Volunteering for Trouble

This time next week, I'll be back in the UP newsroom. Or I'll be in jail.

My last day at FAU coincided with our regular Friday staff meeting, which was packed with 60 alumni, students from all three media outlets, SG leaders, the student media director who fired me, and her boss, the Student Affairs associate dean.

They heard me announce the following...

The editor in chief has asked me to keep advising the paper. So I've agreed to volunteer as your adviser for as long as you'll have me. I'll continue to help you publish the cutting-edge journalism that has won this paper awards and its staff jobs. I just won't get paid for it.

The media director and the dean did not appear as pleased as the rest of the room. They were the only ones not applauding. (Even the SG leaders clapped, which sort of freaked me out.)

I told the staff that if Student Affairs is serious about improving the newspaper – as it has proclaimed all week – then my free help will be welcomed. Especially since there's no adviser at all right now, and there's no timetable for hiring one.

However, if Student Affairs is cloaking this "re-organization" as a back-door scheme to control a newspaper it has often tried – and failed – to rein in, my offer won't be embraced.

Alas, it turned out to be the second one.

The media director and dean both said they wouldn't permit me to volunteer until "we sit down and we talk about it." I suggested now was a good time. They said they wouldn't do so publicly.

The dean said guest speakers are really events, and so they must be approved 10 days in advance via an "event registration form" – which I've never filled out in 12 years of inviting local and national journalists to speak in our newsroom.

One alum, now a high-school journalism teacher, asked, "So if Koretzky shows up next week, are you going to arrest him for trespassing?"

The dean said nothing and shrugged his shoulders. It was a weird moment.

Another alum asked the same question, and the dean replied tersely, "I don't deal in hypotheticals."

Well, it's not hypothetical. Next Friday, I return to the newsroom to host our weekly staff meeting. Hell, there are worse things in the world than getting busted for teaching journalism.