UC Berkeley Journalism - Faculty - Author Orville Schell brings powerful ideas to new post as dean of UC-Berkeley's graduate program

"Schell Set to Beef up Journalism School"

The San Francisco Examiner, Sunday, June 16, 1996

Author Orville Schell brings powerful ideas to new post as dean of UC-Berkeley's graduate program

By Joan Smith, Examiner Book Editor

Orville Schell has for more than 30 years been widely admired for his original and resourceful journalism, especially his nine books and in-depth reports for the New Yorker and other publications about China.

One of the most wonderful things about him is the way in which he has always managed a fierce independence. He started raising cattle on his Bolinas ranch in the mid-1970s to supplement his career as a freelance writer. He wrote an expose about the industry called "Modern Meat: Antibiotics, Hormones and the Pharmaceutical Farm," and his natural Niman-Schell beef has become a staple of Bay Area gourmet dining.

He helped found Pacific News Service during the Vietnam War to supplement superficial reporting by the American media with more varied in-depth reports by Asia specialists. He has helped produce a number of excellent documentaries on China and Tibet. He wrote a biography of Jerry Brown in 1978 and a wonderful book about the Bolinas counterculture and its anti-development wars of the early 1970s called "The Town That Fought to Save Itself."

But now, for the first time, Schell has attached himself to an institution. In August he becomes dean of the graduate program in journalism at UC-Berkeley. "It's a wonderful appointment," says the current dean, Tom Goldstein, who is stepping down to take a leave of absence, after which he will continue to teach but will devote more time to writing. "Orville Schell has worked at some of the highest levels of journalism for more than a quarter of a century and he is just full of wisdom and terrific ideas."

Schell says that when he first heard about the job, "not in my farthest imaginings did I think it was for me. But I began to think about it and two things occurred to me. One was that what I see going on in publishing and in television is somewhat alarming. And I saw a curious kind of opportunity within a school like this to water the roots a little with some of the experience and understanding I've acquired by doing this for so many years. The other was that it's pretty tough out there in terms of the kind of writing I esteem, and the university has always been an oasis where thinking can take place that is not so influenced by the marketplace."

Though Schell came to journalism from history and never studied the subject as an academic discipline, he says he believes that the journalism school has perhaps become more necessary than it once was. There is the rapidly changing technology; most of the new jobs in journalism are on-line and even journalists in the conventional media need to understand the Web and the Internet.

But more important, says Schell, "the imperatives of the marketplace have transformed the whole craft. I think journalism is in a state of crisis. Writers and television producers have less and less freedom to do the kinds of stories that interest them and feel more and more pressure to do the kinds of stories the business side imagines will sell. We have all these market surveys to find out what people think they want and the effect is to turn the whole process of writing on its head. You end up with readers and editors telling writers what to write rather than writers presenting things they believe are interesting and significant."

Schell says he came of age as a writer at the New Yorker, before Tina Brown, "where it was the absolute sacred credo that it was always the writer who chose the topic and there was never any real limit placed in advance on the length. There was this idea that the best writing is not dictated from above, but that the writer discovers, and you never know where you're going until you get there or how long it's going to be until you've finished. I just had a wonderful experience at Harper's where I wanted to write a piece of about 14,000 words, which is incredibly long these days, and their attitude was "We like the idea and you don't need to tell us exactly what you're going to do or what the length is, just follow your nose and do it well.' Most magazines give you 4,000 words and tell you exactly how they want you to frame the story before you've even reported it."

It is not clear that a journalism school, even one of the most influential in the country, can temper the tendency among editors and producers to treat journalism as a kind of prefab packaging of ideas and information. But Schell wants to bring working journalists and politicians and other extra-academic experts to the school to work with the students, perhaps to lecture, to teach, to write. "I learned journalism as an apprentice," he says. "And I think that working with an older person is the best model of how teaching is done.

"Nine-tenths of good journalism is writing a piece over and over until you get it right. I would love to teach a course in which each student writes one article and spends the whole semester editing it over and over, which is maybe not something you can always do in the real world but which builds an awareness that good writing is not a question of getting it right the first time, it's a question of sticking with it until you can get it to sing."

The value of an academic oasis, says Schell, is that "students can learn to think through the process of writing well. And the reason this is so important, I think, is that a nation that forgets how to dialogue with itself is a nation in peril. "Journalism is in peril for many reasons and it will not be possible for one or even many schools to change that, but what is possible is to send young journalists out into the world with at least the ability to know what writing with integrity is. And, yes, they might have to churn out the journalistic equivalent of Big Macs from time to time, but at least they won't confuse Big Macs with filet mignon."

Reposted with permission.

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