When I was 20-years-old I decided I wanted to be a journalist. I had been exploring majors at UMass-Amherst and the more I thought about it, the more I liked the combination of writing and booze and adrenalin that a career in newspapers would provide (or so I hoped).

At that time you had to apply for acceptance into UMass’s journalism department. I had been doing what I thought was the right thing: working for the school newspaper and taking as many classes in the department that were open to non-major as possible. I even took one — Hollywood’s Perceptions of Journalists – with the department chairman, Howard Ziff.

Ziff — as we referred to him – died Tuesday. He was 81 (which is about how old I thought he was back when he was telling war stories about the great Chicago newsrooms from the 1950’s and 1960’s). At UMass in the early and mid-1990′s he was a gruff Santa Claus-looking character. He occasionally had food stuck in the fuzz of his sweater, and he occassionally wore his sweaters way past sweater season, but you were right to be intimidated by him.

And you were right to hang on his every word. He was the definitive old-school reporter who believed in checking and rechecking facts and producing clean, crisp copy where the writing didn’t get in the way of the story.

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After the night I had Tuesday in my role as faculty adviser to the Bridgewater State University Comment, it seemed appropriate to revisit the last column I wrote for my own college newspaper at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 1996. The importance of free speech — and its importance both in newspapers and in college campuses — is one of the few views I hold that hasn’t changed much since I was in college:

“Mass censorship”
from the Massachusetts Daily Collegian
May 15, 1996

by Dave Copeland

“Censorship cannot be employed selectively; when anyone’s freedom of speech is denied, everyone else’s is threatened.”

- Alan M. Dershowitz

“And stupid stuff, it makes us shout.”

- line from the song “UMass” by the Pixies.

A few weeks ago I was sitting in on a friend’s radio show and we got to talking about a guy he had met who had one of those crappy jobs you inevitably end up taking at one point or another to make your way through school. His job wasn’t as nasty as shoveling out septic tanks or as tedious as telemarketing, but it wasn’t the type of thing you’d want to do for the rest of your life, either.

One of us made a comment on the air along the lines of “That guy’s job sucks.” We didn’t say the guy sucked, we didn’t say his mother sucked — if anything, we were sympathizing with a guy whose job entailed sitting alone in a barn on the outskirts of campus. But no sooner had we made our comment then the phone line lit up with a complaint from a caller who felt we were being unfair to the guy.

“I think what you said about that guy is pretty disrespectful and you probably shouldn’t be saying it.”

And this is the stupid stuff at UMass that makes people shout. One of the only reasons why I am looking forward to getting away from here for good is to finally be liberated from a consolidation of people like this caller who feel it is their right to tell others what they should be saying and thinking.

Pretty much anything that is considered controversial that manages to find a way not this paper gets there only after the already overworked editors ask the question “Will our office get stormed if we run this?” and “How can we cover our asses on this one?”

Two years ago the Collegian was heavily criticized for running a pro-life advertisement that clearly stated it did not reflect the view of the paper. Last year, people couldn’t believe the paper would run an anti-Semitic letter from a retired professor. Another racist letter from a member of the campus community never made it to the pages of the paper this semester.

A satirical piece I wrote on Amherst “townies” last year was greeted with a slew of letters asking “How could the Collegian run this?” even though it explicitly states at the top of this page that the opinions expressed here are those of the individual writer.

No newspaper should be subjected to demands to suppress information. It’s contrary to their only public purpose. As a society, we have created a cruel and twisted world, and for me, information has been the only defense I’ve had against the bitter truth that reality doesn’t always have a happy ending.

But there remains an abundance of people in these parts who are brimming with dopey optimism and would rather not know that there are indeed racists, bigots and other wretched people thinking bad thoughts not just in this world, but right here in the “happy” valley. It is a lot easier to nix the thoughts and ideas of the wicked and mean than it is to actually deal with them.

Other denizens of the valley run around like the cast members of “The Simpsons,” making a knee-jerk crisis out of every little issue before they’ve even taken the time to get information on it. “If we don’t like it, we’re not gonna think about it! We’re going to storm Mayor Quimby’s office!”

The First Amendment is the only right you have that ensures the protection of all your other rights. To attack that right in any shape or form is to attack your own freedom.

When I leave next week, the greatest advantage I take away from UMass is the ability to express myself and speak freely in a way that is drastically more effective than plastering my politics in the form of lame cliches on the bumper of my car. To me, that is the price of admission I paid to toil away here for eight semesters and five years.

And if there is anybody out there who wants to take that right away from me, I’d have to say that they suck.

Dave Copeland is a Collegian columnist.

One of the first news stories I ever wrote (click to see a larger JPEG image)….

From Old Photos

Dave Nunez, one of my oldest friends from college and one of the most caring people I have ever known, died unexpectedly on Thursday. He was 38 and leaves a wife and two small children, so you can imagine how awful this is for all who knew him. There is a Facebook memorial group where people are posting memories, but for those of you not on there, here’s what I posted:

I have my own head full of memories about David Nunez. He was the first person I met during my freshman year at UMass in September 1991. While I was scared about all the changes in my life, here was this affable, outgoing guy confidently telling me he was going to be the first Latino president of the United States. Over the years he b…ecame a fixture at our apartment in Amherst, orchestrating a takeover of the admissions building from our telephone (before it was shut off), ordering “second dinner” for us or performing loud, karaoke renditions of “Where Is My Mind.”

But it was long after college that I realized what Dave’s greatest qualities as a friend were. What struck me most about him was that his interest in people was always genuine. There was always warmth and love that I couldn’t even fake on a good day, and he was one of those people who made you feel better about yourself when you were around him.

After we both got grown-up lives of our own, the number of times I would see him dwindled to maybe once or twice a year. Like any good friend, you picked up where you left off but this is where Dave showed that he was always listening, paying attention and caring about what you had to say. As we got caught up Dave would remember personal details about my life and things I had told him long ago with clarity that was even better than my own recollection of details about my own life. It was very subtle but also showed just how selfless he was and how invested in his friends that he was, and I miss those talks already.

I woke up this morning to find out that I had lost about 20,000 words I wrote on a book over winter break, as well as another 30,000 words in notes and outlines (some of which I have, thankfully, hard copies of). They’re not on my hard drive or on my backup disk. There’s a chance that they’re on my computer at Bridgewater State.

What follows are some of the 4,700 or so words I did not lose. I’m posting what is part of the epilogue of a memoir covering the last year or two of my life to remind myself that I really liked this project — winter break was the first time in years I had really enjoyed being a writer — and that I want to push forward despite this major setback.

Excerpt from the epilogue of Cut Off At The Salad Bar (draft)

I joined a farm share. It’s something else I never could have done when I was drinking: pay hundreds of dollars up front for a box of vegetables from the farm each week. I wouldn’t have had the money to pay ahead of time and the vegetables would have gone bad before I’d decide to stay in and cook them instead of grabbing a burger at the bar.

The farm is hosting a pancake breakfast on a Saturday morning in January so members can see where their food comes from. It’s two hours west of Boston in a small town called Whately, and Kate and I turn it into a day trip. Whately is close to Amherst, so I promise to drive her through campus and show her my undergraduate homes and haunts.

The breakfast is in a converted tobacco barn. The building is cold, but the food is phenomenal: pancakes made with locally-milled flour, steamed kale, strawberries and sausage like a baby’s forearm and bacon, all drowned in locally-produced maple syrup and chased down with hot apple cider.

Steamed kale with maple syrup. Trust me on this one: if you get the chance, you’ve got to try it.

A woman seated at our table is from Cuba and says she hasn’t tasted bacon like the bacon we are eating since she fled Castro. The whole meal is $10 for all-you-can eat, and the proceeds are going to a charity aimed at helping low-income people get fresh fruits and vegetables.

Music comes from a stereo with a tape deck. A woman – very much a neo-hippie that you’d expect to find in the Pioneer Valley – breast feeds an infant at the table next to ours. There is no pretension in this part of the state — dusty work boots, frayed fleece pullovers and salt-licked cuffs on brand-less blue jeans are the norm. Professors, working-class moms, locals and retirees filter into the drafty room to buy produce and dairy products from the young, upbeat women manning the retail end of the barn. Kate snaps photos of the winter root vegetables I have never heard of. The whole experience is simple and maybe even something I would have scoffed at another time. But it is fun and wholesome and I feel a connection to people I have never seen before and I will probably never see again.

A connection unclouded and uninfluenced by alcohol, a hangover, or feelings of self-doubt.
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In an op-ed on the front of the Metro section of today’s Globe, Brian McGrory uses the much-talked-about Globe article on the University of Massachusetts to suggest Jack Welch should be the next president of the state university system:

“UMass Amherst, as ace Globe reporter Tracy Jan carefully chronicled, is suffering. Buildings are crumbling, the faculty is shrinking, and the budget is sinking. The school’s freshman-retention rate, average SAT scores, and graduation rates all put it decidedly in the second tier of major public universities, and the result is that Massachusetts kids are flocking to public schools in other states.”

Turn the page and get to page three of the section and you find an article saying UMass is ranked 56th in the world, according to a British newspaper. The article doesn’t mention what criteria were used by the Times of London, but it did mention the Globe’s article earlier in the month that “generated a storm of criticism from university officials, students, and alumni.”

Kevin Cullen column on the Globe UMass article I wrote about last week (and which got a ton of letters in response in Sunday’s paper):

“Not everybody can get into Harvard. John McCarthy did, after he got out of high school in Medford. After Harvard, he got his PhD at MIT. Then he started teaching linguistics at UMass. And then, 15 years ago, Harvard came calling. They offered him a tenured professorship. It was a lot more money and a lot more prestige.

“He turned them down.

“’It was a very attractive offer, capped off with, ‘It’s time to return to Harvard,’ but I like it at UMass,’ McCarthy said. ‘I like my colleagues. I like my students. For a lot of them, getting here was not easy. It’s more rewarding to work with a student who was not ‘the best.’ Some of the kids here are really smart but weren’t sufficiently challenged in high school. Some overcame enormous obstacles. But, really, they’re all over the place. You can’t measure these kids by just test scores.’’’

I’m trying to find the news in Tracy Jan’s decimation of my Alma mater in today’s Boston Globe.

*Gasp!* The state’s top students don’t go to the public, four-year University in favor of other — and, frankly, better — schools. This was the same issue when I was heading there in the fall of 1991 and will be the same issue in the fall of 2021, 2031, 2041 and….you get the point, yet, for whatever reason, it’s news right now.

Jan seems to rely on a lot of anecdotal evidence, like the father of a college freshman who had a 4.0 throughout high school that said “Michigan, California, North Carolina, Virginia — they are killer state systems. Massachusetts is just not thought of as in the same class.” The reality is, UMass, by the very virtue that it’s a public, land-grant university, isn’t in the business of competing for those students in the same way state systems in Michigan, California, North Carolina and Virginia compete for those types of students. But facts like that don’t matter when you’re out to commit journalism.

The numbers in the article, complete with pie charts and bar graphs, however, are what troubled me the most; one chart showed that the number of Massachusetts students going to UConn, UNH and the University of Vermont all increased between 1999 and 2009 (2000 and 2009 for UConn) without showing the increase in the number of Massachusetts students that enrolled at UMass (and, with two recessions and an increased overall enrollment, it did go up between 2003 and 2010, as evidenced via a quick Google search that led me to these fact sheets on UMass enrollment). The fact is, enrollment in state schools generally increased in the past decade, as did overall college enrollment as a result of a wide range of factors, including unemployment that sent many people back to school and increased access to financial aid and student loans.

In other words, it makes a certain sense that as enrollment in those out-of state school increased, so did the enrollment of students from Massachusetts at those schools.

Another chart shows where UMass students came from in 2009, without giving a historical comparison to show me if it’s significant that 80.8% of all UMass students came from Massachusetts (students in my intro to journalism and feature writing class, you may not be attending Stanford as Tracy Jan did, but please take note: if you submit an article that uses numbers but doesn’t give comparison numbers to show why they are significant, your paper will be returned to you, ungraded. Turn it in a second time that way and it will be graded with a grade that will not make you happy).

Other charts actually bolster the case for a UMass degree, showing the system holding its own against peer institutions in six-year graduation rates, faculty awards and National Academy members. The only real damning chart, in my opinion, shows that UMass is in the bottom five nationally for decreases in higher education appropriations. But even that is undermined when you see that UMass still does fairly well in the other categories.

Otherwise, it relies on quotes that are, frankly, predictable. I’m pretty certain you can get any chancellor of any state school in the country to say “It can be better and we’re going to make it better” when you ask them about their ability to recruit top-tier high school students, or about any other area where there is always room for improvement. And any high school senior is going to boast about making the right decision in selecting whatever college they chose.

Here’s my anecdotal argument (since that seems to count for something now): when I was at UMass, those of us from in-state said we were “only” going to UMass, while people from out of the state saw it as a decent school and even a bit of a prestige thing. Very few high school valedictorians enrolled in UMass, then or now, but the education now and then is decent and gave me and tens of thousands of people like me a leg up. We’re people who probably could have gotten into better schools but were undecided and a bit lost and needed a place like UMass — a big, smorgasboard of options — to help us find some direction and, in my case, passion for a profession.

I say this despite — or in spite of — the knocks it gets and the somewhat outdated reputation of UMass as a”party school,” because here is, for lack of a better term, an anecdotal fact: pretty much every, non-secular institution where the average age is 19-20 is a party school, including state schools in Michigan, California, North Carolina and Virginia.

The real trend in higher ed, as documented factually in other Globe articles, articles in higher education journals, and in an anecdotal sense in every classroom I have been in over the past three years, is that people are looking to save money by going to more affordable schools — at least for undergrad. There will always be upper middle class kids who will go off to noted private schools and top-notch, four-year state schools, but more and more, middle- and working-class families are looking to save money, and for many, an expanded state system — even if your son or daughter won’t be rubbing shoulders with lots of kids who got 4.0′s as high school students — is a great place to get a decent education at a decent price.

And this is a big part of the reason why I love working with the population I work with down at Bridgewater State. Most of those kids are smart enough to get into the Bentley’s, Babson’s, Emerson’s and Boston University’s of the world, and some may have even had Ivy league potential. Maybe mom and/or dad got laid off in this economic nightmare and this is all they can afford, or maybe they’re going to bang out gen-eds at Bridgewater then transfer. Or maybe they’ll do their full four years at BSU and save the money for a better grad school. For whatever reason, I see lots of students who could have gone somewhere “better” but chose the state higher ed system.

And some of them know they’re that smart.

If you want see a driven kid, find one who could have gone to those top-tier, state-system schools Jan gushes over in her article but, for whatever reason, they ended up at a Bridgewater State or a UMass. There’s a bit of a “fuck you, I can do this and don’t tell me I can’t” attitude that, frankly keeps me as an instructor on my toes. It’s really hard to be dismissive of a student’s shortcomings saying “well, they are just Bridgewater State students” after you’ve been on campus for much more than a semester.

And it’s really fun to be in that kind of classroom, whether you’re on my end or theirs.

When I was in college I shared a two bedroom apartment with three others guys. Our monthly rent worked out to $117.50 each, yet we were perpetually short of money; so short, in fact, that we didn’t have a phone for more than a year (this is 1993-94, long before anyone besides doctors, stock brokers and Hollywood producers had cell phones).

Dinner was often whatever we could afford after returning beer bottles or whatever we could “borrow” from the convenience store where two of my roommates worked. Once in awhile someone would have a windfall and we’d do actual grocery shopping (I remember lobsters after someone hit on a scratch ticket for $50 or $100). And in slightly-less-flush times, I remember the occasional slice from Antonio’s being procured with change from the couch (which we had purchased for $15):

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Attacks, rowdiness rattling many at UMass-Amherst

15 Things Men Say But Don’t Really Mean

AngryJournalist.com

And yes, it’s Oprah and it’s sickly sentimental, but the Last Lecture is worth 10 minutes of your time: