Columbia Journalism sChool Winter 2010 - Berkeley Graduate ...

for black people back then,” Henry said.
“I loved writing, I loved learning about the
world, and I felt I might have a future in
the profession. Columbia helped give me
focus and direction, but I also learned that
reporting could be a helluva lot of fun.”
After graduation, Henry worked as a
metro, national and foreign correspondent
for The Washington Post and was a staff
writer for Newsweek before joining the
Berkeley faculty. At The Post, Henry said,
“I most loved writing human interest and
enterprise stories. I liked exploring the
ragged edges of Washington, far removed
from the political and ‘official’ scenes.”
Some of his unorthodox assignments
included going undercover as a homeless
person in Baltimore and Washington and
as a migrant worker in North Carolina.
Later he worked on the paper’s investigative
staff, then with the national staff as a
feature correspondent covering places
from West Virginia to Nevada, and finally
he served nearly three years in Africa as
The Post’s bureau chief, based in Kenya.
“Neil is extraordinarily moral and empathetic,”
said Bill Hamilton, Henry’s former
editor and colleague at The Post and now
deputy managing editor at Politico.com.
“There isn’t an ounce of cynicism in him
and that always came through in his writing.
I guess I would call him a student of
the human condition — he brings an
unusual compassion to everything he
writes and, I suspect, to everything he
does at Berkeley.”
After 16 years in daily journalism, Henry
decided that he wanted to return to the
west coast and make time and space to
do a different kind of writing. He became
a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at
Stanford and began teaching at Berkeley’s
journalism school. He married Letitia Lawson,
now a political scientist specializing in
Africa at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate
School in Monterey, had a daughter Zoe,
now 17, and in 2002 published an autobiographical
family history, “Pearl’s Secret: A
Black Man’s Search for His White Family.”
Former student Ryan Lillis, now city hall
reporter for The Sacramento Bee, recalls
how Henry “connected with all his students
on a personal level and how enthusiastic
he was about everything.” When Charla
Bear, now a producer at NPR in Washington,
D.C., arrived at Berkeley, she felt
intimidated and out of place. “I’m part
Native American and part Alaskan native,
and I come from a very low income background,”
Bear said. “Because I was coming
in as a real outsider, I was looking for a
mentor to inspire, coach and teach me.
I really found that in Neil. He took you
from wherever you were to the highest
point you could reach.”
Henry doesn’t get as much time walking
Hazel, his beloved golden retriever, or
relaxing on the golf course as he used to,
said Rob Gunnison, director of school
affairs and a lecturer at Berkeley, who’s
known him for 15 years. “Demand on all
deans is extraordinary,” Gunnison said.
“They’re in a relentless pressure cooker,
fundraising or resolving problems not
able to be resolved at a different level.
It’s tough and wearing. But Neil wins a lot
of points for his openness, frankness and
low-key approach. He’s a half-full kind
of guy. I always know when he’s coming
because I hear the staff laughing down
the hall. People warm to him immediately.”
Henry believes his role as a dean of journalism
is to be a good consensus builder
and ethical leader.
“The critical programmatic challenge I
face as a dean is to communicate a sense
of shared mission, responsibilities, and
goals, and to ensure that we are all rowing
in the same direction,” Henry said. “While
we do our best to embrace change at the
school, I think it’s also critical to sustain
and build the kinds of things our program
has always done exceptionally well, such
as international reporting, magazine writing,
photography, and radio and television
broadcast journalism.”
Correction: In the Alumni Profile of Linda Winslow ’67, which appeared in our Fall 2009
issue, the achievements of another alumnus, Howard Weinberg ’65, were inadvertently
slighted. Robert MacNeil was quoted as saying that in 1975, the first season of what
became the MacNeil/Lehrer Report, “We were on very lean rations with only two
producers and Linda was one of them; she did the very first program, which was on the
New York City fiscal crisis.” In actuality, MacNeil said, Howard Weinberg and Linda
Winslow “alternated as nightly producers on that program, with Howard doing the first
night [the NYC fiscal crisis] and Linda the second.”
From The
alumni BoarD
—
By Alexis Gelber ’80, Chair
For meDia-neWS JunkieS, there are days
when reading Romenesko, I Want
Media, The Wall
Street Journal and
the business section
of The New York
Times feels like a
tour through the
graveyard of
journalism. The news in our world is
undeniably bleak: in the last few
months alone we’ve seen the demise
of many prominent newspapers and
magazines — not to mention the
almost daily body count from layoffs,
buyouts and bureau-closings at the
media organizations that are still
surviving.
And yet when I’m at Columbia, I find
the mood is very different. There’s a
sense of creativity and energy at the
Journalism School, and a forwardlooking
approach to the challenges
facing our profession. Leonard Downie
and Michael Schudson’s thoughtful
report on “The Reconstruction of
American Journalism” outlined a “new
policy model for news,” as Dean Nicholas
Lemann has said — and puts
Columbia at the center of the discussion
about the future of the media. At
the most recent Alumni Board meeting,
Dean Lemann and Academic Dean
Bill Grueskin briefed us on the latest
curriculum changes at the J-School.
And Columbia has assembled a
dynamic group of digital-media
experts who are giving students skills
to create the next forms of journalism.
On the Alumni Board, we’re moving
ahead in that constructive spirit. We
have focused our own efforts around
initiatives spearheaded by our five new
subcommittees. Brief reports from the
Alumni Board meeting on November
18 are as follows:
1. Communications: Formerly known
as the Publications subcommittee,
this group has helped formulate
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