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Friday, June 15, 2007
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Snapshots from Home So we're all shaking hands and introducing ourselves in the conference room at Inside Higher Ed's offices (two blocks from UD's GW office) yesterday, and it turns out that Susan Herbst, interim president of SUNY Albany, one of the IHE reporters there, and UD, had all attended or taught at Northwestern University. Medill, the school of journalism there, was mentioned a lot, and UD said that she'd spent a year at Medill but hadn't liked it much, and had transferred to the English department. "And look at you now," said Herbst, meaning you became a journalist anyway. UD explained that her primary job was in fact as an English professor down the street. But UD was happy to think that here at IHE among other journalists she was taken for a journalist too. She was happy that IHE had given her the opportunity to be a journalist, as well as a professor.... Which is the subject of a nice piece this morning in the Chronicle of Higher Education.... I mean, being a professor and a journalist. ******************* When UD was making plans to drop out of grad school in English at the University of Chicago -- Wayne Booth talked her out of doing it -- she started looking into journalism positions in the city. One magazine looking for writers was Dog World. Having grown up with dogs (UD's mother showed and bred English Cocker Spaniels), and having equal respect for freelance and academic forms of writing, UD had no objection to writing for Dog World, and intended to apply for a job there. She was sitting in a leathery woody old student lounge in the humanities building at the university, paging through the latest Dog World and imagining her new life on its staff, when the man who would later become Mr. UD walked in, got his coffee, and sat down next to her. He gazed long and long at Dog World. Occasionally he glanced at the book he'd brought -- Being and Time or something -- and then stared again for a long time at Dog World. "Why are you reading a magazine called Dog World," he asked superciliously. "I'm applying for a job there." "Summer...?" "No. I'm leaving grad school. I'm thinking of writing for Dog World." Mr. UD laughed. "Dog World." Until that moment I hadn't really lined up, for clear comparison, writing articles comparing flea shampoos and writing essays about James Merrill. Until that moment I hadn't realized that the very title of the magazine sounded ominous... So Mr. UD, in his own obnoxious way, also helped keep UD in grad school. |