Freedom's words
Back in the early 1990s, my students and I at Troy State University pondered ways to raise money for the Society of Professional Journalists’ Legal Defense Fund. The fund, all private donations, primarily gets used to support the legal battles of individual journalists and to support cases where journalists seek access to government records.
We decided to sell T-shirts. I came up with this verbiage: “Talk is cheap, free speech isn’t. Support SPJ’s Legal Defense Fund.”
That crazy thing called 'freedom'
I give a questionnaire each semester to my “Introduction to News Writing and Reporting” class to get to know students better.
“Who was your best teacher and why?” “What rumors have you heard about me?” “John Lennon or John Mayer?”
A few semesters back, I included this question: “What should happen to someone in this class who gets caught cheating?”
With the answers came the expected penalties such as a failing grade on the assignment, some kind of extra work involving ethical decision making and ousting the culprit from class.
