IS FREE PRESS TRAMPLED IN OPRAH's CLASS?

By: Allan Wolper E&P's Ethics Corner Visits Northwestern





They push through a turnstile, flash their ID cards at the four-person security force, all with ear pieces, and slip into the classroom. The plainclothes guards remain outside to keep the unregistered away. It is 6 p.m. Tuesday at the James L. Allen Center of the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.



Oprah Winfrey, perhaps the most famous face in America, is ready to start her three-hour class in "Dynamics in Leadership," which she teaches with her life partner Stedman Graham. The 110 students in the class are among the best and brightest in corporate America, middle to upper 20-somethings who know how to keep a secret. And they have pledged to do just that. The guest speakers are the rocket scientists of media, money, and politics.



In alphabetical order, they included Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com; Warren Buffett; Katharine Graham of The Washington Post; Robert Iger, president of the Walt Disney Co.; Coretta Scott King; Henry Kissinger; and Barry Schuler, president of America Online Interactive Services.



The students in the circular classroom are regaled with advice and anecdotes a panting public would kill to read all about. It won't happen. Students suspected of leaking an anecdote can be hauled before the student-run Honor Court.



If found guilty, the student would be kicked out of class and perhaps thrown out of school, according to Brian Poger, president of the Kellogg Graduate Management Association. Call it Oprah Omerta.



This is Winfrey's second year at Northwestern. There is no record of anyone breaking the code. And there won't be. The Honor Court is a private affair.



Graham, chairman of the executive committee of the Washington Post Co., which specializes in covering, and uncovering, political intrigue, said she was unaware her talk could get a student expelled. "It does seem a little harsh," she said in a telephone interview. "Something like a freedom-of-the-press thing. On the other hand, Oprah Winfrey is one of the best-known people in the world. There certainly should be some controls."



Richard Honack, the Kellogg man in charge of public relations, confirmed all of the above. Still, one has to ask: has any student been caught slipping notes to a reporter?



"Kellogg students don't do that," he said quietly. "No one is forbidden to talk to the media, but they can't divulge any details. It is not uncommon at business schools. I equate what is happening in that classroom to what goes on at a meeting of an editorial board." He noted with pride that none of the 200 or so stories written about the class have said anything more revealing than how wonderful things are in Oprah's class and how hard she works marking papers. Scoopless in America.



The budding journalists at Northwestern's undergraduate newspaper have tried repeatedly to penetrate the Northwestern-Oprah Iron Curtain. They are appalled that the Kellogg graduate students are kept free-speech prisoners. "I don't think that any university should be able to control what a student can say," said Ericka Mellon, the campus editor of The Daily Northwestern.



Mellon recently sent one of her journalists, Ryan Rotner, to the Allen Center to persuade one of the Oprah 110 to open up. He never got past the security detail. Building sources say Rotner was rebuffed, in part, because he showed up at the building in sandals, sans jacket and tie.



"The security guys acted like the Secret Service," said Rotner, a sophomore whose First Amendment classes hardly prepared him for the real world of Northwestern. "They wouldn't even let me stay in the lobby. Most lecture halls, you can just walk in."



Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, a Washington-area nonprofit organization that protects student speech and press rights, handles thousands of First Amendment cases. Stumping him wasn't easy. Until now.



"I've never heard of anything like that before," he said. "It would be hard to imagine that if a student chose to talk they would punish them."



Then he realizes he's talking about Northwestern, the most Ivy of Midwestern universities. Where undergraduate journalism students uncovered evidence that freed Death Row inmates whose constitutional rights were crushed by a police code of silence.



"I can't imagine classes like that at a place like Northwestern," Goodman said. "That would affect the rights of students in that particular class, and inevitably in the whole student press."



Audrey Pass, senior publicist for Harpo Productions Inc., Oprah's TV company, said at first the class was being kept off the record because the students wanted to discuss their personal problems in relative privacy. When it became apparent several days later that the students could land in Honor Court hell for talking about the guest speakers, she returned with a firm statement: "We have no further comment regarding this story." Another lesson in talk-show democracy.







Allan Wolper's "Ethics Corner" column appears monthly in E&P. He can be reached at alfyjournal@msn.com.







Copyright 2000, Editor & Publisher.