We are NOT all Charlie. I was on the USC campus today to give a talk to some visiting Chinese (!) media execs in the Public Policy School and the Journalism school where I teach was a ghost ship. We are still on break till next Monday so classes are not in session. But having lived in South America and in Europe, I could not ignore the deafening silence that surrounded me today. This has nothing to do with my school, its students, or its faculty. This is a broader American cultural malaise of disengagement that you would find anywhere today on ANY American campus, or work place. I certainly did not arrive on campus expecting to find anything other than what I did and I cannot claim to have tried to organize anything myself. But in a different place, certainly in a different time, and even today, a community committed to journalism would have somehow mobilized on its campus to make a showing and a statement. I would expect this not only in Paris, but also in Rome, Madrid, Athens or Santiago. Not in America, This is a place where, at least in my school, faculty has no union and where they do they fight only for salary increases mot on global political issues. We journalists have professional organizations that know how to organize banquets and award dinners but have never taken to the streets and never elevated a protest beyond a polite open letter., We have students that have no real organizations that speak for them nor engage them in matters bigger than themselves not even on very personal issues like debt they are saddled with. The massacre of 12 French journalists and the wounding of a dozen other at the hands of religious terrorists is an unspeakable horror. But not one that can compete very well for attention on such a beautiful, warm Southern California afternoon on a delightfully manicured campus of higher learning.
Posted on: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 06:27:06 +0000
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