New tradition honors faculty
By Alexis Einerson
J Alumni News staff
The year was 1971, Bob Devaney's football team had won the national championship and the Husker football legacy had begun. But another legacy was also beginning at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
A first-year teacher from the J school was sent to a regional Society of Professional Journalists' convention in which UNL journalism students would be competing.
Professor Jim Neal was instructed to send a story back on the Associated Press regional wire on how well the UNL students fared.
"I never expected what happened," Neal said.
"UNL news-editorial students, really Jim Patten's depth reporting class, took all but one first place in the writing competition. And the broadcasters also cleaned up.
"Clearly, Bob Devaney's football team was not the only number one performer at Nebraska," Neal said.
Stories, like this one, of tradition and pride, inspired a tribute to past teachers at the journalism college.
The steps to the lower level of Andersen Hall will soon be filled with the faces of the school's history.
Dean Will Norton is instituting a Wall of Honor in Andersen Hall with pictures and dates of past tenured faculty.
"Basically, what produces good students is the faculty, and there have been some great faculty members," Norton said. "It will be a way to honor those who have spent a lot of time here and tend to be forgotten."
But the faculty members who spent more than a decade at UNL will never forget the experience.
The changes in the school, the students and the technology have added to the memories, along with some regrets, that faculty members who spent years at UNL will always remember.
The school and the students
The journalism program has seen a few different homes in its time at UNL.
When Neal started teaching in 1971, the school was still part of the Arts and Sciences College and was housed in the cramped quarters of Nebraska Hall with the College of Engineering.
"We used manual typewriters and had only an undergraduate program. Broadcasting students used 16 mm film for television," Neal said. "When I retired we had moved to Avery Hall, become a separate college and added a master's program, and we used Apple Macs for graphics and IBM PCs for reporting and editing."
The enrollment grew steadily, but the atmosphere stayed the same, said Professor Jim Patten, who taught at the school from 1967-1979
"The school never lost the family atmosphere among students and faculty that attracted me to enroll there as a freshman student in 1963," Patten said.
"It was about that period, from the mid-1960s on, that the school developed from being mostly an excellent program in print journalism to one that was outstanding in all areas."
Now the J school occupies all of Andersen Hall. Each department - news-editorial, broadcasting and advertising - has its own space, and broadcasting and news-editorial share a state-of-the-art newsroom.
Associate Professor Daryl Frazell, who retired in May, said Nebraska students haven't changed since he started teaching at UNL in 1990.
"Every class is different, but I find that Nebraska students come with a work ethic that might not be there on the East Coast, for example," Frazell said. "The students want to succeed.
"I find it a great thing to be able to work with students like this. They may not be as brilliant as Harvard people, but they've got other assets: They're tenacious, they don't give up and they work very hard. That hasn't changed at all," he said.
Technology
Although Frazell said he didn't think the students had changed much over time, the technology has changed dramatically.
Frazell said he first heard about computers in 1970 when he was working at The New York Times. No matter how much students may get frustrated now, this is nothing compared to what he remembered having to deal with.
"People get upset with these computers because they're on the Internet and they can't run Quark (at the same time)," Frazell said. "In those days (1970s) the computers would just stop and you couldn't figure out how to get them going again.
"There were frequent breakdowns of (computer) communications during stories (in The New York Times newsroom). Anyone who had any brains would save every five minutes.
"We had people scream, jump up and down and completely lose it when they lost stories. When we finally got new computers there was a great deal of sentiment in bringing those old computers out into the parking lot and smashing them into bits. They were very hated," Frazell said.
Memorable experiences
The most memorable moment at UNL for Professor Jack Botts, who was on the faculty from 1963 to 1990, was the creation of the J school publication now called The Journalist in the early 1970s.
"Soon after the paper began (in 1973) we sent two reporters and two photographers by plane to Wounded Knee, S.D., to cover the standoff between renegade Indians and the federal and state police," Botts said. "Neither the Lincoln Journal or Star had anyone there, nor did The Kansas City Star - their reporters got lost."
With the hiring of Frazell in 1990, The Journalist got a bit of an addition in "The Grouch."
"The Grouch" was the weekly critique that Frazell gave to his editing students that pointed out errors - with the hope they would not happen again.
"I started ("The Grouch") when I came here as a means of telling students about things I found in their work," Frazell said. "Something that affects one editor should be made known to all editors."
But it is not just in the J school that Frazell finds material for "The Grouch."
"My eyebrows go up when I see some of the things that are published," Frazell said. "Current students shouldn't feel better or worse, because I've never lacked for material for "The Grouch," and it's not just students.
"There's a good deal of room for criticism for all of the current media. For example, that crawl thing they have now on cable news channels. It's a line of words running across the bottom, and I can't understand why they can't give you the whole sentence. Invariably, I will be looking at the talking head, look down and see one piece that's interesting, but it is just a piece and they don't repeat it. It's infuriating."
But Frazell's most nostalgic memories came from the days when both the advanced reporting and the advanced editing classes met during summer school. During the last two weeks of the session, Frazell and Professor Bud Pagel and their students worked at the Seward paper, up a flight of narrow and creaky stairs above the newspaper's office.
"The students had to carry the computers up there. It was incredibly hot, and there was no air conditioning," Frazell said. "Pagel and I would go up there and operate a newsroom.
"The students had quite an experience climbing up those steps and then going into the oven at the top and having to deal with Pagel and me. They earned their stripes."
The summer session of advanced editing was discontinued in 1995 because of small class size, but advanced reporting continues its work with the Seward paper.
Changes
Patten admitted he would have changed a couple things he did during his time at UNL if he had the chance - like assigning obits for misspelled words in Journalism 371.
"That was probably a mistake," Patten said. "There's got to be a better way, like the time Dr. Walklin made a student carry a dictionary around campus. Great technique.
"Of course, the obit-writing thing created some great moments, too, like the time one student had to write seven or eight obits. Instead of doing seven or eight stories, he wrote one story in which all of the people he had to write about 'died' in one explosion. We actually let him get away with it," he said.
Botts said, however, that he wouldn't change a thing, even if he had the chance.
"We had a good director, and later, dean, in Neale Copple, and we always tried to hire the best, most experienced faculty we could find.," Botts said. "Our policy was - and I think it still is - to place the students' welfare first in everything we did, and they always made us proud."
