Bill Drummond

Faculty – Professor

Alumni

William J. Drummond’s career includes stints at The (Louisville) Courier-Journal, where he covered the civil rights movement, and the Los Angeles Times, where he was a local reporter, then bureau chief in New Delhi and Jerusalem and later a Washington correspondent. Drummond was appointed a White House Fellow in 1976 by President Gerald R. Ford, worked briefly for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and eventually became associate press secretary to President Jimmy Carter. In 1977 he joined NPR and became the founding editor of Morning Edition.

In his journalism career, he interviewed such varied personalities as Dr. Martin Luther King, singer Johnny Mathis and Mother Teresa, who founded the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta. He joined the Berkeley faculty in July, 1983.

During more than 40 years on the Berkeley faculty, Drummond has been a leader and defender of faculty independence and governance. Drummond was selected by his peers on the Berkeley faculty to serve as Chair of the Academic Senate for two consecutive terms, 2006-7 and 2007-8. He is the only person in the history of UC Berkeley to have completed two consecutive terms in that leadership role. He is the first African-American to have ever held the post of Chair of UC Berkeley’s Academic Senate.

In addition to teaching students at UC Berkeley, Drummond twice taught an introductory journalism course pro bono under auspices of the Prison University Project for dozens of inmates at San Quentin Prison in the Summer of 2012 and the Fall 2014 Semester. In the Fall 2023 semester, he taught a course at Mount Tamalpais College that included San Quentin prisoners in the same class as Cal students. The topic was Race, Resistance and Incarceration.

Among the many awards Drummond has received in his career, these are the most prominent: Recipient National Press Club Foundation award, 1980, Chancellor’s Distinguished Lecturer, University California, Berkeley, 1982, Edwin M. Hood award for Excellence in diplomatic correspondence., 1983, award of Excellence for outstanding coverage of Black condition, National Association Black Journalists, 1989; Roy W. Howard Award, Scripps Howard Foundation, 1991; 2014 Barry Bingham Fellowship, the Association of Opinion Journalists; John Gardner Legacy of Leadership Award, White House Fellows Foundation, 2015; Leon A. Henkin Citation for Distinguished Service, UC Berkeley, 2016.

The citation of the John Gardner Award read as follows:

“John W. Gardner challenged all White House Fellows to commit to a lifetime of public service: to return to their communities after their Fellowship year and become agents of change and renewal, and to work to strengthen the White House Fellows Program. Bill Drummond has met John Gardner’s challenge. By any measure, Bill has lived all the values of the White House Fellows program. His life is one of great personal and professional achievement, leadership, and selfless service to community and country.”

His lasting recent contribution to journalism education came through the partnership he established with the San Quentin News beginning in the summer of 2012. His resulting work with the San Quentin News brought national and international attention to California’s mass incarceration crisis.

In 2015 Chancellor Nicholas Dirks gave Drummond a public service award for for his teaching and research at San Quentin. The San Quentin News has been featured prominently in news stories from coast to coast, and around the world. Prof. Drummond’s own teaching efforts were the subject of a page-one story in the Los Angeles Times and the Daily Mail, the most widely read English-language newspaper website in the world. The numerous citations of his San Quentin work have kept the name of the UC Berkeley School of Journalism at the forefront of the national discussion about incarceration policy. The Northern California chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists gave San Quentin News its James Madison Freedom of Information Award, and the citation made specific mention of Drummond’s contribution and that of UC Berkeley students.

In 2021, UC Press published Drummond’s book Prison Truth: The Story of the San Quentin News.

The Association of Opinion Journalists gave him the Barry Bingham Sr. Fellowship in Journalism for his efforts on behalf of bringing underrepresented groups into journalism. In 2022, Drummond received a grant from UC Berkeley’s American Cultures Engaged Scholarship program to employ UC computer science and journalism students to teach incarcerated persons basic digital skills to prepare them for a productive life in today’s workplace.

Beginning in 2021, Drummond worked with Harbor Education of Beijing to teach online classes to hundreds of college and high school students throughout China. The subject: Digital Culture and Gender Equity.

In the summer of 2023, Drummond taught two classes at the Communications University of China in Beijing. One class was Gender Equity and Digital Culture. The other was an introduction to Communications Science.

In early 2022, a documentary project “Separation of East Pakistan–The Untold Story” was released by Karachi-based Evolution Media Productions. The 1-hour and 50-minute documentary drew heavily on Drummond’s reporting from Bengal during the aftermath of the 1971 War for Bangladesh.

www.1971untoldstory.com

Drummond’s research interests lie in incorporating stress-reduction techniques into journalism education. He is a certified acupressure therapist and holds a private pilot’s license with an instrument rating.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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