The Nieman Fellowships

LOUIS M. LYONS

IN HIS inaugural as president of Yale last spring, Kingman Brewster urged that every university must do what it can to meet the need for knowledge of the public beyond its borders. “ The university should open its gates more frequently to those outside who would sample experience.”

This happened to coincide with preparations in Cambridge to observe the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Nieman Fellowship program, through which Harvard has opened its gates to men from the world of affairs, journalists, to take the university on their own terms to meet their own felt needs, the better to inform the public on its public affairs.

The Nieman Fellowship program at Harvard, begun in 1938, came from one of those happy accidents that account for so many educational enterprises in America. Mrs. Agnes Wahl Nieman, whom Harvard had never heard of, had heard of Harvard as a place to leave money to.

In 1937 she left half of her estate in the Milwaukee Journal to Harvard, in memory of her husband, Lucius Nieman, the founder of that strong independent paper. She wanted “to raise standards of journalism.” Harvard, like Yale, had made its contributions to journalism. Lippmann and Broun from Harvard and Whitney and Luce from Yale will do for examples. But lest we take too much pride in our ivied glory, let us recall that James B. Reston came out of the state university of Illinois and reached journalism through the publicity office of the Cincinnati Reds: and that Horace Greeley, who brought more yeast to journalism than anyone since, was graduated from a printshop in East Poultney, Vermont, just down the road a piece from where George Jones left for New York, there to save the city from the grip of the Tweed ring, as the indomitable force behind the New York Times’s greatest crusade.

But the journalist today needs education as badly as anyone. He is in the front line of the desperate task to understand the convulsive changes in our ever-expanding universe so that he can convey some meaning to his readers of the kind of world they live in.

It was President James B. Conant’s happy inspiration to take this surprise windfall from Mrs. Nieman and make inventive use of it. He invented the Nieman Fellowships. By hindsight, it was a simple, practical notion. The journalist’s needs for knowledge are universal, as well as unpredictable from day to day. The range of the university encompasses them all.

Conant was to say, long after, that it began as a very dubious experiment. He got practically no encouragement from newspaper managers. Those not naturally skeptical of the value of education as against the practical experience of the police court and the press-club bar were sure that able newsmen would not step out of the fast pace of their competitive calling to go back to college. But, by hindsight, we can see it was bound to work. The idea was simply that the university would open its doors to as many selected newsmen as the annual increment of the Nieman funds would support on stipends; let them come on leave of absence for a year, no degrees, no requirements, to pursue those studies for which they had found a need, to plow the results back into their jobs.

The time and the place were right. The vitality of Harvard proved a magnet. More than three hundred journalists applied for the nine fellowships of the first year. We have since run an average of a dozen fellowships a year.

The time came just as the need for specialization began to penetrate journalism — somewhat late, to be sure. The first group were all either reporters or editorial writers. Now in any group there may be a science writer, a labor reporter, an education specialist, someone studying the Russians, others working on the growing complexity of urban problems, a select squad of Southern newsmen wrestling with their issues of race relations and economic development, one or two exploring the journalist’s new worlds of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. But the basic program of most comprises those studies that make the background of public affairs — government, economics, and history.

A typical application appeals for a chance to fill in the gap in economics that was scamped in college. For the political reporter has discovered that most political issues have economic roots — budgets, taxes, balance of payments, labor contracts, transportation, space, and foreign aid.

Their mature approach to studies they need and the chance of association with scholars keenly aware of the world of reality have proved to be a vital experience for the Nieman Fellows. “The greatest year of my life,” their reports declare, over and over.

The success of Conant’s dubious experiment was launched on the prestige of Harvard and has advanced on the momentum of achievement of the Fellows. It can be measured in the number of their Pulitzer Prizes, of their posts as Washington bureau chiefs and foreign correspondents, in the r success as editors and authors. What was started as an educational opportunity soon became one of the prized distinctions of journalism.

Over the years a number of other programs arose at Harvard, often described as modeled on the Nieman Fellowships — programs for trade unionists, for public-school administrators, business executives, agricultural-extension specialists. David Bailey, secretary to the governing boards at Harvard, once suggested I write something about all this. He would provide the title: “Life As a Preparation for Education.” it is a good title; still good, since it has been so little used. For, actually, the development of such opportunities has been very meager in our universities. Even some of those I have mentioned here have withered away from exhaustion of funds. Little has developed elsewhere.

ADULT education, as we call it, has been a feeble shadow of what it could be in America. Even the great educational foundations have contributed little to it. They have concentrated generously on enlarging the resources of our universities and opening opportunities for research and study by our scholars. But mighty little has been done to open the university gates, or to reach beyond the walls, to meet what President Brewster calls “the rapidly expanding population’s need for rapidly expanding knowledge.”

In this field it can fairly be said, as old President Eliot said in reluctantly bestowing an honorary degree on a statesman he counted of limited vision: “Long vistas of public service still invite you.”

In the field of journalism, this handful of Nieman Fellowships remains, after twenty-five years, absolutely unique. Only a drop in the bucket. Yet their impact has been substantial. There are actually fewer such opportunities for journalists now than a decade or two ago. Columbia University (Graduate School of Journalism has for the past several years obtained special grants to offer fellowships for science writing and, recently, also for international reporting. These two special fields arc thus better served than others. But the Reid Fellowships that used to send a few American newspapermen abroad for travel and study each year ended when the Reid interest in their newspaper ended. Since I made an appeal at Harvard’s June commencement, it has been gratifying to see several new fellowship programs started. This fall the University of Southern California awarded fellowships to five music critics for study in its school of music. The Russell Sage Foundation has provided funds for the University of Wisconsin to appoint four newspapermen to fellowships for study in the social sciences, and Columbia University has added several fellowships in its school of journalism.

The Carnegie Corporation supported several journalists’ fellowships for some years, then returned to their academic last. The great Ford Foundation has given up its Fund for Adult Education. About a decade ago that fund launched a program of grants for journalists — from newspapers, broadcasting, or magazines — that promised to multiply the opportunities in this field. The grantees could pursue their studies at any university. That is, any that would take them in. This was by no means all. University officials tended to look askance at the visiting firemen who proposed to settle in for a term of quite irregular individual operations.

It was with great elation at this expansion of fellowships that I served on the fund’s first selecting committee. Within a few weeks the fund people were on the phone to ask me how to get three men into Harvard. And what about other places? Happily, our dean of special students responded. If they were going to follow the pattern of the Nieman Fellows and operate from my desk, he’d interpret the admission rules flexibly. But this did not happen everywhere. It was incredible to me, and still is, that able people, selected by a great educational foundation for pursuit of special projects, well financed to pay their way, should have difficulty finding first-class universities to let them in.

President Brewster says, “We dare not admit that we must seal the windows against all relevance to the real world.” But this idea has not penetrated all walls.

For three years at Harvard we enjoyed association with a few of these Ford grantees each year. Like the foreign journalists that the Asia Foundation and the Commonwealth Fund and a few other agencies send us on their grants, they enlarged the dimensions of our discussions. But after three years, the Ford Foundation gave up this program when they merged the Fund for Adult Education with another of their enterprises. Little in their experience with these grants encouraged them to go on with them.

Yet in Canada, with its far more limited resources, a smaller model of the Nieman program has been established at the University of Toronto, with five newspaper fellowships supported by the Southam newspapers. After two years, both parties report enthusiastically on it.

The Columbia Broadcasting System a few years ago undertook to copy the Nieman program for broadcasters and set up a parallel program at Columbia. This is open to staffs of CBS and affiliated stations and to persons engaged in educational broadcasting, but not to staffs of the other two networks or other commercial broadcasters. So there is not yet an equal opportunity throughout broadcasting.

I bring in broadcasting because communication is all one job. This greatly simplifies the question of education for the journalist. Whether he reports for print or over the air, in newspaper, magazine, or topical book, or as an aid to public men in presenting public programs, he is gathering and evaluating information, writing, editing on public affairs. The educational need is the same: to understand the issues in the great areas where a knowledge of history, government, economics, supplies the background to give meaning to the reports. A fair test of journalism is the meaning it imparts to its communications. Perhaps the most important lesson for the journalist is to appreciate the relation of one field to another, one problem to another.

The season of dealing with applications for Nieman Fellowships is always one that I find very inspiriting. It winds up with a weekend trip of the selecting committee to interview those who have most interested us. Two or three editors and two or three of us at the university make up the committee. The editors always come out of these trips heartened by the quality of the ablest young newspapermen we meet — by their intelligence, their professional competence, their idealism, and their feeling for the newspaper job.

Here is a passage from the application of a young copy editor from a great metropolitan paper.

I am impressed by the complexity of news and I am aware of how different news may look to those involved in its gathering and editing. To an expert Washington reporter, it is immediate, intricate, and full of nuances. To a copy editor, it is unmodified prose and unanswered questions, To the man who made the assignment or to a news editor, it is something that must be understood in relation to its time and place. Of any job I have filled on this newspaper, the day desk — originating and assigning stories, planning the daily coverage — has been the most rewarding. It is the type of work I hope to enter full time in the future and it is the reason I am seeking a Nieman Fellowship: I want more intellectual equipment.

Here is another application statement that tells of a door journalism opened for a young Negro who was determined to make something of his life.

For the past three years I have been welfare reporter for my newspaper. My principal concern and the thing about which I have learned the most is poverty. My own background gave me a frame of reference for the job, but nothing has informed me better than working with the reality of poverty, day in and day out. . . . We are now in the midst of waging war on the school district to reinstate 400 children to a free lunch program. ... I live in the faith that even if you cannot change people, you can change the way they behave toward each other. To help them change this behavior, they and the rest of the community must see it laid before them in cold print.

I was born and raised in the section of Brooklyn known as the “Box.” Save for Harlem and the Chicago South Side, no area in America crams more people, mainly Negroes, into so little space with so little light and air. Our schools met the mandatory requirements. They had doors, windows, walls, and teachers, or so they were called, I left elementary school without an 8th grade education and went on to high school, where I might have gotten a 12th grade education, had the other eight not been missing.

I was left in my last year of high school with the simple realization that if I ever was to become educated, I would have to do the job myself. The effort has done for me what I could not have asked of any school. I have become a human being. . . .

My goal is simple: to report in every way I can what is wrong with the way people are treated in this country and to bring to light those things which call for change. ... I want no other role in journalism than as a reporter.

ALL areas of communication appreciate the basic training of the newsroom, and all draw on it for staff talent. We have seen this illustrated in the careers of the Nieman Fellows. Most came from newspapers and have remained newspapermen. But others have become correspondents of the great television networks, authors and publishers of books; one, the assistant secretary of state for public affairs, another, special assistant to the Attorney General; others, administrative assistants to senators and governors, or editors and contributors of magazines. Our magazines become increasingly journalistic. In one recent issue oi the New Yorker, the work of three Nieman Fellows appeared, one reporting from Cambodia, one from Cambridge, one on the Supreme Court. One of these series is now a book; another is a book in process.

Jack Fischer of Harper’s once told the Nieman Fellows he was grateful to the newspapers for leaving so much to the magazines. But the big magazines are now competing for the ablest journalists. Television’s competition with the first news bulletins has forced the newspapers to seek a larger dimension for their reports, to develop interpretive stories, to report in more depth.

This calls for more seasoned and more educated reporters. The quality of the best was never so high as it is now. But there are never enough of this quality to go around.

To meet this common need of the communicator, the university holds the key. For the journalist’s need is the need of all for a broad general education; except that his need is daily urgent and his lack impoverishes all his readers.

It takes special funds to undertake special educational enterprises, which, to be sure, are not the core of a university’s responsibility.

But President Brewster says: “To keep the business of learning itself uncorrupted, it may be important to open the gates more frequently to those who would sample experience.

“Precisely because we may wish to continue our traditional business in a traditionally selective way,” he says, “it behooves us to take the lead in adapting our ways to any arrangement which will make our resources publicly available, as long as ii does not dilute, distort or distract us from our mission.”

Let me assure him it need not dilute or distract.

The evidence at Harvard is convincing.

“Your Fellows are the only people who talk back to me,” a professor told me, way back at the beginning.

They have brought a fresh vitality to the classroom, and the response of the Harvard faculty to this has provided stimulation, encouragement, interest, and collaboration that the Fellows had nowhere known and could not otherwise have experienced.

Out of the coaching and criticism of Theodore Morrison in his writing course has come a long shelf of books by Nieman Fellows, including the Pulitzer Prize work of A. B. Guthrie, who has translated Professor Merk’s westward movement into novels and movies for a vast public that will never attend a college. Anthony Lewis applied his Nieman year at the Law School to the great issues before the Supreme Court, to vitalize such problems as civil rights and reapportionment for the readership of the New York Times.

Doors can be opened without great funds or special organization. Rutgers decided a couple of years ago to invite the editors of New Jersey — all within an hour’s drive — to a weekly seminar on urban renewal and a weekly evening discussion led by one or another of the faculty, the equivalent of a Nieman seminar.

Such a project is possible almost anywhere. Multiplied a hundred times, it would strengthen a very strategic group, our newsmen, on whose understanding we readers are terribly dependent to keep up with the score in our public business.