"Independently Published by Students"

College newspapers are having a moment. Except at my alma mater.

This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture and politics. Welcome to all new readers/subscribers, and if you like what you’re reading, please join the mailing list and share, on social media or through e-mail or however you feel comfortable sharing. (It’s still FREE to join the list: Just click “None” on the “subscribe now” page.) The best way you can help out is by spreading the word and sharing with others. I have set up payment tiers, if you wish to chip in and allow me the time to do a little more research on on these posts and have full access to the archives—I’ve made those subscriptions about as cheap as Substack will let me make them, which is $5 a month or $40 a year.

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I.

One summer morning many years ago in a small Pennsylvania town, I dragged myself out of bed at dawn, trudged thirty minutes, and walked down the stairs into a narrow little basement office, to which myself and a handful of others had been issued our own keys. I picked up the phone, dialed a conference call line, and interviewed a college quarterback who was no doubt situated in a student apartment less than a mile away from where I was sitting. Since the powers-that-be who governed the football program’s media policy did not permit in-person interviews outside of certain Tuesdays every other February during Leap Years, this was the best I could do, and if my memory serves me correctly, it was one of the worst interviews I’ve ever conducted. Which, trust me, is really saying something.

Here is a confession: I was never a particularly good reporter. I always tended toward the writing first. But since I couldn’t really comprehend any other way to make money by writing other than working at a newspaper, the first thing I did when I enrolled at Penn State in the summer of 19(REDACTED) was to take the test to join the student newspaper, The Daily Collegian. I do not remember what was on the test, but it must have been comprised of questions about Twin Peaks, Billy Joel, and the 1983 Philadelphia Phillies roster, because I passed, and that summer of my freshman year I became what was known as a “candidate,” a sort of probationary fraternity pledge at the paper. Since there is nothing to write about over the summer as a young reporter—since the campus as a whole is largely asleep—I have no idea what I actually wrote about, but somehow I became a full-fledged member of the student newspaper in the fall. No one has ever been more enthused to cover women’s cross-country than I was.

Over the course of time, a handful of us ascended the masthead of the newspaper together. And over the course of time—at a university with a lifeless journalism curriculum that had yet to establish its now well-respected sports journalism program—we began to realize that ninety percent of what mattered in journalism and writing, we could learn by doing. The Collegian became our home. It was our apprenticeship. Classes, frankly, were secondary. We were young and imbued with a sense of our self-importance; we lived and died with every issue of the paper, and we fucked up quite often. The paper mattered to us, because we had true independence, and because the entire campus read it every morning. We pissed off coaches and athletes and fellow students; we pissed off the administration, but they understood that what we were doing mattered, that it was both a vital service to the student body and a vital learning experience for us.

And all these decades later, they don’t seem to think much of us at all anymore.

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II.

These are lean times both for newsgathering operations and university budgets, which led Penn State to make a harsh decision this summer: Not only would they cut back on the roughly $400,000 in yearly funding they gave to the Collegian; they would cut the Collegian’s funding altogether. And as it turns out, Penn State is doing this at a moment when student newspaper journalists are repeatedly proving their worth.

A few weeks ago, after Northwestern suspended its football coach for two weeks, issuing a bland press release that was oddly short on detail. And then the student newspaper went to work, interviewing whistleblowers and exposing the width of the hazing allegations against Pat Fitzgerald, which led to his firing. Around the same time, the reporting of a young journalist led to an independent scientific review of the academic work of the president of Stanford; and that review led to the president’s resignation.

As a young man who garnered his education from Dave Barry columns, the backs of baseball cards, and the pages of Mad Magazine, I did not have the academic credentials to get into Stanford or Northwestern. But that was the thing about the Collegian: It was the great equalizer. Our paper was just as good as theirs; often, it was better. It was a place where wayward thinkers like me found their calling, whether it was writing long-form features and books and screenplays or investigating wrongdoing or engaging in corporate communications or publishing mystery novels.

I’m sure it’s easy for the university to look at the Collegian and view it as a secondary asset that will find a way to take care of itself. And I imagine it probably will, because I know there are dozens of people who make far more money in the media business than I do, who will gladly divert whatever money they have to give back to our college newspaper instead of directing it toward the university. I also know that the Collegian has struggled in the era of online journalism, when students can get their news in more entertaining ways from far less serious and/or outright doltish sources. But as my old Collegian colleague Jordan Hyman pointed out, it’s downright ghoulish to use the Collegian as an example of experiential learning by including it on campus tours, while simultaneously refusing to commit a penny to its ongoing survival.

At a public university that hasn’t exactly been a model of public transparency, this decision feels like a betrayal, both of the future of a public university and of its support of a vibrant and independent press. I was never much of a reporter; but if not for the confidence the Collegian instilled in me, I would probably not even be a writer at all.¹ And that means something a lot of us, even if it apparently doesn’t mean a single solitary dollar to my alma mater.

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1. Though when I go back and read my Collegian columns, I wonder if perhaps I should have stopped long ago.