Medill Dean John Lavine Steps Down

Medill Dean John Lavine is leaving behind some unfinished business.

Medill Dean John Lavine sent an email today to the Medill alumni listserv announcing he's stepping down from his post next August.

He doesn't really offer a reason other than focusing on other initiatives and spending more time with his wife. That's certainly possible, though of course it's curious that he's leaving the program at this point in the transition from pre-Lavine to a realization of his magnum opus, the "Medill 2020" plan (of which I'm admittedly not always a fan).

In fact, Dean Lavine mentions in the letter that "we've accomplished far more than was envisioned in our Medill 2020 plan." I'm not really sure what that means, but I would point out that it's only 2011, so maybe an itemized list of what we've actually accomplished (besides RenameGate) might shed some light on the depth of water we've been treading the last few years. And of course, this amplifies the question of where we'll go from here. A lot depends, I suppose, on who is chosen to succeed him.

We wait with bated breath. The letter is pasted below.

-----

from John Lavine
to MEDILLALUMS@listserv.it.northwestern.edu
date Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 9:05 AM
subject Future Plans -- A Note to the Medill Community


Dear Colleagues and Members of the Medill Community,

Six years ago, President Bienen and Provost Dumas asked if I would lead the implementation of a new strategy for Medill. In the years that followed, we have joined together to deepen the quality of our curricula, provide our students with the best educational opportunities in the country and strengthen and diversify our offerings and resources.

Now, I’m writing to tell you that I have shared with President Schapiro and Provost Linzer my decision to step down as Medill's Dean on August 31, 2012. I do so knowing we have a faculty, staff and curricula no other school can match.

When I became dean, journalism and marketing communications were being roiled by a digital tsunami, and soon thereafter, by one of the worst economic downturns in a century. In the midst of these difficult circumstances, we adopted unprecedented curricular change. Northwestern supported our plan with the addition of more faculty and staff with new skills, knowledge, and experience than at any time in Medill’s history.

It has been quite an odyssey. Together we’ve accomplished far more than was envisioned in our Medill 2020 plan. Along the way, we’ve faced and overcome major challenges, as well as some controversies; when you undertake seismic change, both are inevitable.

What counts is the progress we’ve made, the foundation for the future that we’ve built, and the validation of what we’ve done from external sources -- including leaders of the industries we serve and the unprecedented evaluation last spring from the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications. Our faculty and curricula lead the country. Despite the tough economy, employers here and abroad seek out our graduates, and Northwestern University Qatar, our undergraduate school in Doha, is about to graduate its first class.

You are terrific colleagues. I treasure the opportunity to have worked with you, and I’m excited about completing the big projects we have before us this coming year.

When I step down, I will focus on an initiative that is also close to my heart -- examining how the media can determine if people are truly informed by the content they provide, and seeking out new ways for the news media to remain viable. I’ll have more to share about this work in the future.

I will also spend more time with my wonderful wife, Meryl. As busy as we’ve both been in our careers – and as much as she has been central to all that I’ve done in my professional life – now, more than ever, we cherish having more personal time together.

Warm regards,

John

Human categorization via social media

(click to enlarge)

I'd like to thank Facebook for making it so easy to fit my life into various pre-defined categories: education, music preferences, favorite athletes, things I "like." It's nice to see political views taken so seriously as an option as well. Facebook is, after all, an extension of ourselves, and that freedom of expression is not to be trifled with, no sir. Especially if you're tired of being nice to people who don't give a shit. Sign me up for that one.

And apparently drunken twats don't know the proper usage of the various forms of "your." Go figure.

No room for hat

I hate that my day doesn't feel accomplished unless I've written something. Not just something, but something I like when I read it back.

I hate that I cannot end a sentence without first fixing the beginning. Same with paragraphs. And thoughts.

I wish that I could read through others' eyes. I guess that would require thinking through others' minds, which is why it's impossible. Same reason you can't look at yourself in the mirror and not see, just, yourself.

I hate that I have to be in the mood to write. I need to be in that zone to do anything worthwhile. And I hate to admit it, but I can manufacture that zone. I'm capable of it, at least, when I really need to make it happen. Procrastination is my willful refusal to be productive.

I love writing and reading and thinking and writing about reading and thinking and reading about writing and thinking and thinking about reading and writing. You know?

I hate the font Papyrus. Don't use it. Also Comic Sans, though I admit to heavy usage between the years of 1996 and 2001. We were all young once.

I hate that I can't write something poetic without scrunching my nose at it. Judging it. Rewriting it until it's a little more logical, a little less touchy-feely. Fewer dreamy clouds and smoky waters, more hard lines cloaked in secrecy. But the reader can tell when something isn't genuine. You can count on the reader to see through you.

I love that I can write things in a room by myself and then have the audacity to put it on the Internet, where everyone in the world can see it.

Twilight

Source: redmudnessa.tumblr.com via Brittany on Pinterest

I would like, if you'll allow, to reclaim the word "twilight." While it was once a beautiful vision of dusk in summer, fireflies and green leaves, the sky tinged pink over the lake -- this once lovely word has been stolen by glittery vampires that enjoy teasing preteen girls. You can see why I'm upset.

I went for a run with my roommate tonight. We left at 7:30pm and ran to Lake Shore Drive, and the skyline came around a corner, and we ran in awe of Chicago, watching the lights glitter on Navy Pier, competing with the Hancock and Sears* Towers for attention. On the way back north we were treated to a sunset over the classy Lakeview architecture. The air felt clear, clean, accommodating. This is twilight.

When I was a kid I would visit my grandparents in the Iowa countryside on a weekly basis. They lived, still live, next to a man-made pond where a family of swans lived in the summertime. We'd play croquet, or go swimming in the pool, or wander around the weeds in between the pond and the corn fields. (Like I said: Iowa.) At night we'd eat dinner on the porch. Dinner included a meat, a potato, a corn on the cob with butter, some fruit, and a glass of milk. We'd eat delicious Midwest dinner and watch the sun set over the little pond with the swans. There were fireflies, and they flitted in the half-lit air. That was twilight.

I say we take it back from these teenage vampire books that have something to do with Mormonism or werewolves or not showing the juicy parts of sex scenes or what have you. We take it back from them and give it to dusk in the summer, to air heavy with sweet scents, to surviving on barbequed meat and watermelon, to playing hard and being lazy. Because that sounds much more likely to get you laid.

* I will never call it the Willis Tower. That's bullshit. It's the Sears Tower. Why do I feel so strongly about this?

Blogging NUMB again

Happy Saturday! A quick note to let you know that since football season is almost upon us, I've begun blogging again for the esteemed Northwestern football blog, Lake the Posts. My first post, a Q&A with the band's SpiriTeam about the upcoming season, went up this morning. Check it out! And have a great weekend!

For an aggressively inarticulate generation

Check out this short slam poetry piece by Taylor Mali, given the typographical treatment by graphic artist Ronnie Bruce. This is the best 2:45 you'll spend today.

Mali's poem is about speaking with conviction, about not ending every sentence with an uptick, as a question, thereby making you sound unsure of everything you say. (Ya know?) Bruce takes that performance and gives us the actual words, the hidden question marks, the metadiscourse of "like" and "you know." He portrays words as both shy and bold. He makes them into trees and axes. He fits everything together. The poem was poignant and funny and clever to begin with, but Bruce's execution has made it into art.

I love words so much. I think this demonstrates the power they can have if you're competent and you speak with conviction. And with an increasingly "aggressively inarticulate generation" learning literacy via text message and Facebook chat, it's a nice reminder that though language may change, the power it has when used effectively is enduring.

Whatchu talkin' about, Mark Twain?

"Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination."
- Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger

Gangsta.

It's surprising how timeless certain ideas can be. As a writer, this immortality is both dis- and encouraging: On the one hand, it seems that all the wisdom has been found, wrought, digested, and regurgitated in "Inspirational Quote-a-Day" calendars. But on the other hand, we have these wonderfully knowledgeable guides to teach us things they learned the hard way. And who are we to balk at that? Especially since we can then take those lessons and build on them, make them relevant to ourselves and modern society. After all, Twain couldn't have anticipated what social media would do to happiness quotients, or how the Internet would render sanity an unnecessary prerequisite to amassing thousands of readers (or Twitter followers, but I contend that no one on Twitter is truly sane). (P.S. Follow me on Twitter!)

But Twain was obviously getting at something with this sanity/happiness thing, and the fact that we pluck this one sentence out of a book and put it on t-shirts and coffee mugs speaks to one of two things: either we're rocking the bookworm fashion, or we are able to read between the lines and apply this lesson to our own lives.

Do me a favor and think some more about the Twain quote.

"Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination."

What was your initial reaction? More than likely you considered it, recalling the adage "ignorance is bliss," and then what? Did you dismiss it? After all, it makes madness sound like not such a bad way to spend a life, but you probably don't consider yourself truly insane. Or do you? How do we define insanity in various contexts? How much does this idea apply to something in your own life? Should we all just give up now?

I read an article today titled "30 Lessons Learned by 30." Despite being six years from the dreaded 30 (I hear it's not that bad!), I found myself immediately applying these one-liner lessons to my own life, evaluating how well I perform them on a daily basis, making mental notes to try harder to prioritize relationships, to be grateful and giving and loving, not to judge others. It's easy to roll your eyes at such well-meaning advice, to resist acknowledging that an entire life's lesson fits so easily into ten words. But understanding that lesson requires some background knowledge, some empathy with the situation. It's hard to argue with maxims like "Honesty is the best policy in relationships. The truth will come out eventually" -- but if you don't have any experience with dishonesty in relationships, then this means nothing to you. It is through life experience that we're able to boil down lessons into easy-to-digest tidbits. It's the reason cliches work and refuse to die: at some point, we realize they're all true.

This is also why grandmothers have so many things embroidered on pillows and hand-painted on adorable signs hanging around their house. Aging brings an understanding of and trust in digestible wisdom. And it's why young people, no matter how smart they are, will always be stupid: we simply don't have the years to back up what we claim to know. Experience trumps every other form of knowledge, always. Take it from a (still relatively stupid) young person who would love nothing more than to write a book that establishes a cliche that winds up on a coffee mug. It's the American dream, I tell ya.

I should mention that the opening quote was said by the main character of the unfinished and posthumously published novel The Mysterious Stranger. That character happens to be the nephew of Satan, and he spends the book ruminating on "the damned human race." It's heady stuff. The character goes on to say:

"No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is. Only the mad can be happy, and not many of those. The few that imagine themselves kings or gods are happy, the rest are no happier than the sane. Of course, no man is entirely in his right mind at any time, but I have been referring to the extreme cases. I have taken from this man that trumpery thing which the race regards as a Mind; I have replaced his tin life with a silver-gilt fiction; you see the result - and you criticize! I said I would make him permanently happy, and I have done it. I have made him happy by the only means possible to his race - and you are not satisfied!" He heaved a discouraged sigh, and said, "It seems to me that this race is hard to please."

No kidding, dude.

The Blackberry Suicides

Let me tell you a story. It is one of loss, betrayal, and first-world hardship. This is a story that proves it may, in fact, be better never to have loved than to have loved and lost. This is the chronicle of my pathetic history with the Blackberry.

I bought my first Blackberry in the summer of 2009 as a personal reward for completing college and obtaining a real-person job. It felt appropriate: I was an adult, and people would thus require constant access to me. In turn, I would need constant access to Google maps, Facebook, and the TFLN mobile website. I even bought a gel skin to protect my investment. Life was grand.

The following Thanksgiving, I was helping my grandfather haul a Christmas tree over a porch railing, forgetting about my prize Blackberry encased in its feeble gel skin in my front pocket. I leaned hard, resulting in a broken screen. Goodbye, Blackberry #1.

Blackberry #2 fell victim to a friend's birthday bar night in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a few months later. It was left on a table, whereupon some douchebag picked it up, turned it off, and probably sold it on eBay, instead of replying to my frantic texts and phone calls. People are a-holes.

Blackberry #3 also fell victim to a broken screen, but I was particularly irked because I hadn't done anything to deserve it this time. It was just sitting in my bag, minding its own business, when it got the living shit kicked out of it by another member of my purse community. No one has stepped forward to claim responsibility. It was probably domestic terrorism.

Blackberry #4 was lost in epic fashion while vacationing in Las Vegas this past February. To protect the integrity of those involved, I'll just say that the last time I saw it, my fourth Blackberry was somewhere in Treasure Island. (Trust me, it's not the weirdest thing found there.) Needless to say, Vegas marketers don't fuck around.


At this point, my cell phone insurance provider dropped my coverage. I was officially on my own. But that didn't slow my irreverent momentum, as Blackberries were dropping like acid at a Flaming Lips concert. Blackberry #5 was in my hand during a softball team bar outing this spring. Fifteen minutes later, it was nowhere to be seen. Again, I suspect some douchebag picked it up and made an eBay profit. Seriously, people suck.

Blackberry #6 was obtained from the T-Mobile store in June, but within a couple days it was clear there was a defect that prevented certain necessary actions. I could not, for instance, upload photos to Facebook from my mobile device. Finding this injustice unacceptable, I took it back to the store and traded it for one that worked. This, I submit, was the most innocent and painless of the Blackberry deaths. At the very least, it was definitely not my fault.

But Blackberry #7 only lasted two weeks. It was lost this past Thursday, somewhere between a River North club and the cab ride home. I honest to God have no idea what happened.

The cosmic message is clear: I was not meant to be a smartphone owner. In an act of contrition, I've downgraded to the "Samsung :)" -- a slide phone designed for a 13-year-old girl with an emoticon fetish. If I can keep this flimsy not-smartphone alive for a year, I'm allowed to get another Blackberry. We'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, I urge you, dear Reader, to observe a moment of silence for the seven Blackberries that had to die to teach me this unpleasant lesson. What was meant to be a symbol of my triumphant entry into adulthood has turned into the insolent shitshow of my early twenties. Let their demise not be in vain. Learn from my tale. And don't bother with the gel skin.

Alas, if only I'd gone for real protection. At the very least,
thieves would have been deterred out of pure disgust.

The stuff dreams are made of

My motivation for the next nine months.