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Photo by Dan Doherty

Brown’s unique style elevated
J-School in the eyes of many
By Jeff Hull, with reporting by Lucas Hamilton, Justin Woodburn, Eddy Haver and Dan Doherty

When I taught in the old journalism building, I was always rushing onto campus five minutes late to class, and I had to pass the office of the dean who had just hired me—Jerry Brown—to get there. It's perhaps ungracious, but I'll admit I was sometimes relieved to see Brown's office door closed.

It wasn't that I didn't enjoy the advice Brown so freely dispensed—be the subject parenting ("You should spank a boy child every day. You may not know what he did wrong, but he will"), relationships ("When a man loves a woman enough, sometimes he’ll let her henpeck him a little") or personalities, ("If I ordered a trainload of sonsabitches and when the train arrived only he stepped off, I wouldn’t complain of short measure"). But I was late and I knew that a careless response to Brown's, "How are you doing?" could trigger rampant Yeats quoting, a biological deconstruction of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, or remembrances of SEC football players past.

Don't get me wrong—I cherished those little chats. But I liked to have them after class.

Brown mentored me through the shortcomings neophyte professors are prone to display. But mostly, when I went to Brown for advice about academic affairs, he talked to me about life. That's what Brown was best at—living life and then reliving the observations he'd made with a vitality that captured your attention, and resonance that made you think about what he'd said for days to come.

"When you're the youngest of 13 kids you have to develop a way to be heard, and Jerry developed a sense of humor," said photo professor Keith Graham. "His greatest gift as a teacher is to take that humor and use it to turn a lesson into more of a life lesson."

Broadcast professor Ray Ekness said Brown "tends to say strange country things to get his point across." When Brown first arrived as dean, faculty members spent a good deal of time trying to develop the ultimate outrageous "Jerry Brownism." Ekness said adjunct professor Gus Chambers took the cake with, "you can't squeeze oil from a porcupine."

Denise Dowling, also an R-TV professor, said her first freshman orientation with Brown proved so puzzling she wasn't sure what he'd said. He told the students, "Put the hay down where the cows can get it," and, "if you feel like a ball in the high weeds, be sure and come see us."

Print professor Carol Van Valkenburg recalls a recent student delivering a graduation speech sprinkled with pithy aphorisms in an obvious tribute to Brown—evidence, Van Valkenburg said, of Brown's impact on his students.

Van Valkenburg also remembers being entertained by Brown's volubility. Van Valkenburg traveled to New York City with Brown to meet potential donors and remembers heading to Times Square after dinner. They passed a man on the sidewalk wielding a sign that read "Tell me off for a dollar." Brown stopped and, by the time he was done, felt like the man deserved a couple extra bucks.

Print professor Dennis Swibold remembers an outrageous evening of karaoke, featuring Brown on lead vocals singing "My Wild Colonial Boy."

Swibold's print colleague Nadia White will miss Brown's simpatico about what could be a dry topic: brucellosis. "Jerry Brown sits down and engages in long, hilarious conversations about brucellosis and reminds me that the conversations are not boring but in fact crop up in the annals of Southern literature."

But Brown was never merely entertaining. The man always had something to say
.
Print professor John Saul remembers listening to Brown entreat incoming freshmen to "become irreverent thorns in the side of authority, comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable and go out into the world as journalists to make their mark."

"Screw teaching," Saul remembered thinking, "I want to enroll."

Print professor Clem Work will remember Brown as, among other things, a good man to have on your side. "You couldn't wish for anybody better to back you," Work said. "If you needed Jerry's help, you'd get it."

Work said Brown's encouragement and interest helped him with his book, Darkest Before Dawn, and later with the Montana Sedition Project.

Work said Brown was the "staff raconteur, psychologist and fullback. He had a lot of roles that will be missed."

Swibold also noted Brown's dedication, noting that it extended to students as well. Swibold recalled Brown's testifying on the behalf of a student when police demanded she turn over video she had taken of a riot. Brown also provided a firewall when officials thought student journalists had probed too deeply into the university's business affairs.

And Brown drove the initiative to build Don Anderson Hall. "If you had asked people in the fall of 1999 when [the new building] was being proposed to wager on would this actually happen, most of them wouldn't have thought it was going to," Graham said. "Then the donations stared coming in and it was $1 million, then $2 million, and people started to believe.

"People knew Jerry. He was the face of the journalism department, and without him we wouldn’t have had the building. He was determined that this was going to come to be."

And it did.

For a man able to orchestrate the realization of such a grand vision, Brown was notoriously disorganized about smaller matters. Van Valkenburg remembers staffers sweeping through his office, tossing out cups of chewed cigar butts and organizing Brown's mountains of strewn papers.

"I think that's why he had to quit teaching," Van Valkenburg said. "He couldn't find his notes anymore."

When Brown goes, he'll take with him one of the J-School's most gracious hosts, his wife Libby. "She got him up and going in the morning," Swibold said.

And he'll take a vivid and vital presence from the building he was responsible for erecting. Dowling may have spoken for all of the faculty when, forecasting Brown's absence, she said, "I’ll feel like a ball in high weeds without him."

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