The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Apology to a Princetonian

Posted on | June 19, 2010 | 11 Comments

In punk-smacking young Isia Jasiewicz the other day, I evidently touched the pride of one of Jasiewicz’s fellow Princeton alumni. Ben has expressed his embarassment on his own blog, and in a comment at my post:

It’s pretty clear that the kid meant just to sneer at Beck — problem for her is that she revealed just how little she knew about 20th century intellectual history with her snide little description/dismissal of The Road to Serfdom.
As far as the top schools go, though, Princeton is pretty good on this stuff.
About a quarter of its student body votes Republican (25% for W in 2000, as I recall), and it was where I found out — from my friends, not my profs — that right-wingers didn’t have horns and make sacrifices to Lucifer at night.
And when I made a snide remark about George W Bush in my senior thesis (a year and some before I voted for the man), my advisor made me take it out — it weakened my paper, she said. (And she was right, of course.)
Anyway, Princeton is about as friendly as it gets, for Ivy League conservatives — people actually believe in freedom of expression there, unlike, say, at Brown.
So lay off a little, will you? Robert George has his Madison program there and is bringing alternative views to the ignorant.

Which prompted me to send Ben an e-mail:

Ben:
You’ll excuse my digs at the Princeton girl who flubbed Hayek, and I hope you won’t take it as a *general* putdown of your alma mater. It wasn’t even really a putdown of the girl who wrote that Newsweek item, merely a disciplinary whack upside the head to get her attention. These young kids think they know everything and must occasionally be reminded that they really don’t.
It happens that the finest intern we ever had at The Washington Times, Laura Vanderkam, was a Princetonian. So I am favorably disposed toward the institution. Also, my great-grandfather’s brigadier, J.J. Archer, was a Princeton man. Both were both captured at Gettysburg when the Iron Brigade outflanked them at Willoughby’s Run July 1.
— RSM

Being the southernmost (* see note below) of the Ivies, Princeton has always had its quota of Southerners, going back at least as far as when Virginia’s James Madison was a student during John Witherspoon’s presidency of Princeton. And I note that Isia Jasiewicz also has Southern ties, having grown up in Lexington, Virginia, where her father Krzysztof Jasiewicz is professor of sociology and anthropology at Washington and Lee University.

Miss Jasiewicz’s unfortune early detour into celebrity literary criticism (“Hey, let’s all have a Glenn Beck beatdown!”) need not permanently mar her otherwise promising career. Isia writes well — check out the clever piece on how Gary Cooper saved Warsaw she published at Newsweek last year — but I still hold that the proper job for a beginning journalist is as a regular news reporter.

Kids starting out in the news business need to be shoved onto a beat where they are required to crank out hundreds of words a day of deadline reporting — sink or swim. Wherever your ambitions may ultimately take you, there is no substitute for that kind of experience. I just received this e-mail:

By any chance did you work at the Calhoun (GA) Times in the late ’80s? Your career background would fit, and you look a lot like the Stacy McCain that I worked with there (well, you don’t have that “Flock of Seagulls” hair that he had LOL). Regardless, it looks as if you’ve worked hard and achieved a lot.
Good luck!
Jim G–

Heh. I never thought of it as a “Flock of Seagulls” haircut, although maybe I did sometimes get a little carried away with the styling products on the pompadour. As to hard work, I probably never worked harder in my life than when I was sports editor of the Calhoun Times. 

Pulling insane deadline all-nighters to provide complete coverage of high school basketball tournaments is the kind of experience that came in handy when, for example, I found myself in the coffee shop at the Buffalo airport with mere hours to provide the final wisdom on Doug Hoffman’s NY-23 campaign. “Fourteen hundred words by noon? No problem.”

The ability to crank it out lightning-quick, by the way, is why Laura Vanderkam sticks out in memory as such a splendid intern. She arrived in the newsroom one morning in May or June — was it 1999 or 2000? — and got her first assignment about 11 a.m. About 2 p.m., she came over to the national desk and announced that she’d filed her story. Not expecting much, assistant national editor Joe Curl (who has since become White House correspondent) opened the file. His reaction: “Damn. She can write.”

Usually, you hand an intern an assignment and don’t expect much. You especially don’t expect much very soon. College kids have a way of dawdling over stories and not being sufficiently aggressive in blind-calling sources. But Vanderkam had quickly made her phone calls, done her research and cranked out 14 column inches (about 600 words) in about three hours. We were impressed.

Vanderkam recently published her second book and has a blog. Let other young Princetonians emulate her example.

* — A commenter below points out that Penn, in Philadelphia, is actually about 45 miles farther south than Princeton. I stand corrected.

Category: Education, Neutral Objective Journalism

Comments

11 Responses to “Apology to a Princetonian”

  1. Greg Hlatky
    June 19th, 2010 @ 5:51 pm

    Actually Penn is slightly more to the south than Princeton.

  2. Greg Hlatky
    June 19th, 2010 @ 1:51 pm

    Actually Penn is slightly more to the south than Princeton.

  3. Robert Stacy McCain
    June 19th, 2010 @ 5:58 pm

    Actually Penn is slightly more to the south than Princeton.

    Wow. You’re right — about 45 miles south, to be exact. Learn something new every day.

  4. Robert Stacy McCain
    June 19th, 2010 @ 1:58 pm

    Actually Penn is slightly more to the south than Princeton.

    Wow. You’re right — about 45 miles south, to be exact. Learn something new every day.

  5. Ben (The Tiger)
    June 19th, 2010 @ 6:09 pm

    Actually Penn is slightly more to the south than Princeton.

    In geography, yes, but not in mindset! (For good _and_ for ill.)

  6. Ben (The Tiger)
    June 19th, 2010 @ 2:09 pm

    Actually Penn is slightly more to the south than Princeton.

    In geography, yes, but not in mindset! (For good _and_ for ill.)

  7. Joe
    June 19th, 2010 @ 9:40 pm

    Didn’t Rummy go to Princeton?

  8. Joe
    June 19th, 2010 @ 5:40 pm

    Didn’t Rummy go to Princeton?

  9. Roxeanne de Luca
    June 20th, 2010 @ 7:04 pm

    but I still hold that the proper job for a beginning journalist is as a regular news reporter.

    Ah, but her ambition is to be a lawyer, which is why she’s starting at YLS in a few months.

    Of course, that raises another set of problems: I maintain that the best habit for a baby law student is to read absolutely everything at least twice, and prepare with a thoroughness that puts NASA lunar missions to shame.

  10. Roxeanne de Luca
    June 20th, 2010 @ 3:04 pm

    but I still hold that the proper job for a beginning journalist is as a regular news reporter.

    Ah, but her ambition is to be a lawyer, which is why she’s starting at YLS in a few months.

    Of course, that raises another set of problems: I maintain that the best habit for a baby law student is to read absolutely everything at least twice, and prepare with a thoroughness that puts NASA lunar missions to shame.

  11. dustbury.com » We’ve learned our lesson well
    June 25th, 2010 @ 8:40 pm

    […] Something Stacy McCain said last week: Kids starting out in the news business need to be shoved onto a beat where they are required to crank out hundreds of words a day of deadline reporting — sink or swim. Wherever your ambitions may ultimately take you, there is no substitute for that kind of experience. […]