Scenes from the Pollner semester

Text and photos by Nancy Szokan
Pollner Professor, Fall 2004

The seminar
The day after arriving at the University of Montana in August of 2004, I hit what for me was the J-school jackpot: I learned that the national treasurer of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth lived right here in Missoula. I was preparing to teach a seminar on the use and abuse of opinion in journalism – particularly in the presidential campaign – and the Swift Boat Vets were the privately funded “527” group that had just hijacked John Kerry’s war-hero credentials. If the presidential campaign was the “Superbowl of spin,” as I’d told prospective students, the Swift Boat Vets had just intercepted the ball and run it back for a 70-yard touchdown.

Wey Symmes of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth faces questions from Pollner seminar students.

So I put together a reading list from media coverage, assigned students to write up questions and signed up the treasurer – a retired banker named Weymouth Symmes – to be interviewed at a mock editorial board meeting in class.That sequence of reading, interviewing and writing inspired some of the best classroom discussion of the semester.

It was also a good example of the spontaneity that can characterize the Pollner professorship. Because I had to teach only one small, high-level seminar – with the almost-full-time help of my husband, Rick Nichols, a longtime writer and columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer – we had time to shape the course as we went along, incorporating news events and taking advantage of whatever resources became available. Instead of books, we used coverage of real-time events as our texts – from Wey Symmes’ polished spiel to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s televised speech at the Republican convention to the swarm of Internet bloggers who were reporting and making news of their own. The more the class drew on real life, the more the kids responded with curiosity and energy: One of my proudest moments was when the Washington Post’s ombudsman, whom I’d enlisted to talk with the class by speakerphone, told me the discussion left him “encouraged” about the future of journalism.

The Kaimin

Kaimin editor Jessica Wambach at the weekly critique

Teaching an upper-division seminar is half the Pollner professor’s duties; the other half is advising the staff of the Kaimin, the four-day-a-week student newspaper. Again, the most significant learning experiences this year came not from any prepared lessons but from real-life events – such as a family’s anger when the Kaimin reported on their son’s suicide, or reporting on a football player whose misdemeanor conviction didn’t even get him suspended from a single game.

This is a student paper; the advisers are there to advise, not report or write or edit. What that meant was that most of my role involved helping to critique the paper in hindsight at weekly student staff meetings. At first, the situation seemed designed to create resentment: There I’d be every Friday, clutching my annotated Kaimins, preparing to nitpick the hard and under-rewarded work of a bunch of dedicated kids who were also carrying full course-loads and in some cases working part-time jobs. But resentment never seemed to surface. Instead, the kids were attentive and responsive, exhibiting the kind of straightforward good will that I’ve come to associate with UM students, and Missoulians, in general.

The Griz

The Griz at home, with friends

Sports is a big beat on the Kaimin: It was from the editor who put out the “Game Day” edition that I learned that during home football games, Washington Grizzly Stadium itself is the seventh-largest population center in the state.

Twenty-three thousand fans scream “MON-TAN-AAAAH!” in unison with every first down and party at daylong tailgate picnics outside, and the season tends to continue right up until Christmas break, since the Grizzlies usually make the playoffs.

On a sunny November day, with the giant “M” on Mount Sentinel looming over the game, it’s a great scene. Did I mention that every home game begins with skydivers parachuting onto the grizzly bear depicted on the 50-yard line?

The other griz

Too close for comfort

Speaking of grizzlies at 50 yards … that’s how far the ranger told us we were from a young male bear that Rick and I photographed over Labor Day weekend in Glacier National Park. We’d been hiking on a wind-whipped slope near Logan Pass, along the Continental Divide, and after we left, the rangers closed the trail so they could haze the bear into a little more wariness of tourists. Glacier was as spectacular as advertised, and only about four hours from Missoula.

The weekends

Year-round basking at Chico Hot Springs

Throughout the semester, in fact, we took weekend trips in every direction, taking advantage of our first-ever visit to Big Sky Country. One Saturday we biked the Hiawatha Trail – a converted railroad track that winds at a gentle grade through gorgeous mountains on the Idaho border, over trestle bridges and through long, pitch-black railroad tunnels, lit only by our puny bike lights.

For Thanksgiving, we went to the comfortably rustic spa at Chico Hot Springs near Yellowstone, where we hiked, rode horses and soaked in the 104-degree spring-fed pool before eating the sumptuous buffet served in the century-old lodge.

Missoula’s Saturday morning farm market

Speaking of eating … my husband, a food columnist for the past few years, had been wary of leaving the delights of east coast cuisine. But we found cooking at home and eating out to be sources of pleasant surprise. Like the bison burgers at the Bison Café on Route 93, toward Flathead Lake. And the cheerfully bountiful farmers market in downtown Missoula on Saturdays, well into fall semester. And the produce that turned up in my office, courtesy of garden-growing journalism professors. And the appropriately named Good Food Store, an old organic market that has evolved into a sleekly modern emporium. And some restaurants capable of turning out, if not cutting-edge cuisine, genuinely tasty fare.

The lecture

Waiting for my moment on stage

In mid-October I delivered the annual Pollner lecture. I was pleased to see about 200 people show up – and not, as I’d expected, a bunch of students attending because their teachers ordered them to. Rather, the audience seemed to be mostly adults from the university community, attentive and involved. (And they asked good questions afterward.) I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. Rick and I, too, routinely took advantage of the offerings of a university town – a lecture on the Middle East by an Iranian-born professor, a visit by Anthony Lewis to discuss not only the Times v. Sullivan case but legal issues under the Bush administration, poetry readings, a Native American singer, the Day of the Dead parade … not to mention other classes we visited or gave presentations in.

Yes, it’s a busy, crowded life, being the Pollner professor.

But somebody has to do it.

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