AN INTERVIEW WITH TED FREDERICKSON
Interviewer: Jewell Willhite
Oral History Project
Endacott Society
University of Kansas TED FREDERICKSON
B.A., Political Science, University of North Dakota, 1970
M.A., Journalism, American University, 1971
Juris Doctorate, University of North Dakota, 1975
Service at the University of Kansas
First came to the University of Kansas in 1980
Professor of Journalism
2 3 AN INTERVIEW WITH TED FREDERICKSON
Interviewer: Jewell Willhite
Q: I am speaking with Ted Frederickson, who retired in 2011 as professor of journalism at
the University of Kansas. We are in Lawrence, Kansas, on November 10, 2011. Where
were you born and in what year?
A: I was born in San Francisco, California, in 1944, so I’m not a boomer. The war was on
and Franklin Roosevelt was president when I was born.
Q: What were your parents’ names?
A: My dad’s name is the same as mine, Ted Frederickson. I’m a junior. My mother’s
maiden name was Stahl, Valerie Stahl, which means steel in German.
Q: What was their educational background?
A: My mother didn’t get any further than high school. She graduated from high school and
then went to a business college briefly. My dad enrolled in Augustana College in Sioux
Falls, South Dakota, and was editor of the student paper there. He was there when the
Depression hit and that pretty much ended his college stay at that point.
Q: What was your father’s occupation?
A: When I was born my dad was an inspector for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He
worked in the brokerage of food crops.
Q; Do you have brothers and sisters?
A: I have two brothers and one sister, one brother older, one brother younger, and a younger
sister.
Q: Did you grow up in San Francisco?
4 A: No, we lived there for roughly two years. My parents, who were both from Minnesota,
wanted to move back to that area. So they moved to Barnesville, Minnesota, and then to
Grand Forks, North Dakota, which is on the Red River, on the border between North
Dakota and Minnesota.
Q: Where did you go to elementary school?
A: I went to Catholic schools until I was a junior in high school. Then I went to the public
high school in Grand Forks, Grand Forks Central.
Q: Were you involved in extracurricular activities in high school?
A: Not so much, other than the student newspaper. That was about it.
Q: What sort of activities did you cover?
A: School news, that sort of thing.
Q: Did you have honors in high school?
A: I was not a very good student in high school. I was at the point where I was discovering
girls. I think there is something true about people that age having hormonal issues. I was
one of them. Even though I did well on standardized tests, I didn’t do so well in classes.
Q: Did you have influential teachers in high school?
A: In the Catholic high school I had Sister Mary Leo, who was the teacher of the journalism
classes, and she really encouraged me to go in that direction because she thought I was
pretty good at it.
Q: Did you have jobs after school or in the summer?
A: I worked at the University of North Dakota, which is located in Grand Forks, in their
student union. I washed dishes, I peeled potatoes. That was one of my jobs.
Q: When did you graduate from high school?
5 A: 1962.
Q: What did you do then?
A: I briefly enrolled at the University of North Dakota. But I really wasn’t ready for it. I
still wasn’t a good student. That was kind of the pivotal moment in my life because I
dropped out of school without getting a single grade in anything. That was just as the
Vietnam War was starting. I enlisted in the Army. The U.S. Army was the place where I
developed my lifelong work habits, my work ethic, getting up in the morning, working all
day, that sort of thing. It was very good for me.
At that time when you enlisted you could choose where you went for basic
training, so I chose Fort Ord, California, which is on Monterey Bay, a beautiful place. I
picked the school I wanted to go to, which was the U.S. Army Information School, their
school for journalists, which was in New York on David’s Island, which is in Long Island
Sound. And then I got to pick my duty station and I chose Germany, where I was based
for the final two and a half years of my Army career. In Germany I was the editor of a
unit newspaper and I also worked for Stars and Stripes for a while. So that, I think, was
kind of a pivotal moment and it continued because when I came back there was a very
generous G.I. Bill at that time. So I was able to use that all the way through my
undergraduate and my master’s degree. I had benefits from that that were very helpful to
me.
Q: Is being a journalist for the Army different from being a journalist for a newspaper?
A: Oh, yes. The answer to every question from a superior in the Army is “Yes, sir.” Of
course journalists are supposed to be very neutral people. I think that the First
Amendment was not really applied that well in the Army, nor would I expect it to be.
6 Q: You had the G.I Bill, so where did you go to college?
A: I came back to my home town of Grand Forks. I grew up in the shadow of the University
of North Dakota, so I knew it well. I attended North Dakota. I got an undergraduate
degree in political science. Even though I was a political science major, I was the editor
of the student paper during that period as well. I graduated Magna Cum Laude. It was a
completely different me when I got back from the Army because I went from being a
high school student with not very good grades to being a four point student in college.
Then I went on to get a master’s degree from American University in Washington, D.C.
Q: Did you have influential teachers when you were at North Dakota?
A: I did. They were primarily political science professors. One in particular I remember
was Steve Markovich, whose interest was international, Eastern Europe. He was actually
a Yugoslavian. I think he was a Croatian. He loved journalism too. He was a very avid
reader of the New York Times, where you get the best international news, of course.
Q: Was there some reason why you didn’t major in journalism, since you had decided you
were interested in that?
A: Journalism has two kinds of training. One I would call almost vocational, or perhaps
professional, where you are learning the skills of this trade—gathering, writing and how
to put a story together, that sort of thing. But journalism is also at its base a liberal arts
degree, an important segment of what we call the Humanities. Journalists are some of the
most important gatherers of information, writing the first rough draft of history. I thought
at that point I had worked enough on the skills in the army at the Information School that
I wanted to concentrate on the substance of politics, which is, of course, the mother’s
milk of journalism, covering politics. That sort of took me in the direction of
7 Washington, D.C., where American University is. They have a wonderful program, a
master’s program, both in broadcasting and in print.
Q: I guess we forgot to mention when you got your undergraduate degree.
A: I got my undergraduate degree in 1970.
Q: That was the time when they were having a lot of demonstrations.
A: Oh, absolutely.
Q: Maybe they don’t do that in North Dakota, or did they?
A: Oh, they did. There were numerous large student demonstrations surrounding the Kent
State and Jackson State shootings. There was a menacing crowd outside the university’s
ROTC building, campaigning to get ROTC out of campus. Windows were broken. A lot
of things happened. It was not different from any other college campus. At the time I
remember being solicited by an anti-war group to sign my name to a one-page ad that
was placed in the New York Times. The people who signed were student body
presidents and editors of papers at major universities. So my name was on that particular
page as opposing the war and arguing that we ought to get out of Vietnam.
But anyway, I went off to Washington. That was a great program for me. By that
time my good grades had rescued me and I applied for and got a full fellowship at the
American University. All of my tuition was free, my books were paid for and they gave
me a monthly stipend. I was told that not only did I not have to work, but that I could not
work while I was a student there. At the same time I was still getting my G.I. Bill too.
So I could concentrate on being a student. It was a very exciting place to be because we
had all sorts of guest speakers who were prominent journalists or politicians in the D.C.
area.
8 Q: What was your major?
A: It was journalism.
Q: Did you have influential teachers from that university?
A: I had a professor named Lew Wolfson, who was a longtime Washington bureau chief for
the Providence Journal, a major newspaper on the East Coast, who was a very good
political journalist. He was an influence on me. So was Ed Bliss, who ran the TV
journalism program at American University. Ed was the longtime managing editor of the
CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. He was a very impressive guy.
Q: When did you receive your master’s degree?
A: I got my master’s degree in 1971. So it took me a year and a half to get the master’s. It
was a full school year and a summer.
Q: Were you married at that time?
A: I was married.
Q: What was her name?
A: Her name was Sara Garland, still is. We decided to end the marriage after five years but
remain friends. Right now she is the chief of staff for Senator Kent Conrad, the North
Dakota Democrat who is the chairman of the Senate budget committee in the U.S.
Senate.
Q: Did you have children?
A: No.
Q: Then after you got your master’s degree, what did you do?
A: I worked for a while as a reporter for the Grand Forks Herald back in my home town. It
was a Knight-Ridder newspaper.
9 Q: What were you covering?
A: I covered city hall, politics, even sports for a while. At that point I pretty much decided
that I was interested in teaching but I was also interested in law. So I decided I wanted to
go to law school at that point and did.
Q: Where did you go to law school?
A: I went back to Washington, D.C. and enrolled at Georgetown Law School. The law
school at Georgetown is not on the Georgetown campus. It is on Capitol Hill, the only
law school on Capitol Hill. So that attracted me to it. It is a very politically connected
law school. I was in the law school for two years. At that point that’s when my wife
Sara and I decided that we were great friends but not really meant to be married to each
other. So we got a divorce. At that point I really couldn’t afford Georgetown as a single
person in Washington, D.C. My then ex wife was the person who was bringing in the
money. So I had to look for a job. The Grand Forks Herald came calling and offered me
a job as the city editor of the paper, the person who is in charge of all the reporters,
essentially.
Q: Was this after you finished law school?
A: No, I was still in law school, having finished two of the three years. So I accepted the job
and went back to Grand Forks. I accepted the job only on the condition that I could work
six days a week from six in the morning until one in the afternoon, rather than doing a
regular five-day week. I needed that schedule to both work and finish law school at the
same time. I enrolled at the University of North Dakota law school. While I was city
editor of the paper, I also earned my law degree.
10 Q: Oh, my. You must have had very little sleep. Did you have influential teachers from that
law school?
A: I did. I took environmental law from a professor named Robert Beck, who was a strong
influence on me. He was a very good teacher, a hard-working teacher. He was probably
the person I looked up to the most.
Q: When did you get your law degree?
A: I got my law degree in 1975.
Q: Then what did you do?
A: Well, I was still working for the paper as the city editor. Being a city editor is like being
a teacher in a lot of ways because I had many young reporters and I worked with them a
lot. I was a regular guest lecturer talking to journalism classes at the university. The
chairman of the journalism department asked me if I would be willing to teach a class.
So I did, even as I was still working for the paper. He liked what I did and after that first
experience he offered me a tenure track position at the university to teach journalism. So
that’s how I got into the teaching business.
Q; What sort of classes were you teaching?
A: Mostly reporting classes. I also taught the media law class, which made some sense
because I had the law degree.
Q: How long were you at North Dakota?
A: I was at North Dakota until ’78. During that time, I met and married my second wife.
She was a classmate.
Q: Oh, she was taking law also?
A: Yes, she is a law professor now, actually. She’s really the reason I came to Kansas.
11 Q: What is her name?
A: Her name is Nancy Maxwell. We were married shortly after law school. At that point
she was practicing law but she was also interested in teaching. She decided there was no
way she could teach law having only a degree from North Dakota, a small state school.
So she decided to apply to Harvard’s LLM program, a masters of law program. It’s
interesting because the first degree in law is the juris doctorate, which is what I have.
That’s what she earned also at North Dakota. But there’s a second level degree that they
call LLM, or a masters of law. So she applied to Harvard and was accepted into that
program, which made her very excited. It’s a highly rated graduate program. So at that
point I became the good husband. She went to Harvard and I went with her. I gave up
my teaching at North Dakota, a tenure track job, and moved to Cambridge with her,
where we lived in Harvard student housing.
While I was there I managed to get a job teaching journalism at Boston
University. I was also a senior writer for the BU public relations office for that year and
a half I taught at Boston University. Okay, how did I get to Kansas from there? Well,
Nancy started applying for teaching jobs at law schools. And she found an ad for
Washburn University Law School in Topeka, Kansas, whereupon I said, “One of my best
friends and classmates at Georgetown now teaches law at Washburn.” Myrl Duncan is
his name and he grew up in Paola, Kansas. He was a very close friend of mine at
Georgetown so I called Myrl and asked him about Washburn. He said, “Oh, this is great.
It’s a wonderful place.” I told him about Nancy. She applied for the job and they
immediately offered it to her. At the same time there was a journalism opening at Kansas
and I applied. Unfortunately for me, I was competing with another applicant by the name
12 of Mike Kautsch. He was applying for a tenure-track position but he was already
teaching in a non-tenure-track position. Mike is an excellent teacher, which they knew
because he had taught there for a year. He and I were the two finalists. Not surprisingly,
he got the job. But Del Brinkman, who was dean at the time, called me into his office
when he was saying goodbye and said, “You know, if I have another position open up
here, it’s yours.”
In the meantime the dean at Washburn law school who was very anxious to make
sure that Nancy was going to teach for him looked at my resume and said, “I’ll hire you
to teach here this year.” So I taught at Washburn law school for one year.
Q: What did you teach?
A: I taught media law and I helped the dean organize media law seminars that we had at
Washburn Law School that went on for a number of years after that. That was a good
experience. At the end of that year, Del Brinkman called to tell me he had an opening,
but not tenure track. But he said, “If you come and we have a tenure-track opening we
can probably slide you into that.” So I came to KU in 1980 and a year and a half later a
tenure-track position opened up. Ironically, it was Susanne Shaw’s track because she left
the university to become publisher of a small daily newspaper in Kansas. I essentially
got that position. Of course Suzanne later came back and is still here. So I got hired in a
tenure track in 1983 and in 1984 I got tenure.
Q: What were you teaching here at KU?
A: I taught a lot of different classes because I was the low person on the totem pole at that
point. I taught beginning reporting classes, intermediate reporting classes and law of
communications. I even taught design classes. My scariest assignment was when our
13 legendary editing professor, John Bremner, went on leave to do seminars all over the
country. During that semester he asked me to teach his classes. So I taught all of the top
editing classes.
Q: Did you originate any courses?
A: I was the first person to teach a freestanding media ethics class at the University of
Kansas. We had taught it previously under a sort of catchall course number. But we had
never had an established media law class. I had applied for and won a fellowship to a
week-long seminar on the teaching of ethics in journalism at the University of Kentucky.
All the major gurus of media ethics attended to help train journalism professors to teach
classical ethics. When I returned to KU, we created a freestanding ethics class and I was
the first one to teach it and did so for a number of years. That became one of my
specialties.
You would think that someone who teaches law would not want to teach ethics
because they are completely different. The law tells you what you can do and ethics tells
you what you should do. But I love teaching ethics. Ultimately I got appointed to the
Society of Professional Journalists National Ethics Committee. I represented the states of
Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri on the Ethics Committee of the largest journalism
organization in the country. During my nine years on the committee a small core of its
members, including me, authored and wrote the SPJ Code of Ethics for Journalists, which
is still in place
So ethics was one of my emphases at the university. But I had an emphasis in
law, obviously, too. My research area was access to information in the hands of
government, in other words, government records. So I was part and parcel of the
14 movement to change the Kansas law to make it more open to let journalists and ordinary
citizens have access to information in the hands of government and government records.
In ’84 the legislature finally passed an open records act. When a major new law like that
happens, there is a big scramble to answer important questions—what does the law really
say, what does it require, if it is ambiguous, what was the legislative intent?
I was inspired by Deanell Tacha, who was a law professor and later became KU’s
vice chancellor for academic affairs. She had written a law review article analyzing the
open meetings law several years before that when they passed a new open meetings law.
She told me it was her one major piece of published research that had a life of its own. It
lived forever because any time a dispute or a lawsuit arose about access to meetings, her
article was always cited and her research was always used. Every such court case cited
her article. So I did the same thing for the open records act, which was about records
rather than meetings. The same thing happened. To this day every lawsuit involving a
dispute over whether records have to be opened or not ended up quoting my law review
article. I’m grateful to Deanell for advising me to research and write about the new
records law for the Kansas Law Review. Del Brinkman had 1,000 extra copies printed
and sent them to all the newspapers and newspaper lawyers in Kansas. It really turned
out to be a wonderful research area for me.
Q: Were you involved with the Kansan?
A: I was. What is interesting about my time at Kansas is that when I arrived here all these
great lions of journalism education were still here, Calder Pickett, John Bremner, Lee
Young, Paul Jess. They sat in the back of the room listening to me teach when I was up
for tenure. It was scary as hell actually. We also had another teacher here, Rick Musser,
15 who was a master teacher of what I would call depth reporting. Rick went on to get interested in other things and I sort of drifted into taking over his classes, which were the top end, final classes that print journalists took. The students in them were the editors and reporters for the Kansan. When I took over Rick’s classes, they became my students.
It really gave me the opportunity to do what I call coaching rather than traditional teaching. When you are coaching, it is essentially a one-on-one situation where you are helping a number of individuals become good at something, whether it is basketball or journalism. Anyway, my idea and Rick’s idea was that we want these people when they leave here to be able to write for anybody, the New York Times or the Lawrence Journal-
World. So we always required them to research and write serious depth projects. There are some rewards in doing that. When I came here in 1980, KU was known as a great school for people who wanted to be copy editors, because of professors like John
Bremner and Calder Pickett. But we had some pretty damn good writing and reporting teachers too, Rick among them. On the editing side our students who were great editors got what they call Dow Jones Fellowships, internships, where they went off to work for great newspapers like the New York Times. They get a chunk of money and once they get that on their resume it’s a ticket to a good job.
There is a similar competition for writing called the Hearst Awards, which are often referred to the college Pulitzers. They are professionally judged and honor the best writing in the country done by students at accredited journalism schools, we all compete.
They have six categories of writing that they have annual contests in. The individual student winners get cash prizes ranging from $1,000 to $3,000, and national recognition.
The schools compete for what Hearst calls the Intercollegiate Writing Championship,
16 which goes to the schools whose students performed best in the individual contests. Our
school has done extremely well in that competition.
Q: Now is this student work?
A: Absolutely. It has to be published work by a current student in an accredited journalism
school. Hearst then adds up the points for all the contests won by students from all the
accredited schools and the school with the most points is given the title of Intercollegiate
Writing Champion. The school gets $10,000 cash, a trophy, bragging rights and the
students get all this individual money too. Rick Musser did very well and won a couple
of national championships for us. My last five years at KU, students in my classes won
for our University three consecutive writing championships in 2007, 2008 and 2009. The
journalism school got the $10,000 first place prize along with matching cash awards for
all of the individual prizes. If a student won $3,000, the school got $3,000. So we got a
lot of money out of it and a lot of recognition. We finished second as a school during my
last year, and the work published by my students during my last semester, spring of 2011,
currently has our school ranked first in the 2012 collegiate competition after three of the
five writing competitions with two more contests yet to be judged.
Q: What do you think makes a good journalist?
A: A good journalist has to care about what happens in the world. You have to understand
how important journalism is. I’m one of those who think you can’t really have a
democracy without, number one, freedom of speech, and number two, journalists who
use that freedom responsibly. How can you have a functioning democracy without
knowing about the people who want to lead us, about the issues that matter? A good
journalist seeks to hold up a mirror to show society, all of us, the governors or the
17 governors, who we are and what we’re doing. Honest journalism can be pretty awful
stuff, football coaches who abuse little boys, violence, wars. So you have to care about
what is happening in the world and you have to understand how important it is that we all
know these things. Last, a good journalist has to be talented enough to make the news
interesting enough that people want to read it. In other words, you have to be able to tell
a good story. If you can’t tell a story well, nobody is going to listen.
Q: Did you ever work for a newspaper again?
A: I did. During my time as an undergraduate I had internships at the Grand Forks paper
and at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. I worked as a police reporter for the Star
Tribune in Minneapolis. When I was going to Georgetown, I worked as a reporter at the
Washington Post, which was a thrilling time because that was during the Watergate
period. My desk literally faced the desk of the Post’s great political writer, David
Broder. His typewriter—and it was typewriters then—was back to back with my
typewriter. I wrote national news for the Washington Post.
Even after I came to KU I decided I wanted to keep up with the profession. So I
would get summer newspaper jobs. One summer I got a Gannett Foundation Grant to do
a depth investigation of conditions at the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing. I spent
most of the summer researching and writing that for the Wichita Eagle. Two other
summers, I took on the abuse and misuse of campaign funds by politicians in Kansas. I
wrote some pretty hard hitting stories that got some people defeated in the legislature. In
the early 90s, I took off a whole semester and worked in the Topeka statehouse bureau of
the Kansas City Times. I don’t know how long you’ve lived here. But the Kansas City
Times was the morning paper, the serious paper in Kansas City. I worked in the
18 statehouse bureau in Topeka and wrote all sorts of hard-driving stories about what was
going on there as well. I’m not saying I set out to do this, but my reporting did get some
results. One piece that I wrote for the paper led to the firing of the director of the KBI
(Kansas Bureau of Investigation) . The same semester, my reporting on problems at the
Kansas Highway Patrol got the superintendent of the Patrol relieved of his
responsibilities. Actually, I think they said he retired. Anyway, when I took these jobs I
wanted to focus on the kind of serious, depth reporting that I wanted to teach to my
students.
Q: Journalism has changed a lot during the time you have been in it, hasn’t it?
A: It has changed some for the better and some not. The movement from print to broadcast to
online and digital has really connected us to each other and the rest of the world. It’s
now easier to get international news because we are now all connected by this thing we
call the internet. We have access to media that we never did before. You can go to the
BBC site. Anybody can read the New York Times. We don’t have to wait a day for that
newspaper to arrive. It’s easier to get sources and witnesses to talk to you because we’re
connected. We can talk to people who are in Bengasi and Tripoli and Libya. We can talk
to witnesses of history. I think all of those things are for the better.
But there is a downside to this too. And the downside is that we haven’t really
figured out how to get people interested in paying for journalistic content on line. A lot
of the advertising that used to appear in newspapers has fled to other places, many on
line. But the journalism jobs have not gone on line. There are probably half as many
people actually gathering news for journalism now as there were 15 years ago.
Q: Oh, really?
19 A: Newspaper staffs, including the New York Times, have been cut by half.
Q: A lot of papers have gone out of business?
A: They have. They have gone out of business. A lot of people think, “Oh, my God, why
do we need newspapers any more because there are so many other sources of
information. And I can get it free on line.” Well, the truth is that the vast majority of
information that you see on line is what I would call shovel ware. It’s information that
was originally gathered by print media or the Associated Press and online locations are
simply putting it on line. But there are far fewer people today actually gathering the
news. There are fewer reporters today watching and monitoring our election season and
campaign and writing about than there were 15 or 20 years ago, far more.
Q: Is it hard for your students to get jobs?
A: It is. Jobs are becoming hard to get. It’s a troubling time economically for the business.
Now I have some hope. If you think about it, at one time the same thing happened to
television. I mean, when I grew up, all you bought was the TV set. You didn’t pay
anything to watch television. Right? It was just there. Now you’ve got to send off a
check to a cable or satellite TV provider. I’m sure you send a check each month to
somebody, probably Knology.
Q: Yes.
A: It’s a significant monthly check that you are writing to watch television. Well, you know,
at one time it was free and now it’s not. People sort of bought into the idea that they have
to pay for it. Well, that hasn’t yet happened for online news content. There’s this notion
that everything on the internet ought to be free. Well, it takes effort and money and
talented people to gather information. I have one other serious gripe about journalism
20 today. That is that concept of citizen journalism, the idea that because we’re all
connected now—most of us of us have computers and internet access— somehow that
makes everybody a journalist.
Q: You mean like Facebook and all those things. Everybody is writing something.
A: They are and they are posting it.
Q: Oh, yes.
A: They are trying to act like journalists. But guess what? They haven’t been trained to do
it. They don’t know media law. They don’t know the trouble you can get into
communicating falsehoods about other people. They don’t know basic media ethics, the
responsibility of giving people an opportunity to respond. They don’t have any concept
of neutrality, how you are not supposed to favor one side or the other. Trained journalists
are supposed to do fact-based journalism and let the people decide what their opinions
are. So we have all these wacky people out there online, identifying themselves as
citizen journalists. Last spring was my last semester teaching here. The dean invited me
to be the speaker at our graduation in the Lied Center. So I was. My speech was about
the concept of citizen journalism. And I compared citizen journalists with Jayhawk
journalists, the students we train and educate. How many hours they do this and how
they actually put out their own newspaper, a daily newspaper and an online newspaper,
every day. They not only gather all the stuff, make all the decisions, write the stories,
write the headlines, they sell a million dollars worth of ads to finance it. They do
everything. They sit in classes. They learn how to do this. They’re really experts at this.
The idea that somebody out there can say, “Well, I’ve got a computer and I can write. I
can be a journalist too.” It’s preposterous. They might be a good witness and be a good
21 source for a journalist and we ought to talk to them, but they are NOT journalists. That’s
one of my big beefs. One of the things I said at the end of the speech was I wouldn’t
want to be on board a plane operated by a citizen pilot. I wouldn’t want a citizen lawyer
defending me in court. And I wouldn’t want to have a citizen gastroenterologist
performing a colonoscopy on me. Jayhawk journalists know how to do journalism.
Q: Have you had honors at KU?
A: The honors won by my students, such as the Hearst Awards, are the ones I most proud of.
My students have won the Hearst depth reporting category four out of the last seven
years. I’ve had students leave here and go on and do wonderful things. I’ve had three
students in my classes who won Pulitzer Prizes.
Q: Oh, really?
A: Of course, I wasn’t the only one who had them in class.
Q: Of course not.
A: Kevin Heliker won one for the Wall Street Journal. I was very flattered when in stories
about him he mentioned both Rick Musser and I as professors who had an influence on
him. Mark Zieman, who until a month and a half ago was the editor and publisher of the
Kansas City Star, was one of my students. He edited one of their Pulitzer Prize winning
projects. Jeff Taylor won a Pulitzer for the Kansas City Star. He was one of my students
as well. I had him in the class John Bremner was supposed to teach. So I got to teach
him. As for teaching honors, the success by my students led to me being named the first
Gene Budig Professor of Writing in the school of journalism. Former Chancellor Budig
is a strong advocate of teaching writing in the classroom and donated money establish an
annual award to professors who are proficient at it. The annual award, including a $3,000
22 stipend, is given to a professor in the schools of journalism and education. I was the first
journalism professor to get that award and I especially appreciated having Chancellor
Budig call to congratulate me. The William Allen White Foundation had what they
called the William Allen White Teaching Professorships, which were salary supplements
given to professors known for their classroom teaching skills. I had that for a five-year
period.
Q: Have you been involved in any community activities?
A: Not as many as you would expect because we have an ethic in journalism that says you
ought not to become involved in things that you may write about as a journalist.
Journalists tend to eschew politics and community activities and I’ve maybe carried that
too far as a professor. But my students would go out and write about all these things, and
I didn’t want them to think, oh, because he’s involved in that maybe I’ve better go easy
on them or be nice to them . I did get actively involved in freedom of speech issues and
journalism ethics. If there were situations where I thought a person’s First Amendment
rights were being abridged, I leaped into those.
Q: Did you have children?
A: I have one son, Max, 28, who is a graduate of Washburn University, works as a
computer programmer for Apple, and plays and sings in two different bands. I neglected
to tell you that I also married a third time. I knew I forgot something. My second wife
Nancy Maxwell and I have a son, Max., who was born in 1983. Nancy still teaches at
Washburn Law School where she is a nationally prominent family law professor . We
were divorced in 1991, a year before I made full professor. But anyway I was married
again 16 years ago to Merrilee Cooper, an elementary teacher at Tonganoxie Grade
23 School. She has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Oregon and a master’s from
the University of Kansas. Merrilee, her father and her sister are all KU graduates.
Merrilee’s grandfather, her dad’s dad, was not only a KU grad but majored in journalism.
Merrilee is retired now.
I neglected to tell you about two of my favorite teaching experiences while on the
KU faculty. I taught two whole semesters in northern Italy.
Q: Was this a sabbatical?
A: It wasn’t a sabbatical. When I taught my first semester there in 2002, it was for a
program staffed mostly by business and journalism professors from KU. The credit hours
were all from the University of Kansas, but the students came from all over the United
States There were business courses and journalism courses and they were taught in
Paderno del Grappa, Italy, near Asolo, actually very close to Venice. The campus was
quite beautiful with wonderful views of the snow-capped Dolamite Mountains. I taught a
whole semester there in 2002. When I returned there to teach a semester in 2009, the
program had been taken over by the University of Iowa. Apparently, our then provost
had problems with the program, and Sally Frost Mason, president at Iowa and before that
a KU administrator, agreed to have Iowa take it over. I taught travel writing that
semester, which was a lot of fun.
Q: Oh, I’ll bet.
A: It was great because they were in Europe and they had all sorts of time to go places
because the classes were always Monday through Thursday, no classes Friday. They had
a three-day weekend. And there were two one-week breaks. Instead of one spring break
there were two. So students had wonderful opportunities to travel and I required them to
24 carefully plan and write about their experiences. It was great. They loved it. And I got
to travel myself and help them write about their adventures. Travel is one focus of my
retirement..
Q: I was going to ask you what you plan to do in retirement.
A: I frequently get asked what I do with my time and I always answer, “Anything I want to
do.” I’ve only been retired since last May. And I haven’t really done that much traveling
yet. But two and a half weeks ago I and nine other friends climbed into rafts on the
Colorado River and we rafted through the Grand Canyon.
Q: Oh my.
A: We camped out under the stars on the banks in the canyon. It was wonderful. That’s the
first major thing I’ve done. My brother, my best friend from law school and a friend in
my high school class were along our group
Q: You have a Tonganoxie address. Are you living out in the country some place?
A: I’m in the country. My wife and I have 40 acres of hilly land, half woodland, half pasture
for our two horses We have two Arabian horses, Jimmy and Echo, and a lot of trails
through our woods for hiking or horseback riding. We live in a place where we don’t
need curtains on our windows because we are surrounded by our own land. We also have
another place, a small cabin on a lake in northern Minnesota, where we don’t need
curtains on our windows. The cabin is on Balm Lake northwest of Bemidji in the north
woods. It is green, beautiful and very cool in the summer. I love to kayak and our lake
and others nearby.
Q: To kind of finish up, what is your assessment of the journalism department, the
university, past, present, hopes for the future, that sort of thing?
25 A: Well, I think that the University of Kansas has always been a wonderful bargain for our
students. For a state school, I think it provides an amazing educational opportunity for
most students. I really believe that. And I think that over the years the KU Journalism
School has been among the very best in teaching, educating journalists, both the
journalists who are on the news side and the journalists who are on the all important
advertising side, which I call the green side, because they make all the money that pays
for the serious news journalism that happens, which I think is pretty important.
A couple of trends bother me about what’s happening with our university and
many state schools. One of them is the growing lack of support, financial support, from
the state. They provide a much smaller percentage of the money we need to really be a
great university. I think that’s led to two other troubling trends—higher and higher
tuition for students, and an emphasis on getting outside grants. If we can’t look to the
legislature for essential financial support, we look elsewhere. In looking elsewhere, I
think we have begun to overemphasize research and grants to the extent that the teaching
mission of the University has suffered. At the beginning of the academic year I was
named the first Budig Professor of Writing, our then Provost spoke at the convocation
announcing individual awards, and made what I thought was a shocking declaration. He
said, and I’m trying to quote his very words, the primary role of every tenure-track
professor at a Research One University like the University of Kansas is to conduct and
publish research. When I heard that, at a ceremony where I and others were being
recognized for teaching, research and service, all I could think about were the 27,000
students we are teaching in our classrooms. I think that emphasis is not so much on the
research itself as it is on the grant money that pays for it. The University now goes after
26 professors who can attract grant money the way we go after basketball players who fill
Allen Fieldhouse, attract donations from alums and sell t-shirts and other athletic
paraphernalia. who get grants the way we go after basketball players.
I have nothing against research. I have many great friends who do wonderful,
important research at the university. But there is no doubt that the emphasis we once
placed on quality teaching has been displaced by an overemphasis research, fueled by the
search for outside money. One result has been huge classes. If you get less money, you
have bigger classes. That’s just the way it is.
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
A: I should mention the importance of teaching in my own family. My grandfather
graduated from Mankato Normal, now Mankato State University in Minnesota. Back
when he was enrolled in Mankato Normal, my grandfather was studying to be an
elementary teacher. I have a framed picture of his graduation class, which was made up
of mostly women with only a few men. Back then, most elementary teachers were
women. But my grandfather thought nothing was more important than educating our
children. I had three aunts who were teachers. My wife is a teacher. I’m a teacher. My
step-daughter Chloe is going to be a teacher. She just completed her Ph.D. in English
Literature at the University of Kansas. She has been teaching two classes in the English
Department and two classes at the Art Institute in Kansas City. So she’s a teacher too. I
think families of teachers tend to encourage teaching. I don’t know if you have that in
your family.
Q: Oh, yes. Lots of teachers.
A: I come from a family of teachers.
27 Q: Well, thank you very much.
A: It was very nice to talk to you.
Additional remarks from Professor Frederickson:
I retired from the KU journalism faculty in May 2011. My last lecture as a professor was delivered in the Lied Center as speaker at graduation ceremonies for the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications. Dean Ann Brill, who asked me to be the speaker, introduced me. My remarks both honored our graduates and recognized their work, but expressed concern about the so-called citizen journalism appearing online. This is what I said:
Thank you, Dean Brill, for making my last KU lecture the most interesting and certainly largest of my career.
Good morning to my colleagues, parents of our graduates, grandparents, brothers and sisters, spouses, girl friends and boyfriends, friends and last and most importantly, to those we all honor today as they become full fledged Jayhawk Journalists.
Another kind of journalist has appeared in recent years as a byproduct of the transformation of our profession from print and telecommunications to what is becoming a digital world. I’m talking about what some are calling Citizen Journalists, brought on by the growth of broadband Internet and the ability of anyone with a computer or cell phone and Internet service to communicate to others on the net . Technically speaking, the 70 percent of us in the United States who have broadband have become publishers, each of us a medium of one, free to blog, email and post whatever we produce.
As a professor who teaches a required class on First Amendment free speech and press, I am thrilled the Internet has given voice to the previously voiceless citizens of autocratic countries that suppress free expression and democratic movements. As someone who teaches news journalism, I am impressed that the Internet has connected us with witnesses to history, key sources, rebels seeking to overturn autocratic regimes, and the citizens of such regimes. Three
28 recent examples come immediately to mind that show the power of these new connections: First, the video of the young woman shot to death during street demonstrations against a rigged election in Iran; Second, the audio of the law student arrested by Muammar Gaddafi’s thugs and repeatedly gang raped before fleeing to a Tripoli Hotel where she dramatically told her story to foreign correspondents; Third, the Pakistani man awakened by noise from the U.S. raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout who stood outside the complex with his cell phone Tweeting about what he was seeing and hearing.
Lest we be smug about these examples from elsewhere, we should not forget the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison posted online that broke the story about mistreatment by our own U.S. troops of suspected terrorists.
Our connectedness has provided journalists with unique methods of gathering important news, but I question whether we should anoint such voices as Citizen Journalists. They may satisfy that first requirement, citizen, so long as they can provide a simple birth certificate—or, if you are a die-hard birther like Donald Trump, a “long form” birth certificate. But I don’t believe that mere possession of a cell phone and/or computer and the ability to use it qualifies them for the title Citizen Journalist.
By comparison, to earn the title Jayhawk Journalist, the graduates we honor today completed between 124 and 136 credit hours. About three fourths of those were in carefully chosen liberal arts classes—history, political science, economics, languages, math and more. The other one- fourth of those credits were taught by the demanding, even fussy, group you see seated behind me on this stage—my faculty colleagues.
Today’s graduates spent a minimum of 2, 142 hours in class. One rule of thumb suggests that for each hour spent in class, successful students must study or work on research and writing projects a minimum of two hours outside of class.
That adds up to 6,426 hours spent working on their degrees, the equivalent of 160 weeks of 8- hour work days five days a week.
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Now, that does not include time spent waiting tables at a restaurant, working as a desk clerk at a motel, or any of the other part time jobs most students need to pay for living expenses and rising tuition. Nor does it include time spent maintaining important personal relationships.
While these numbers seem daunting, the work produced for journalism courses is even more revealing. Every day of every semester, KU journalism students produce the seventh largest circulation daily newspaper in the State of Kansas, the University Daily Kansan. Our students provide the management, reporting, writing, editing, design, photography, multimedia components and advertising for print and online versions of one of the top ranked student papers in the United States. In the last five years alone, stories published in the Kansan won first nationwide for our school three times in the annual Intercollegiate Writing Competition of the Hearst Journalism Awards program, often called the college Pulitzers. We finished second nationally this year.
Magazine students produce JayPlay, an entertainment and lifestyle magazine distributed weekly with the Kansan. As with the Kansan itself, Jayplay staffers write, edit and design its coverage of nightlife, entertainment, health and relationships—or, as we like to put it, the sex, drugs and rock and roll beat.
Broadcasting students for KUJH-TV hone their skills by gathering, shooting and airing daily news and sports programs, offering opportunities for on-camera talent, producers, directors and writers. Other students contribute daily newscasts and sports programs on KJHK Radio.
Strategic Communications students manage the Kansan’s business side, generating a million dollars or more in revenue each year through advertising sales to local and national companies. Their work pays for nearly all of the newspaper’s expenses. The Kansan has received the award for Best Advertising Staff in the Nation three out of the last four years, including this year. The award is given by the College Newspapers Business and Advertising Managers Association.
30 All Strategic Communications students are required to enroll in Strategic Campaigns, a capstone course that requires teams of students to research and solve a marketing communication problem for an established business or governmental agency. The class requires them to draw upon the knowledge, experience and skills gained from previous courses in research, writing, message development, strategic communications and public relations to present a real client with recommendations for addressing a real world problem. Clients have included Sprint, The Cheesecake Factory, Chipotle, The Kansas Department of Commerce and Hallmark.
Add to these classes the strong likelihood that students will serve as editors or business managers of the Kansan during their four years and work internships in summers for newspapers, broadcast stations, public relation firms and advertising agencies, and you can see that the degrees earned by graduating journalists we honor today represent more than an academic credential.
Much of their homework produced for classes appeared as professional news or advertising content in newspapers, television, radio and magazines. Jayhawk Journalists leave here having studied their disciplines and practiced their professions in the real world.
As for Citizen Journalists, I’m ready and willing to hear from them and help tell their stories. But I’m wary of giving them the title of journalists that KU graduates worked so hard to earn today and in previous graduation ceremonies. I am not ready to have a Citizen Pilot fly an airliner when I’m a passenger, or have a Citizen Lawyer defend me in court, or have a Citizen Gastroenterologist perform a colonoscopy on me.
Our graduates who will walk across the stage today were already good citizens when they arrived on campus. Unlike Citizen Journalists, now they are educated and trained professionals. They are Jayhawk Journalists, and for that we salute them.
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