Sam Smith - I have come to realize that one major reason I didn't do better at Harvard in the 1950s was that I was a fledgling journalist. I thought I was there to learn facts, not theories and ideas. I like to tell folks that the best course I took at Harvard was covering the Cambridge City Council for the student radio station. It wasn't on any course agenda, but it started me on my actual career. So you will understand why I found the article below so interesting.
William Deresiewicz, Persuasion - I was sitting across from the professor as she went over my latest piece. This was 1986, Columbia School of Journalism, Reporting and Writing I, the program’s core course. At one point, in response to what I don’t recall, I said, “That doesn’t bode well for me.” I could have been referring to a lot of things; there were so many, in my time in journalism school, that did not bode well for me. One was the next set of words that came out of her mouth. “‘Bode?’” she said. “I haven’t heard anyone bode anything in a long time.” Another was her comment, on a previous piece, about my use of “agglomerate.” She had circled it and written, “No such word.”
But the most important was the intellectual climate of the school as a whole, in that it did not have one. We were not there to think. We were there to learn a set of skills. One of them, ironically, was asking questions, just not about the profession itself: its premises, its procedures, its canon of ethics. I know, because from time to time I tried, and it didn’t go well. This was trade school, not liberal arts school. When a teacher said something, you were supposed to write it down, not argue.
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