-time academic adviser.
• The renovation of classroom and office space in the Armory this summer will include the installation of “smart” computer technology in each of our classrooms.
• On the research front, we revived the faculty research colloquium, with 10 presentations this spring; our faculty and students will be presenting literally dozens of papers at the upcoming convention of the International Communication Association.
• One of our December 2003 Ph.D.s, Zala Volcic, was granted the Nafziger-White Award for the nation’s top dissertation in mass communication.

CU-Boulder remains a great place to get an education, and the School is continuing in its quest for excellence in journalism education. We haven’t seen the last of the national headlines, and we won’t stop feeling conflicted about reading and hearing unpleasant stories about a place we love.

But my hope is that we’ll soon start reporting news about CU’s leadership in reforming athletic recruitment and that our SJMC students will start playing a greater role in reporting the turnabout.