Entries associated with the tag "David Spett":

Sixteen Medill present and former faculty members have signed and released a letter calling on Dean John Lavine to show his hand. They want a "more complete accounting than the dean has thus far provided" of the unattributed quotes Lavine used in a letter to alumni published in the Medill alumni magazine last year--quotes that it's been suggested the dean concocted. "This matter has become a crisis for the school. The principles of truthfulness and transparency in reporting are at the core of Medill’s professional and academic mission," says the faculty statement. It was delivered to Lavine with a cover letter signed by professors Craig LaMay, Donna Leff, and David Protess, all of whom teach ethics classes and who told Lavine "it would be unconscionable to maintain faculty silence on such a widely covered public issue."

Medill students and alumni have weighed in by the dozens online and overwhelmingly they gig the dean both for using anonymous quotes and for asking the school to take his word for it that they were legit. (He says they came from e-mail he's since deleted.) Lavine sent his faculty a memo that insisted, "They are real quotes, a fact that was demonstrated by my including in my letter to the alumni a link to a student video that showed students making the same kind of points. There was no shortage of material from students for these quotes."

This video showed sophomores being interviewed about their experiences working in storefront newsrooms. They were apparently enthusiastic in roughly the same sort of language used by Lavine's anonymous junior, who said about a marketing class, "I sure felt good about this class. It is one of the best I've taken." But while one excited student might sound like another, video about one class is hardly proof that the anonymous quotes about another are bona fide. Tuesday's letter from the faculty bluntly points that out.

If Lavine feels he doesn't have a friend at Medill, the fact is he had precious few before this scandal erupted. The journalism faculty feel disrespected since he became dean two years ago and ripped up the curriculum. Now they've got a chance to publicly disrespect him back.

UPDATE:  By early Wednesday afternoon, a statement posted online by the "Concerned Students in the Medill School of Journalism" had been signed by 175 persons, according to one of the four authors, Medill senior Emmet Sullivan. The students endorsed the faculty statement and added that they felt students "have been ignored" by Lavine in the matter. The statement concluded: "We believe the dean, the faculty, the alumni, the students and ALL members of the Medill community should come together, come to terms with the issue and use this unfortunate situation as a teachable moment in our journalism education. In our eyes, this has yet to happen." For more, go here.

UPDATE: On Thursday Dean Lavine issued an apology for his "poor judgment" in quoting a student's letter "without naming the student. I should have asked permission to use the student's name with their comment about the IMC 303 class." Is that what happened? David Spett, the Medill senior who broke this story in the Daily Northwestern, says he interviewed all 29 students in that class and they all denied having said the above quote. The school might want to poll those 29 students again, ask them if they said or wrote anything to Lavine about the class, and if they did ask them what. And while the school's at it, it could find out how many, if any, of those students thought it was one of the best classes they'd taken. Perhaps the dean's being dodgy because it was actually a quote he heard secondhand. 

A Medill senior has gently but firmly suggested that his school's controversial dean made up a quote. David Spett, a columnist for the Daily Northwestern (and a Reader intern last summer) took a close look Monday at the "Letter From the Dean" (pdf) by John Lavine in the 2007 spring issue of the school's alumni magazine. Lavine touted an undergraduate class in "Advertising: Building Brand Image" that had created what Lavine described as a "fully integrated marketing program to uniquely impact teen driving." 

Since shifting from Medill's money-making Media Management Center to take over the entire school in 2005, Lavine has alienated a lot of NU faculty (and alums) by acting with little regard for faculty governance to rewrite the curriculum and more closely integrate Medill's two wings -- its journalism and marketing programs. So it's not so surprising that he would tout a marketing course. He wrote that a Medill junior had told him: "I came to Medill because I want to inform people and make things better. Journalism is the best way for me to do that, but I sure felt good about this class. It is one of the best I've taken, and I learned many things in it that apply as much to truth telling in journalism as to this campaign to save teenage drivers." It was a message that couldn't possibly have suited Lavine's purposes any better.

But "the phrasing "struck me as odd," Spett commented in his Daily Northwestern column, and he wondered why Lavine hadn't identified the student. What's more, a Medill instructor told him "sure felt good" sounded like a favorite construction of the dean's. Spett also noted that Lavine had used two other anonymous students as sources (one of them earlier in the same piece). So he did a little digging. There were 29 students in the advertising class (five of them juniors), Spett reported in the Daily Northwestern, and he contacted every one. "All the students denied saying the quote, even when I promised not to print their names."

Spett then recorded an interview with Lavine saying he'd taken the quote from an e-mail from a student whose identity he now couldn't remember.

"We cannot be certain these quotes were fabricated," Spett concluded. "But at the very least, I find reason to be suspicious." 

He's not alone. Faculty sources who prefer not to be named for obvious reasons tell me that some of them suspected the quotes were bogus, but beyond grousing among themselves they did nothing to act on their suspicions. As far as they know, Spett was the first person to confront the dean. "There are people on the faculty who are very nervous," one source said. They weren't ready to challenge Lavine's integrity over something like this -- a dubious quote he could shrug off by allowing that he probably should have named the kid. 

Spett said no one put him up to this. He says since he read Lavine's piece last year "it had been in the  back of my mind that it might be something worth looking into." In January the Daily Northwestern made him a columnist and he went to work. 

Lavine hasn't returned my calls. Neither, for that matter, have several other professors.