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| Mark Goodman joins JMC as Knight Professor of Scholastic Journalism | ||||
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Under the aegis of Kent JMC’s Center for Scholastic Journalism, Goodman is ramping up his advocacy for scholastic journalism and support for the First Amendment rights of student media across the country. Goodman, who joined Kent State in Spring Semester as the 20th Knight Chair in the country, said his role puts him in good stead to support scholastic media across the country “in a big picture.” The position is endowed by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Goodman previously served for 22 years as executive director of the Student Press Law Center, a non-profit organization that educates high school and college journalists about the First Amendment and offers them legal advice. He said his current role not only allows him to support scholastic media nationally through public advocacy, but also through research and teaching at Kent JMC. Goodman said the position also enables him to “develop one-on-one relationships with students.”
Goodman’s role involves informing and getting people outside the realm of scholastic journalism – such as parents and community leaders – to support free student media in their communities across the country. He said scholastic media need to be free and strong because they train students to understand and appreciate the First Amendment. “We really are preparing citizens for life in a great democracy,” he said. Goodman said student journalists’ First Amendment rights need to be protected so that they can in turn protect those rights as adults. “They are people who are going to be expected to defend our fundamental American democratic values. They will not defend those values if they’ve been taught to dismiss them as teenagers,” he said. Goodman said there’s a lot of research that indicates the dismal knowledge of high school students about the First Amendment. “More people can name the five members of the cartoon Simpsons’ family than can name the five freedoms of the First
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Amendment,” he said, adding that “If we believe in our constitution and we believe young Americans should value it, we’ve got a lot of work to do.” Censorship is the other challenge to scholastic media. “I think most people don’t have a clue about how often the high school media are being censored,” Goodman said. He said most censorship cases that were reported to him at the Student Press Law Center involved schools’ efforts to stop students from covering important issues in a meaningful way – things that the schools feared were going to make them look bad. Goodman said heavy censorship in high schools has given rise to “a generation of young people who think the First Amendment is a joke.” Ignorance not a joke He decried the situation and said that high school students should not be dismissed as “just kids.” “Those are kids that in a few years will be voting citizens in this democracy and if they believe that the government should be dictating what we see and read, we’ve lost,” he said. Goodman said Kent State’s endowment of the Knight Chair and its diverse scholastic programs reflect a commitment to young people, and to the U.S. constitution that no other university has demonstrated. He said KSU is the university in the country that people think of first when they think about scholastic journalism. “Few scholastic journalism programs make high school journalism a priority issue and pay attention to it,” he said. “We care about the high school press.” -- Dan Teng’o for The Co-Lab |
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Copyright © School of Journalism and Mass Communication 201Franklin Hall Kent State University Kent OH 44242 330-672-2572 http://www.kent.edu |