Washington Post's Weingarten: What I Learned As a College Paper Editor

Gene Weingarten | The Washington Post

This is excerpted from a speech I gave last week at New York University, my sort-of alma mater, after being given the 2010 College of Arts and Sciences Alumni Achievement Award.

I want to thank you for this great honor. But as a journalist and truth-seeker, I have to raise an uncomfortable point. While the dictionary informs me that "alumnus" may indeed apply to someone who attended but did not graduate from a college, there might be a problem, in my case, even with "attended."

I am not referring to the lack of attention caused by enough drugs to stupefy a rhinoceros -- though that was a factor for me, too. I mean that even though I somehow amassed sufficient credits to almost graduate with the Class of 1972, I did not actually go to classes. In my junior and senior years, I chose mostly courses with professors who did not take careful attendance and who required only a final paper, which I usually dashed off the day before it was due, often with only a nebulous connection to the assigned subject. I was hoping that after grading dozens of earnest Sociology 101 dissertations on peer-group inter-dynamics in a pluralistic society, a professor might find it entertaining to consider an impromptu deconstruction of "Bazooka Joe and His Gang."

Oddly enough, this strategy was often successful, but not always. At the end of one semester, I finally actually went to a class to deliver my term paper on Gestalt Approaches to Criminal Psychology, which as I recall I wrote as a Socratic dialogue between Lee Harvey Oswald and Raskolnikov. All I had to do was find the classroom, sidle in, quietly deposit this preposterous document, and get the heck out. So I walked up to the first person I saw in the hall and asked if he knew where Dr. Smith's class was. He said, "I am Dr. Smith. Who are you?"

I didn't get that F, I earned that F.

I'm not saying I was a bad student; to be a bad student, one has to actually be a student. I spent virtually all of my waking hours as editor of the Heights Daily News, the daily newspaper run by a small staff of grungy, hollow-eyed, sleep-deprived fanatics and misfits. Those of us who weren't in danger of flunking out had already done so and were technically trespassing, living furtively in the newspaper office, hunted like outlaws.

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