Well, students aren't the only ones who begin to feel the semester getting away from them after midterm exams have taken place. It happens to professors, too-and this professor, for some reason, was under the impression that just three weeks had passed since her last ombudsman column. Apparently, it has been FIVE weeks-and I didn't realize that until this past weekend, when I sat down to write my column. Please accept my apologies.
The extra two weeks only served to confirm a trend I have noticed in this year's coverage, though-and it's a trend that I would like to publicly applaud the Justice for. I hate to say it, but ordinarily in this column, I try to find something negative to say about the Justice's coverage. I couch the criticism in praise, of course (My German friend, Susanna, calls this an "American Sandwich"-a layer of negativity between two slices of self-esteem-boosting whole wheat), but the general trajectory is usually that there is something the Justice could be doing, and it isn't-or shouldn't be doing, and it is.
This week, though, I want to congratulate the Justice on its coverage of the intellectual climate that students, faculty and administrators have been working very hard to create at this University. I have written in the past on the obligation that journalists have to empower citizens to shape and participate in their communities. In order to do that, journalists must be keenly aware of what it is about the community they're reporting on that makes it unique or different-and in the case of a university, what makes the community different is the unabashed effort on the part of the community's leaders to foster a sense of intellectualism. A university like Brandeis is a community in which citizens are very deliberately given the opportunity to hear, learn from and challenge some of the greatest thinkers the world has to offer. This is the reason for the community's existence-and so far this semester, the Justice has done a fine job of emphasizing that raison d'etre in its coverage.
I guess I first noticed this the week of Oct. 16. In that week's issue of the Justice, I read about public lectures that were delivered at Brandeis by former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, Harvard Medical School professor Paul Farmer, Al Quds University President Sari Nusseibeh and German Ambassador to the United States Klaus Sharioth. The following week, the Justice's coverage was equally extensive, with articles about lectures that were delivered by Arun Gandhi, Benjamin Pogrund, Betty Williams, Errol Morris and Werner Herzog.
Those two weeks were enough to convince me that this year's editors were doing a better job than their predecessors of assigning reporters to cover the intellectual elements of the University. I got some added proof Nov. 6, when the Justice ran an article about a public lecture that was sponsored by the journalism program and delivered by Northeastern University professor Laurel Leff ("Leff speaks on media crisis coverage"). I direct the journalism program, and every semester since I've been here, we've brought a speaker to campus. Last year, WGBH's John Carroll spoke on the influence that advertising has had on the news, and Huda Ahmed, Baghdad correspondent for the McClatchy newspaper chain, spoke on the dangers faced by Iraqi reporters working for American news agencies. Every journalism minor-many of whom worked for the Justice-knew about these lectures; yet, the Justice covered neither event.
So improvement has been made, and I am grateful. As the paper noted in its editorial Oct. 16 ("Poor Publicity for Speakers"), student attendance at public lectures has often been unacceptably low-as apparently was the case at Carol Moseley Braun's lecture Oct. 10. (Full disclosure: I did not attend that event because of dog-walking responsibilities at home.) I don't know that attendance at the lecture would have been improved with better advertising, as the Justice's editorial insists-but I do know that the paper's coverage can only emphasize to all of us how lucky we are to belong to a community that allows us to engage great minds such as Braun's. Perhaps the coverage will even encourage us to engage.The ombudsman serves as the readers' representative, writing a regular column evaluating the newspaper's journalistic performance. Prof. Maura Farrelly (AMST), the director of the journalism program and a former broadcast reporter for Voice of America, can be reached at farrelly@brandeis.edu.