May 9, 2010
Note: This was my last formal post-graduation address as the just retired but still officiating executive associate dean of the IU School of Journalism at IUPUI.
To our graduates—
I think this would be a good day to thank someone. You probably had many people who helped you in some way get to this major accomplishment in your lives—a college degree.
You are just at the point of beginning your professional careers and I am coming to an end of mine—at least this first one that lasted 37 years—teaching.
In my case I had excellent role models in my father, who was a professor of chemistry, and my mother, who taught English and played the piano. I am wearing my late father’s doctoral robe today. It is about 80 years old. And after a delay of 55 years, I now play the piano.
Walt Craig, and the late C. William Horrell were my photography teachers at Southern Illinois University. They gave me a firm technical foundation in photography and encouraged story-telling with a camera.
Bob Gilka, director of photography at National Geographic and my internship supervisor, widened my vision considerably.
Harvey Frye, my graduate graphic teacher at IU-Bloomington, was like a second father to me. Ralph Veal, manager of the IU Photo Lab, was a nurturing boss and friend. Both are deceased.
The late Will Counts, a Bloomington faculty member, launched my teaching career. As a young AP photojournalist, Will made one of the hundred best news pictures of the last century. His pictures exposed the hatred about desegregation of Central High, Little Rock, to a national audience. Will literally forced me to apply for a position at the University of Minnesota before I was ready to apply anywhere. I got the job.
The late Ed Emery was my mentor as a faculty member.
I have benefited from working with thousands of students and wonderful colleagues.
Each of these people, and many more, shaped the person that I became. I have always been aware of the help and guidance that I have received over my career and I have tried to give back to others what I so generously received.
So should you too, as your careers develop and mature. Try to help others along the path you have cleared. When you begin to help others it is a sure sign that you have matured professionally.
Let’s think about excellence for a minute.
We could probably agree that Rolex watches, BMW motorcycles, Nikon and Canon cameras are excellent. Those of you who have been around me for any length of time know that I think Apple computers are excellent. Porche cars are excellent. We are not so sure any more about Toyota. We can all agree that National Geographic magazine is excellent. But these are things, not actions.
How will you define excellence in your career?
You could have no better role model than our speaker today, Chris Johns, editor in chief of National Geographic magazine. When I was a young professor, Chris was in our Master’s program at the University of Minnesota.
It is always a pleasure to work with graduate students. They have already proved themselves academically at the undergraduate level or they are not admitted to graduate school. In grad school they are concentrating on studies that directly focus on their specialties and interests.
When I first met Chris, I knew he was going to be different, I just didn’t know in what way. After all in Minnesota, all the women are strong, the men are good looking and ALL the children are above average.
Chris was very eager and had a great sense of humor. And he was a very, very talented photojournalist. He had an intensity about him that set him apart from other graduate students. He wanted to be the best that he could be.
He had an internship after his first year at the Topeka Capital Journal, the best newspaper to learn photojournalism at the time. There were two interns there that summer and Chris was clearly the lesser known of the two. Susan Ford, President Gerald Ford’s daughter, was an intern too. Naturally the nation’s press followed the story of what the president’s daughter was doing that summer and Chris was known simply as, “the other intern.”
At the end of the summer, Susan Ford went back to school and Chris was hired as a staff member.
Within a few years, the excellence of his photojournalism led him to be named Newspaper Photographer of the Year. There were major magazine assignments followed by regular National Geographic assignments. His career long coverage of Africa stands out. Now he is editor in chief of the magazine, the first photojournalist to become editor in chief of the magazine in its long history reaching back to the 1800s. Under his leadership, the normal number of awards for excellence has increased. Chris has been named magazine editor of the year.
Several years ago, I spent a week at the Geographic sitting in on meetings that covered the full range of the operation of the magazine. Chris had changed from a personal ambition to be the best that he could be, which turned out to be one of the world’s best photographers, to making the magazine the best it could be. I witnessed a story killed that had completed final layout and was ready to publish. Everyone agreed the writer had done a terrific job and the six talented photographers who worked on the story had milked every possible picture opportunity from the story about a national bird watching event. Some things are just not very visual and bird watching is one of them. That story was ready to go into the magazine and a lot of money had been spent getting the story to that point. The story was killed because the visual quality of the story did not meet the standard of excellence of the magazine.
National Geographic is arguably the most important magazine in the history of publishing in explaining our natural world and the people in it. Stories are planned two years out and photographers often spend a year in the field on a story. Each month, in each issue, the stories and photography define excellence in journalism.
Chris Johns has exhibited a standard of excellence as a newspaper photojournalist, a field photographer for National Geographic and now editor in chief of the magazine.
Please welcome Dr. Chris Johns, Indiana University’s newest honorary degree recipient.