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University Daily Kansan / Thursday, April 28, 1988
5
Pickett
Continued from p.1
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但 he stayed. His daughters, Carolyn and Kathleen, were born. He became an associate professor in 1959, the year he got a doctorate in American studies from the University of Minnesota. He became a full professor in 1961, the first year he was a finalist for the HOPE award. Pickett was a finalist three more times before winning the award in 1975, one of his many teaching honors. The Chancellor's Club recognized him in 1987 with its Career Teaching Award.
In 1973, he began a radio program, "The American Past," that can be heard at 7 p.m. Thursdays on KANU-FM, and will continue despite Pickett's retirement. He won the 1974 George Foster Peabody broadcasting award and was a second-place winner in the 1983 Armstrong Broadcasting Award.
He served as adviser to Sigma Delta Chi, a journalism society, from 1954 to 1968 and as adviser to Sigma Alpha Epifafron fraternity from 1966 to 1971. He has been a member of the Western Civilization committee.
Within the journalism school, he has been head of both the graduate program and the news-editorial sequence. During 1960-61, he served as acting dean of the school.
He has worked on every level.
"I don't suppose there's been any body who has served on as many thesis committees as Calder has," Leibengood said.
The history course
The number of different journalism courses Pickett has taught defied the memory of Leibengood, who thought the total was around 15 or 16. Some of the classes, like Propaganda and Censorship, are not taught regularly. Pickett, an American Journalism, has become synonymous with Pickett's name.
Pickett began teaching History or American journalism at KU in 1959. The class is required for most of the journalism school programs, and thousands of KU students have heard Pickett lecture about the Penny Press and William Randolph Hearst and have seen his slides that tie together journalists with the times they have covered.
In 20 years, Pickett said, the class has changed little.
"I don't mean to incriminate myself," he said, "but I'm still working from some of the same notes."
Among the changes are some of the more current advances in journalism and the addition of slides and audio tapes. He plays the reel-to-reel tapes.
full of campain jingles and big band tunes and even a Dylan tune or two. Before class periods, the music drifts into the hallway by 100 Stauffer-Flint, heralding students entering or just passing by.
The students are Pickett's pride and, at times, his misery. Many of his recent classes have been graduate classes, but he always returns to teach the history course, and a certain student he finds there disturbs him.
"A lot of them are very lazy and have never had history before, and they hate the whole idea." he said.
And so Pickett lets his class know what is going to happen, in no uncertain terms. Papers in on time. Mar-
riage. A date correct. The correct. No computer prints.
"Maybe you have to put some students on the defensive," he said. But he said that was not his intention.
"I always hate to hear that I've scared somebody," he said. "I've known some colleagues that have said, his voice slides into a griff and I don't care if my students don't like me as long as they respect我."
Then he is Calder Pickett again, and he smiles. "I'm not like that. I'd like them to like me."
"He's such an inspiration for new professors like me," Rich said. "I think, Maybe if I can know just a bit of what he knows about the field
Carole Rich, assistant professor of journalism, has taught at KU for a year.
Rich has given writing assignments in class, asking students to describe a faculty member without knowing who they are of them description Pickett, she said.
"He has so many unique characteristics," she said. "And there always seems to be something about his caring for his students."
Thoughts and clippings
Caring for students is one part of teaching. Caring for the material is another.
Kautsch named several things he found unique about Pickett, including his breadth of knowledge and his attention to detail.
Pickett's office is proof of both. His bookshelf is packed with books: books about journalism and history and a little bit of everything else. Across the room, large file cabinets hold newspaper and magazine articles that Pickett has cut out and saved.
"See this?'" he said, pulling out a thick folder. "All this is Nixon." Folders on Humphrey Bogart and other figures from motion pictures, a particular interest of Pickett's, are tucked among the clippings of politicians and sports heroes.
Many of these things are also filed away in Pickett's mind, and he puts them to good use.
Deb Peterson, Janesville, Wis., graduate student and Pickett's teacher teaching assistant, said, "When you've taught for so long, and you have as much experience and as much wisdom as Pickett, you automatically have an opinion on a great variety of subjects."
Leibengood discovered as an undergraduate that Pickett was not a man to back down from his principles.
"We used to get in some of the liveliest arguments." Leibengow said. "I was for Eisenhower, and I was an Adalai Stevenson democrat."
And though the relationship between Pickett and Leibengood changed from student-professor to teacher, I still remember to butt heads once in a while.
"We both get mad, but we get over it without any lasting hard feelings, which you can't do with everybody." He has his own definite points of view."
Those definite points of view are a vital part of Pickett's teaching style, Peterson said.
"He likes to give his opinion on things, and sometimes it's at the expense of generating opinions from other students," she said. "But you've got to hand it to the guy. He's never boring."
Controversy hasn't necessarily followed Pickett throughout his career at KU, but it has seen fit to visit him occasionally. Two of the more recent headlines recalled happened not in the turbulent 608 but in the tranguil '70s.
Tastes of turmoil
One of Pickett's first tastes of turmello came during the presidential election of 1952, when he was adviser for the Kansan editorial page. The Kansan editors passed over Dwight Eisenhower, the immensely popular Republican candidate who grew up in Kansas, and endorsed Democrat Adalai Stevenson. The ensuing problems resulted in the creation of a special editorial board to consider controversial matters.
In 1956, the KU chapter of Sigma Delta Chi, with Pickett as adviser, published an issue of their sature magazine, the Sour Owl, patterned after the "confidential" movie magazines of the times. The magazine contained "expose" articles on figures such as Chancellor Franklin Murphy and basketball coach F.C. "Pho". Allen.
Sale of the magazine was stopped, and Sigma Delta Chi was placed on a one-year probation.
Some were not amused.
Through later battles large and small, Pickett continued to speak his mind. Sometimes, he said, he didn't speak when he should have.
"The things perhaps I'm most ashamed about are the things I should have had more courage about." Pickett said.
Pickett said that at times he had felt a little restricted and that there were things he wasn't supposed to talk about in class. But, he added, feelings have diminished greatly as he has approached retirement.
"I let Reagan have it today," he said with a grin, referring to comments he'd made in class about former White House spokesman Larry Speakes admitting that he fabricated quotes for Reagan.
"They can fire me if they want." Pickett said, and then his voice slipped into a deep tone of authority.
Pickett, we've had enough of that one more week and you're out!
The important things
A few more days, of course, and Pickett will be out. He'll maintain an office on the third floor of Stauffer-Flint, but he will be finished as an instructor in the school. He leaves satisfied but wary.
Pickett said that some of the problems in education began during the late 1960s, with the movement away from required classes and toward the idea that one piece of knowledge is as important as another.
"Education should be a body of knowledge instead of how you feel about things." Pickett said. He ran a finger down a listing of courses in the timetable, growing more irritated with each course title he read.
He spoke critically of the changes in programs around the country like the Western Civilization program at Stanford University. "It's more important to know Plato than to know Gloria Steinem," he said.
He does not leave KU asking to be remembered. In a way, his request is more personal than that. He spoke of the continuation of the journalism history course and a move back toward some of the required courses in journalism. He never did, it, a summer reading of Stevenson's "Treasure Island."
In the end, though, he was not pessimistic. He spoke of the essay answers on his latest history test and asked him to tell his classmates care about learning about Vietnam.
"I would like some of the things I have done to be continued," he said. "I would hope others would think these things were important."
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