Just one of the coolest things ever

I cannot believe it’s almost April, y’all. This year has sped by faster than any other I can remember, and has been full of so many amazing things that if I tried to list them all I’d have a scroll longer than I am, and you’d need food or sleep before you could finish reading.

There was one early this month, though, that I’ve been hunting for the right words to share, because even in the middle of so much awesomeness, it took my breath away.

I haven’t said much about it to anyone but my nearest and dearest, largely because I was terribly afraid that no matter how I did it, it would come across as me having a big head. Which, while physically true (no really, I’ve even looked online for “hats for people with huge heads” and they still don’t make ones that fit me), anyone who knows me well can tell you it’s pretty far from right as far as ego is concerned. Not that I tend to belittle myself: I just know I’m not God’s gift to much of anything except my family, and I’m very glad they think I’m that.

Then last week I got an invitation in the mail, related to this cool thing, and I thought again, “Wow, I should really write a blog post about this, because it’s super cool.”

So here goes:

When I was in college, I spent the majority of one spring semester doing a series of quasi-investigative stories for the campus newspaper about the salaries our professors were paid. Why? Well, because they were paid significantly—like, double-digit percentages—less than professors at comparable institutions in the same part of the country. Across the board. They were bothered enough by it that they’d formed a committee to try to figure out how to address the problem before the school lost any more good teachers. One of my favorite political science profs was on said committee, and he knew I was the assistant managing editor at the paper that semester, so he asked me if we’d be interested in covering their dialogue with the administration.

At the time, I didn’t really know what I was up against. Or what the profs were up against. I recall the administration pulling some pretty dirty tricks, not the least of which was that when the professors requested an open meeting where students could listen and any faculty member could attend and question the reasons the administration had offered for the discrepancy, the chancellor’s office agreed: and set the meeting for 5 p.m. on the Friday before spring break. Yeah.

I went, for the first time ever toting a tape recorder, because the very professor who’d told me a million times never to rely on electronics (they break) insisted I take his. “These guys will say something in there that they will not like seeing in print, and they’ll come back and say they didn’t say it. Get it on tape,” he told me.

And he was right. When I played the tape for the provost, he said “well, that’s not what I meant!”

I smiled and said “Sir, it’s not my job to quote what you mean. It’s my job to quote what you said.” There you have it: my one and only real-life Nichelle comeback.

And so it went. Late in the spring, I took the questions presented by the professors to the chancellor and his right and left arms—separately. We ran a two-page spread, with their (sometimes conflicting) answers side by side. Our faculty advisor drove those pages to the printer two hours past deadline. The chancellor showed up for our weekly critique session the next day and yelled at me such that the journalism department chair stepped in and asked him to dial it back, because we hadn’t printed anything that was untrue (thank you, Dr. Wells). He huffed out of the newspaper office. But at the end of the year, the professors got their raises.

The three who led the charge started a campaign for everyone to donate half of the first year’s increase to a scholarship fund for the journalism school. And they named the scholarship the LynDee [Walker] Integrity in Journalism Award. I thought that was weird back then, because I was still a student there. But I was flattered, and very happy my work had done something to help them.

So here’s the cool part: I had no clue the school still had or awarded that scholarship. I’ve always sort of thought of it as a really nice “thank you” from my professors, to be honest.

About two weeks ago, a lovely woman from the journalism school called me and asked me about it. She proceeded to tell me she was so glad she’d “found” me and ask if she could have the students who win the award send me thank yous.

“Of course!” I said. “You mean, y’all still give those out?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “But all I had was a few letters from professors who aren’t here anymore, mentioning that they were impressed with the work you did.” She said she was glad to have the whole story.

I hung up the phone marveling that something I did all those years ago is helping kids pay for college. Even in the middle of so many amazing things, that’s pretty darned cool, don’t you think? My congratulations and best wishes to all of the winners, past and present. I like to think Nichelle shows a lot of integrity in her work. I’m glad my alma mater is recognizing and rewarding that in a field of study that’s changed so much since I was a student, and I am honored to have my name attached to the award. Now that I’m old, that’s pretty cool, too.

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