A few quick hits that I think are worth noting, for reasons that should be apparent…

1) The New York Times had this photo and hed in the top spot of their Web page when I checked it earlier this evening. Anyone who thinks I’m crazy for wanting to take over the NYT’s San Francisco bureau and combat West Coast Bias one pine tree and one barren mountain at a time should now understand why. For the record, I’m pretty sure from looking at this that no people actually live west of, say, Wichita.

2) From Jaunted, Miami is planning a “Death party” for Castro, and it may well be hosted in the Orange Bowl. Coincidentally (or not), that’s also where Kennedy gave a “free Cuba” speech in ‘61.

3) Anyone else watch the A-block of the NBC Nightly News tonight? The story about the 200 Iraqis killed? Is anyone else bothered that an Iraqi soldier put down his weapon during the fighting, pulled out his cell phone, and shot some grainy video of the action? We’re spending how much money, time and American lives to teach them what exactly? Good.

Sounds like a Bob Woodward book, I know. But no, this is all true, and all about Medill. You’ll remember this post from a few days ago about my “disagreement” with Dean John Lavine. The irony of this all, as several people have pointed out, is that we went through Medill to learn how to dig up information, to champion the necessity of free and open communication, and to strive to make the institutions we interact with more transparent. But when it comes to the institution of Medill itself, it is failing on all three of those counts right now. Plans are kept secret from students and faculty members, the future is described in only the most vague terms, and attempts to get a little honest information are met with snarky comments in return.

Fittingly enough, my own NU login stopped working two days ago (I wasn’t the only one), so I can’t even keep up with the Dean’s blog, nor respond to him on his own turf. Mr. Lavine, I’m glad to see that you care about the alumni of your institution even a tenth as much as Medill’s students. Your efforts are keeping us even more out of the loop than many students, and I’m quickly losing respect for the work you’re doing. If you ever expect to get an alumni contribution out of me, think long and hard about what you’re doing now and what kind of a message that sends.

Dad and I went up to SF on Saturday for dinner and the symphony…it sounds really pretentious I know, but I guess that’s the price of enjoying classical music. We ate at Citizen Cake, a nouveau-French-American restaurant with a patisserie attached. Great food. Anyway, Dad and I found ourselves trying to figure out what the second entree on the menu was: Salmon sous vide. Of course, our combined knowledge of the French language is about enough to get from Charles de Gaulle to the Left Bank and then order some steak and fries. We were stuck.

Alhammdulellah that the guy at the table next to us knew about the dish. “The preparation is excellent,” he said.

“Great, but what exactly is the preparation?” I replied.

“Well, it’s sous vide.” … Period. No further explanation. I didn’t have time for his silly and pretentious games, so I shot back without much thinking…

“Right, but what exactly is sous vide?” A brief pause, maybe a quarter of a beat, and then he replied…

“They use this device (his hands gesture to show a large pot or something) that creates a lot of pressure and cooks the salmon and carmelizes the outside while leaving the inside really soft and moist, so it keeps all the flavor in.”

Right, I thought. Since when you do put salmon in a pressure cooker? I’ve watched enough Iron Chef America to know that salmon in a pressure cooker would pretty quickly turn into something inedible. Thankfully, our waitress came by a minute later and started amorously regaling us with the preparation.

“Sous vide,” she extolled, “is French for ‘in a vacuum,’ and the flavors are the most amazing that you’ll ever taste. We put the salmon in a plastic bag, vacuum-seal it, and poach it to lock in the flavor.”

There you have it. Sous vide is a haute-cotoure way of saying, “We went to Bed Bath & Beyond and got one of those $14.99 as-seen-on-TV vacuum-sealing things and stuck it back in the kitchen.” The salmon was quite tasty, by the way. Carmelized on the outside? No, not at all. There was, however, a crisped piece of salmon skin served on the plate.

So, by now you’ve probably heard that approximately 65 students were killed in Baghdad by a suicide bomber at al-Mustansiriya University. My Serbian professor stopped class before a test to comment on this. He said something along these lines: we take going to school for granted. We take our health and safety on campus as a fact, and don’t think that what happened to these students could happen to us. Imagine going to college worrying the whole time “Am I going to be attacked by a suicide bomber?” I imagine it would be hard to learn anything.

The Canadian in the classroom piped up. “Did the Americans do it?” Unfortunately you can’t read tone in a blog, but it sounded like he was asking if Americans intentionally targeted the university. At this I took offense. I may not be a fan of the war in Iraq, but I’m pretty sure my countrymen wouldn’t intentionally bomb a university. That’s something that ethnic cleansers and facists do (witness the bombing of the National Library in Sarajevo during the 1990s Balkan wars). In my opinion, yes, Bush has really screwed up in Iraq. But would American troops go so far as to intentionally bomb a university? I don’t think so. That would cause a really negative reaction in the eyes of the public.

I looked at him and said, “C’mon. It wasn’t Americans. It was suicide bombers.”

And then he says: “Well, I know they’ve blown up Canadians before.”

At this point, my professor stopped the conversation so we could take our test.

The Canadian and I have been having an interesting Facebook discussion about what happened at the university. He says I misunderstood him — that he was asking whether or not the Americans may have missed their target. The end of his post read like this: “Even a smudge of nationalism is never a good for any country, so don’t take my questioning the wrong way. I ask because I care about what our country is doing overseas. You just came from a country that obliterated itself and I never want to see that happen to the USA.”

I’m not nationalistic. I’m not patriotic. I don’t wave the flag on the 4th of July. There is one, and only one “American” thing that I hold sacred, and that is the First Amendment. My response wasn’t knee-jerk nationalism. I know it’s possible for American troops to deliberately attack a university and its students. It’s happened before, at Kent State. But to me, attacking a university is like attacking the First Amendment. To me, it’s the same thing as revoking freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion. If Americans ever deliberately attacked a university and its students in Iraq, I would lose all faith in my country. And I’d be rootless. I like to think that Americans still stand for freedom of intellectual thought. It’s basically the only thing I’m proud of if I’m ever proud of being an American.

I feel like I’m down to my last bit of faith in my country. I’m hanging on to the notions of freedom of speech and freedom of intellectual thought. A deliberate, calculated attack on that — on foreign soil — would probably shatter my tenuous faith. And the worst thing about that? It would leave me hopeless. That is an outcome I’m not willing to face.

If you’re a journalism dork like me, or if you’ve spent any time talking with me in the last nine months, you’ve probably heard at least a little ranting about the undisclosed directions in which Medill is headed. Finally, we have some progress. Sort of. I’m going to go chronologically with this, so skip ahead if you so desire. Some of the following is directly copied from Dean John Lavine’s blog. However, his blog is only accessible to current Medill students and recent graduates with an NU login. So if yours expired or you’re curious, that leaves you a bit SOL. Thus the reprinting below. This issue is important enough (especially for prospective students) that it is not fair to leave it behind a password-protected wall. For background, it’s worth taking a look at the profile that Columbia Journalism Review did last summer about Mr. Lavine.

If you want to jump ahead, skip to my email, or Mr. Lavine’s response, or my reaction.

May 2006. I was a young whippersnapper in Medill’s DC bureau and John Lavine’s “Medill 2020″ curriculum overhaul had started only a few months earlier. Not surprisingly, there hadn’t been many visible changes, with the notable exception of our two newsroom profs/editors heading back to Evanston every Wednesday for seminars, and returning with compact MiniDV camcorders and pocket digital cameras that circulated around the newsroom. We were all in the dark about what changes would be coming. The school launched a new Flash-driven homepage for Medill, but did not update any other information pages. By the time I left D.C. in August, we still didn’t have any specific answers to our questions. As I learned today reading Mr. Lavine’s blog, that’s because the new curriculum hasn’t been drafted yet. Keep reading.

On December 5, I wrote the following email to John Lavine:

Dear Mr. Lavine,
As an MSJ student about to head out into the real world, I have a number of nagging concerns about the direction Medill is heading, and which no one has been able to answer for me. Chief among them, it seems there is a great deal of secrecy surrounding your planned transition. Because of this, nearly everything I’ve heard has been third-hand and quite possibly exaggerated or misconstrued. My attempts and the attempts of my peers to find out specifically how classes and graduation requirements will change have been met with both with sweeping replies of “transforming Medill” and “connecting with audiences,” and with admissions that no one actually knows yet. Why not clue in the students and alumni as to how things are going to change?

Because of the sheer lack of information about what Medill will specifically look like in two or three years, I’m sorry to say that I can’t recommend Medill to any of my friends who are considering applying to journalism schools. Despite the introduction of a new Medill homepage over the summer, it appears to me that the rest of the site behind it looks nearly exactly as it did almost two years ago, when I applied to graduate schools. Your blog, while an intriguing idea and one that I will continue to follow, also has yet to shed any light on the details of the new Medill. How is anyone supposed to find out what Medill’s graduate program actually is?

There are several alarming rumors that I have heard in the past months. I would appreciate it tremendously if you would confirm, deny, explain, and/or contextualize all of these.
*The Global Journalism program may come to an end because it is not profitable for Medill and does not relate to connecting with audiences.
*Medill’s D.C. newsroom may be shut down because it is too far afield from Medill’s new mission.
*Professors fear for their own job security since they do not know what they will be teaching until weeks before a new quarter starts, and consequently are doubtful of their own abilities to teach new techniques and technologies that they themselves do not understand.
*The “beat reporting” portion of the Methods quarter has been gutted; what’s more, incoming students are now expected to buy $10,000 of video and computer equipment that Medill will not provide.

I have no doubt that since I am in Egypt and far from where decisions are made in Evanston, that some or all of this is incorrect. But with no other channels of communication besides snippets of conversations that students pass from one to another, I am left with little else to keep me connected with my school.

Thank you for your time and your explanations.
Sincerely,
Peter Sachs MSJ ‘06

Finally, on January 16 (the date of his post is not immediately apparent, either), Mr. Lavine replied. Under the big-font heading of “Some Wrong-Headed Rumors About Medill,” here is what he said. Note particularly the parts of my email that the referred to, and what he left out.

Peter Sachs, MSJ ‘06, was in Egypt last quarter. If you look in the comments under his name, you will see that he had:

“… a number of nagging concerns about the direction Medill is heading, and which no one has been able to answer for me. Chief among them, it seems there is a great deal of secrecy surrounding your planned transition. Because of this, nearly everything I’ve heard has been third-hand and quite possibly exaggerated or misconstrued. My attempts and the attempts of my peers to find out specifically how classes and graduation requirements will change have been met with both sweeping replies of “transforming Medill” and “connecting with audiences,” and with admissions that no one actually knows yet. Why not clue in the students and alumni as to how things are going to change?”

Peter then raises a number of other points. Let me tell you what I know about each of them in turn:

Where does the change in Medill’s curriculum stand?

Twelve teams spent the fall working on all aspects of Medill 2020. Their reports are in, and they are extensive. It will take some work to digest them. This quarter we will do that, and if we don’t hit any unexpected bumps before the end of the quarter we would have a draft curriculum which I will bring to all students for your input.

How is Medill different and where are we going?

I’m sorry that Peter didn’t read it, but last year and in emails to every student I sent out Medill 2020 FAQ. It did not have the specifics of the new curriculum, since it hadn’t been developed, but it sure detailed where we are headed, why you will be best served by these changes, and what they look like.

Not only that but visitors to the school from famous New York Times journalist Charlie LeDuff to world class marketer Scott Bergren told students that what we were doing is the future and that they were excited by it.

Finally, let me put the rest a set of totally wrong rumors:

Medill’s Global journalism program is not ending. (Actually, I leave next week to work on expanding it.)

Medill’s D.C. newsroom is not shutting down. The folks in D.C. are making exciting headway with Medill 2020 - or, as they call it, DC 2020.

Students do not have to buy $10,000 worth of video and computer equipment. Yes, students will use a computer and specific software and a video camera and digital video recorder. If students purchase them, the cost is nowhere near $10,000, however. What’s more, if you have a computer that will run the required software, then there will be no computer expense at all. Why do you have to have these tools or access to them? Because it would be unethical to send you out into the world without the ability to work all of the traditional and new media platforms. Further, if someone can’t afford these things, there will be machines scattered in the NU computer labs with the software students need, and we will make arrangement about the other devices.

Faculty (and staff) are not losing their jobs. We have grown the number of people we employ. (This fall Professor Geraldine Henderson joined IMC, and we are searching for a person to hold the Knight Multi Media Professor’s chair for next fall.) As important, we have open faculty lines that we will fill as soon as we know what we need to make the new curriculum go.

Like I said, I think it’s better for everyone to have this discussion on a publicly accessible site. With that said, Mr. Lavine’s blog now allows commenting, so if your NU login still works, by all means carry on there.

First, a thank-you to Mr. Lavine for at least addressing my four bullet points, about Global, D.C., Methods and professor retention. These are all rumors that I had heard swirling for months before I wrote to him, so it was more than past due for him to put those to rest. I will also say that not all of these rumors came from students. I contend that these are all significant questions. So significant, in fact, that it should not have been left to a recent grad to inquire about them. Thanks to Medill, I consider myself a capable young journalist, able to find answers to my questions. The fact that I couldn’t on my own speaks volumes about the opacity of this transition. Why not send a weekly or a monthly e-newsletter to anyone who wants it? The blog is a nice enough idea, but if you check it regularly, you’ll notice that updates are infrequent and don’t always directly address the progress of the transition.

I was intrigued that Mr. Lavine was silent on my concerns about being able to recommend Medill to future students and on the lack of information available on the Medill Web site. Perhaps that is because, as we’ve all learned, the draft curriculum is still being written. Fine, but if that’s the case, why are changes being made to classes already? And why doesn’t the Web site reflect any of those changes?

Finally, I’m not sure how I feel about Mr. Lavine’s tone in his response, particularly his “sympathies” that I failed to read all his FAQ emails last year. From what I remember of them, I found them unspecific and filled with the ambiguous rhetoric that I referenced in my email to him. Thus my email to him asking for specifics.

In short, I for one am glad to have at least some information about the transition. However, I am still unable to recommend Medill to future students. I’m sure Mr. Lavine has an outline of his plans somewhere…why not share that with us, even if it is subject to revision?

Comments, of course, are welcome. You can even be anonymous if you want to.

This is my second day at the Macworld SF Expo. It only runs for four days. And I’m the only one here without some extremely geeky piece of computer apparel. My favorite was a guy getting off the train in a black leather jacket…with the old blue OS X logo embroidered on the back. So here I sit at the Microshaft Blogger Pavilion making a post about how amazing the iPhone is all so I can check my email and get a free soda. The next time I come here I need to have money, so that I can buy things like discounted external hard drives and iPod accessories.

I’ve finally launched and mostly worked all the bugs out of my new personal Web site over here. For one, you can actually find information. And once Google indexes it again, you’ll be able to search all my articles. Oh, and if you’re into stalking me, that’s now waaaay easier than it was before. Just do it with Firefox, since some things look a little off-kilter in Internet Explorer.

Trouble with a capital F.

That was the dire warning facing us, which we neglected to read, two nights ago as we stood around with fireworks in one hand and lighter in the other. Don’t blame us for setting off fireworks on New Year’s, nor for what happened next. Maybe it was that these things were two years old, and they had just cellared a bit longer than they should have. Maybe it was the inversion layer, evident by the smoke that was already obstructing the streetlight from our previous fireworks.

When I got “into” fireworks, I was disappointed by California’s restrictive laws. Yeah, people blew off their faces, hands and other things every year. But I was smarter than all of them. Therefore, logically, I should have access to the roman candles and mortars that anyone can buy in so many other states. But no, here we’re relegated to things that stay on the ground and shoot sparks six feet in the air. Fun, but not nearly as much fun as lining up six mortars in a row and lighting them. I can only imagine about the latter. But then I got a liberal arts education and came to peace with the fireworks we had. They would do the trick just fine. Mainly we were after something loud and bright.

Cue the Ground Bloom, Ground Gyro or whatever you want to call it. It’s a short cylinder that when lit spins around and changes colors from green to red to orange on the pavement. The keyword here is “on.” It makes noise and shoots some sparks, but pretty much stays in one place.

Not on this New Year’s, and especially not at midnight. The characteristic scorch marks from our previous ground blooms marked the ignition point. This one ignited, spun around green, switched to pink, started bouncing up a few inches, switched to orange, and then rather gracefully lifted up, careened over Ben’s car, gained altitude a bit over the front yard, and hurled its orange, sparking, whirring mass over our roof into the backyard.

We never saw it again. With Charles Shaw Shiraz coursing through our veins, we ran to the back yard, doubled back to grab a flashlight, and looked. Nothing smoldering. Nothing blazing. We checked the roof, too, but did not see a thing. And no, we weren’t collectively hallucinating this, either. The next day, my neighbor across the street, completely unprompted, asked why we were throwing fireworks over the roof.

The moral of the story? Don’t judge a firework by the warning on the side.