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Journalism Fellowships at Stanford

A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Journalism Fellowships at Stanford

By Jim Bettinger

This article appeared in slightly different form in the Spring-Summer 1998 issue of Sandstone & Tile, published by the Stanford Historical Society.

Ted Natt knocked on the door of the Stanford Law School dean and introduced himself: "Hi. I'm one of the new professional journalism fellows and I'd like to take some classes in your law school."

It was the fall of 1966. Natt was the first of his kind at Stanford and like the rest of his colleagues, he was regarded as a strange new beast.

"The dean kind of looked at me and thought, 'Well, what in the dickens does a journalist want to do in a law school?'" Natt recalled. Natt explained how better-informed journalists could help the public understand the legal system. "And he allowed as how that made some sense, so he let me in."

Natt was one of the first to explain to a Stanford professor what a journalist was doing on a university campus. But he was far from the last. Since that fall of 1966, 623 reporters, editors, producers, photographers, editorial cartoonists and editorial writers have made their way to the Farm to study in a professional journalism fellowships program. By the time that first group of 37 Professional Journalism Fellows–or PJFs, as they were commonly known—left Stanford, the basic thrust of the program was set, and hasn't changed much since:

Identify promising midcareer journalists. Stake them to several months at Stanford and let them study anything they want. Stimulate them with provocative seminars. And send them back to work, where they will raise the overall level of journalism.

Fellows audit classes rather than take them for credit, which lets them take full advantage of their time on campus. They also are free to set up independent study programs with individual professors. And those who wished can undertake archival or library research. The mix is entirely up to each individual fellow.

To varying degrees, all of Stanford–its professional schools as well as the School of Humanities and Sciences–are open to fellows. They are forbidden from working professionally during their time on campus, and they promise to return to their news organizations when the fellowship is over.

Some news organizations recoiled at the prospect of sending their most promising 30-ish reporters and editors away for up to a year to Stanford, where they might get the taste for different pastures. But others have accepted the idea that a journalist's education should not end the moment he or she starts to work.

The fellowship has been targeted at "mid-career" journalists–people old enough to know what they need, and young enough to use it through the rest of their career. That first class averaged 32 years old, with Natt among the youngest at 25, and the oldest being 43. Fellows in the 1997-98 class range from 29 to 48, with an average of 39.

But why journalism fellowships in the first place? And why Stanford?

Blame Jim Armsey.

James W. Armsey was a program officer for the Ford Foundation, and when the Foundation had a big chunk of money to spend in the mid-sixties, Armsey wanted to spend some of it on journalism programs. He'd been a journalism major in college, and he thought that better journalism could be good for the public. He devised a series of grants, including $1.2 million for the Columbia Journalism Review, $1.2 million to refinance the Nieman Fellowships at Harvard, $700,000 to set up seminars for journalists in the South, $750,000 to the American Political Science Association and $1.1 million to start an Urban Journalism Program at Northwestern.

Armsey wanted these grants to have a western U.S. presence as well. So he called his old friend Lyle Nelson at Stanford.

Nelson, a native of Oregon and graduate of the University of Oregon, had worked more than 20 years in educational institutions: the University of Oregon, the Educational TV and Radio Center in Ann Arbor, San Francisco State and the University of Michigan, where he was a journalism professor and administrator, eventually becoming vice president. In 1961, he moved to Stanford as director of university relations.

Armsey had known Nelson since the late 1940s, and he was familiar with the pioneering research of Stanford communication professor Wilbur Schramm. So he called Nelson, told him about the series of journalism grants the Ford Foundation was making and said, "Okay, what would you like to do at Stanford?" And the next thing anyone knew, Stanford had a $975,000 three-year grant to start a journalism fellowship program, and Ted Natt was knocking on the door of the dean of the law school.

When Natt and his colleagues arrived on campus in the fall of 1966, they were greeted by a couple of experienced, well-known newspaper journalists. Herbert Brucker, the director, was a former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors who had recently retired as editor of the Hartford Courant; Julius Duscha (pronounced "doo-shay") had been a national political reporter for the Washington Post.

The fellows were to be on campus for either one academic quarter or two, receiving a stipend of $1,700 per quarter (about $8,500 in 1997 dollars). Of the 37, 30 came from newspapers, three from wire services, three from broadcasting and one from a magazine.

By design, the one-quarter/two-quarter format contrasted with the full academic year that Nieman Fellows spent at Harvard. Stanford Communication Professor Emeritus Chilton R. (Chick) Bush had surveyed publishers and editors and found they liked the shorter terms. Three to six months was less disruptive for employers, according to Stanford's application to the Ford Foundation, "and they would be more likely to release their best men for such a time."

One-quarter fellowships didn't work very well–it was simply too short a time for a reporter or editor to switch gears–and after the first year, one-quarter fellows were rare.

Besides the classes, the fellows were treated to seminars organized by Brucker and Duscha. Once, recalled Natt, fellows traveled to Sacramento, "where we met this kind of odd duck who was the brand-new governor, named Ronald Reagan." Other seminars that first year featured British historian Arnold Toynbee (on his 78th birthday), civil rights activist Mark Lane, Stanford student body president David Harris, community organizer Saul Alinsky and Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler.

"All this," wrote Noel Lieberman, a member of the first class, "engendered a rare animal, a happy, contented newspaperman whose discussions ran the gamut of human experience with a conspicuous absence of complaints."

Stanford's first journalism fellows left with batteries recharged, ready to resume their careers. Of the 33 fellows from that class whose whereabouts are known (two have died and the program has lost contact with two others), 27 either are working as journalists or retired. Nine are working for the same news organization, and four others retired from that news organization. Two teach journalism; only four have left the field.

By 1969, the leadership of the program had changed. Julius Duscha, missing Washington, returned to the capital and the Washington Journalism Center in early 1968. Herb Brucker, his three-year commitment done, returned to the East Coast. Nelson replaced Brucker and Harry Press, a long-time San Francisco journalist who had recently come to Stanford, replaced Duscha.

Press was a Stanford grad (Class of '39, B.A. in journalism). Starting as a reporter at the San Francisco News in 1946, he survived the shrinking S.F. newspaper field: The News merged with the Call-Bulletin to become the News-Call Bulletin and then in 1965, the News-Call Bulletin was folded into the Examiner. When Stanford beckoned in 1966, with an offer to become the founding editor of the Stanford Observer, Press agreed.

The division of responsibility between Nelson and Press was clear: "We laughingly said, 'We're Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside,'" Nelson recalled in a 1996 interview. "And I was the outside. It was my job to raise the money. Harry was inside. It was his job to run the programs, chiefly because he could run them." With some minor changes, this arrangement continued for the next 16 years, until Nelson retired in 1985. (He died in 1997.)

Nelson got the Ford Foundation to make a second $1 million grant—a matching grant, meaning that Stanford would have to raise $1 million itself. Nelson was an effective fund-raiser, and he set himself to work. Over the next few years he got grants from Gannett Newspaper Foundation (now the Freedom Forum), Times-Mirror, Time Inc., the Washington Post, the Thomas More Storke Foundation, the Providence Journal and the American Petroleum Institute. The grant that put the program over the top was from the Knight Foundation.

Press, meanwhile, ran the program on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis. The job was (and remains) a combination of camp counselor, concierge, herd dog and father confessor: Fellows always need advice on what classes to take, which professors to seek out, where to get a clutch repaired, where their careers should go and when they should arrive for the softball game. "Ask Harry" was the answer to all these questions.

Most fellows met Press when they were interviewed for their fellowship. Because it was cheaper than bringing 35 or 40 candidates to Stanford for interviews, Press traveled around the U.S., meeting applicants in various central cities. Seeking to set ap-plicants at ease–"they were stressed out, they were nervous, they were under tremendous pressure, trying to win a fellowship"–Press eschewed any office setting. If at all possible, he tried to meet outdoors–in a park, by a pool, even in a rooftop garden.

Sometimes there were glitches. Tom Mulvoy, now a managing editor of the Boston Globe, remembers being interviewed by Press on Boston Common in the spring of 1982. At one point Mulvoy told Press that 300 years earlier there had been three hills nearby: "The area was called Trimountain then, which is how we have come to call this thoroughfare Tremont Street. Beacon Hill, where the Bulfinch State House sits, is the last vestige of Trimountain."

At which point a derelict at the other end of the park bench took over the interview. "That stuff about the hills is nothing," he said in a raspy voice. "In those days, the harbor waters reached not five feet from where you guys are sitting, and the settlers fished off the piers that were right at the edge of the Common. Great history here, all around us."

During the early 1970s journalists from outside the U.S. became a regular presence in the program. The first class had three Canadian journalists, and the first fellows from outside North America came in 1968-69: Zika Bogdanovic of Yugoslavia, sponsored by the Institute for International Education, and Ana Lena Thorsell of Sweden, sponsored by the Association of Swedish Authors and Journalists. There was no provision in the Ford Foundation grant for them, so they were accepted into the program as "associate professional journalism fellows," and had to find their own funding. Beginning in 1970-71, there have been international journalism fellows at Stanford every year.

International fellows have come from more than 40 countries (some of which, such as the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic, no longer exist). Nelson, who spent more time than Press on the international fellows, had a particular interest in countries where the press was struggling to get free, and in the late 1970s and early 1980s, that often meant Poland, which has sent 12 fellows to Stanford. Nelson also had a keen interest in China, and beginning with Zaihan Guan in the spring of 1980, seven Chinese journalists have been fellows at Stanford.

For the U.S. fellows, the perspective of international fellows is the single most unanticipated benefit of the program. "It helped richen the dialogue about journalism, so that we weren't always thinking in a U.S. framework," said Jon Funabiki, a 1985 fellow from the San Diego Union. The U.S. journalists often arrive for the fellowship still scarred by the ambition, the battles over turf and the cynicism that often wrench newsrooms. Then they would hear Joanna Szczesna describe hiding stories for her Polish underground newspaper in her son's diapers. Or they would hear from Rodrigo Carpio of Guatemala, or Carlos Chamorro of Nicaragua, each of whose father was assassinated because of his journalism.

As the program established itself at Stanford, a pair of top officials of the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington were kicking around ways to broaden NEH's impact. Perhaps, thought James Blessing and Guinevere Griest, director and deputy director of the fellowships division, a program aimed at younger professionals might work.

"Our first thought was of journalists, because journalists give to the general public their knowledge of what is happening in the world," Griest said. "And in the early seventies, coming out of the late sixties, we thought that the knowledge and the insight provided by the humanities were more urgently needed than ever."

Blessing and Griest envisioned a program that would send journalists to a resource-rich university for a broad variety of courses: "And we did want some kind of core study of the humanities, where they'd all come together and learn from each other's experiences."

She and Blessing explored journalism programs at Stanford and several other universities. "Lyle understood what we wanted, and he was pretty close to doing it already," Griest said. Stanford, one of several universities invited to submit proposals, asked for $215,798 to bring 12 U.S. journalists to campus for the 1973-74 academic year. Stanford's proposal was approved. (So was a similar proposal at the University of Michigan.)

National Endowment for the Humanities funding stabilized the program. It put fellows on campus for a full academic year, instead of the two quarters that had been typical. After years of fluctuating numbers—as many as 37, as few as 12–the number of fellows settled at 18 to 20.

NEH funding brought one new element to the program—a regular seminar, revolving around a single humanities theme, taught by either one professor or a team. It had mixed success over the years that it was taught. Some fellows liked the coherence and discipline, while others, particularly if they didn't hit it off with the professor, found the seminars onerous.

Griest said NEH kept close tabs on the program and was pleased with the way its money was spent. "At Stanford, it was so successful, so quickly, and so outstandingly, that we were stunned." (Not everyone was so impressed: The National Enquirer reported breathlessly, "$500,000 of Taxpayers' Money is Being Wasted to Send Newsmen Back to School!")

The longer the program was on campus, the more it became familiar to professors—and the more professors came to value the presence of fellows in their classes. Professors reported that the fellows' combination of real-world experience, maturity and straightforward interest in the subject matter (since they were getting neither grade nor credit) often heightened the quality of the class. Sometimes professors drew directly on the journalism background of the fellows. Political Science Professor Condoleezza Rice, now provost, had fellows act as reporters during a classroom political crisis simulation, and Law Professor Marc Franklin often would call on fellows in his media law class to explain the journalistic perspective on such issues as whether crime victims should be named.

History professor Barton Bernstein says the presence of fellows has often increased the quality of his teaching: "You always have present older, more knowledgeable people, who aren't necessarily smarter, but are certainly more mature and worldly, sitting there as a check and constraint," he said. "So there's a nice intellectual-standard check on faculty."

Gerald Gunther, an emeritus law professor, was persuaded by the contribution of fellows in his late-1970s classes to argue for modifying law school admission standards, in order to put a higher value on the non-academic experiences of applicants.

Other faculty have used fellows directly in their research. English Professor Diane Middlebrook realized she needed investigative journalism skills for her biography of Billy Tipton, a woman who had lived most of her adult life as a man. "Fortunately," she told a biographers' conference, "I also knew that a whole cadre of [investigative reporters] was hanging out not far from my office at Stanford University." She spoke to a Knight Fellowships seminar and turned it into a brainstorming session.

Not all professors welcomed fellows with open arms. The Graduate School of Business, with a general prohibition on auditors, was mostly off limits. Some professors, particularly those teaching undergraduate seminars, found fellows too prone to dominating discussions. And some found the fellows unprepared for the rigor of the courses they taught.

By the early 1980s, with Ronald Reagan in the White House and William Bennett the new director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the "humanities for the professions" program was on the way out. The 1982-83 academic year was slated to be the end. But Lyle Nelson had been assiduously raising the fellowship's endowment fund.

One potential source Nelson was eyeing was the Knight Foundation, named for John S. Knight, co-founder of Knight Newspapers. Nelson had known Lee Hills, chairman of Knight-Ridder Newspapers and a trustee of the foundation, since the late 1950s, when Hills was executive editor of the Detroit Free Press. Nelson had been cultivating the foundation, getting grants in the $50,000 range. He hoped a larger grant for the Professional Journalism Fellowships endowment might be possible.

John Knight died on June 16, 1981. His will left the bulk of his estate to the Knight Foundation; by the time the estate was settled in 1986, the foundation's assets were more than $400 million, the 20th largest in the nation.

Nelson was in Washington when he heard about Knight's death (coincidentally, he'd been in Hills' office the day before, talking about the fellowships program and the Knight Foundation). He recalled asking himself, What do we have to do now? "And so I sat right down there and I borrowed a typewriter from somebody's office, sat down there and wrote out a preliminary proposal." Nelson always said that Hills was key to the grant.

That draft became a formal proposal to the Knight Foundation for a $4 million grant. Among the points in that proposal were two that Nelson had emphasized from the start: Knight-Ridder Newspapers had sent more fellows to Stanford than any other newspaper chain. And because Stanford's Professional Journalism Fellowships program already had a $3.5-million-plus endowment, a Knight Foundation grant would in effect double its contribution, producing an endowment of nearly $8 million. In May of 1982, the Knight Foundation Board of Trustees approved the proposal. Stanford's Professional Journalism Fellowships were about to become the John S. Knight Fellowships.

The academic year 1984-85, the first year of the Knight Fellowships, was Lyle Nelson's last year before a year of sabbatical leave and then retirement. In February, James V. Risser was named to succeed Nelson. Risser was one of the Stanford journalism fellowship success stories—a fellow from the Des Moines Register Washington bureau in 1973-74, he had become bureau chief and won two Pulitzer Prizes in the five years after his fellowship.

"The message that I got from people on the search committee . . . reinforced by Lyle Nelson," Risser said, "was that there was a great interest now, with a secure endowment, of trying to make this the premiere fellowship program in the nation." This would mean intensified efforts to attract the best applicants—a larger stipend (from $18,000 in the last year of NEH funding, the stipend has increased to $45,000 a year), more advertising of the fellowship, and regular attendance at the annual meetings of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the National Association of Black Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors and similar journalism organizations.

Instead of traveling around the country to interview prospective fellows, the program now brings about 35 semifinalists to Stanford to be interviewed by a committee of staff members and former fellows. Among other benefits, this allows the program to show off Stanford to applicants.

Risser, Press (who retired in 1989) and deputy director Jim Bettinger took several steps to increase the visibility of the fellowships program on campus, too. Fellows speak in classes, dorms and other forums. Risser, University President Donald Kennedy and GSB Dean Robert Jaedicke hammered out an agreement that allowed a limited number of Knight Fellows to audit GSB classes. Beginning in 1988, the Knight Fellowships have sponsored an annual lecture by a prominent journalist.

The program continues on a sound financial footing, and the endowment has grown to $38 million as of May 1998.

So have the Knight Fellowships become the premiere program in the country? "I think it's clearly the equal of any other journalism fellowship program in the country," Risser said. "Whether it's the best is hard to measure and even sort of self-serving to say, but the fact that we generally get the greatest number of applicants among the three general fellowships certainly says something about how it's regarded within the business."

Although some aspects of the program have changed since the mid-sixties, the value to journalists has remained much the same.

Sometimes the benefit has been direct and practical. When Jose Ferrer was writing about Watergate for Time magazine, he drew on an evidence class he'd taken while a fellow in 1968: "I got out my old textbooks and looked up the underlined entries and found the examples I used in my story." Sometimes the fellowship has sparked a new interest. Bob Boyd, of the Knight-Ridder Washington bureau, took the kind of science classes he hadn't taken in college when he was a fellow in 1980-81. In the years since he's developed that as a specialty.

Fellows have gone on to win journalism's major prizes. Besides Risser, other fellows who have won Pulitzers after their year at Stanford are Ross Anderson, Peter Carey, Glenn Frankel, James McGee, Michael Toner and Eileen Welsome. But often the benefit is less direct. Sheila Stainback, a fellow in 1982-83, said her year made her "a born-again journalist. The time I was able to spend reading, researching and studying reconnected me to the passion I once had for covering the news as a young reporter."

The majority of fellows have stayed in the profession. Of the 557 former fellows whose whereabouts are known, according to program records, more than 80 percent are either working as journalists, teaching journalism or retired. Nearly 40 percent are still with the same news organizations.

And almost all, if questioned, say the fellowship is still useful to them. "It gave me considerable depth of knowledge in some areas that I had not had before," says Natt, who now, more than 30 years after he knocked on the law school dean's door, is editor and publisher of the Longview (Washington) Daily News. "I still find I'm using some things I learned in water law, of all things, to this day. "I think it helps reinforce the importance of quality in the news content part of what we do."