Journalistic Past Echoes Forward

By Cassie Morse | Contributing Writer

I was what they called a “non-traditional student” when I went to college in the eighties. Not because of any learning differences, physical challenges or minority status, but because of my age. Starting college after a four-year enlistment in the U.S. Navy put me in a special category of matriculation at Lynchburg-not-Liberty-University-College when I enrolled in 1986. The only benefits of which, as I recall, meant I didn’t have to live in the dorms.

In addition to being four years older than my classmates, I was a veteran, the rare local on campus having been born and raised right there in Lynchburg, Va., and I looked like Frankenstein’s twin sister. The only reason I was able to afford LC was because of a legal settlement with a guy who drove me into a tree at 38 miles per hour, breaking both arms and ripping off half my face. It was the last time I was in a car without buckling up.

When I first visited LC, I met with professor Woody Greenberg, who happened to be available to advise a potential student. He was head of the Journalism department. He asked what I was interested in studying. I wasn’t sure, I told him, except I really liked public radio and thought I might want to be a reporter some day. We’d love to have you, Woody said. Thus, I declared a major in Journalism and joined The Critograph, the campus newspaper. Woody and student editor Sarah Revson taught me everything about reporting, from ethics and AP standards to investigative and interview techniques. I accompanied Sarah on the early morning runs to the Nelson County Times, who published our little collegiate newspaper. We left campus at an ungodly hour so we could stop at Hardees for cinnamon biscuits before arriving to hand over the digital story files so the press operators could print them out, and we could cut, wax and paste them onto galleys, which they would photograph and put onto the presses. I became an Exacto jockey who could slice and dice headlines and copy with precision.

By my Junior year, I succeeded Sarah as editor. I assigned stories to the student staff, edited them, and wrote the editorial column, in addition to the bi-weekly publishing trips.  Having a platform for my opinions on campus life was heady. In advance of student body government elections held each year, candidates submitted their platforms to The Critograph. When I read their submissions, I was appalled. Here I’d served my country and was paying for my own schooling, and they could barely string a coherent sentence together, let alone craft a compelling position on campus politics. “Candidates writ real gud” was the headline of the op-ed I penned, and published their pieces unedited.  Lacrosse captains don’t appreciate being shamed, but their indignation and threats were easily ignored.

The real test was to come. As I watched the anti-apartheid movement mount on campuses worldwide, I questioned our administration’s investments in South Africa, where Nelson Mandela was leading the resistance to the system of institutionalized racial segregation that the white minority was employing to oppress the majority black population. I called for an end to LC investments in such a repressive regime, beginning with the school’s membership at Boonsboro Country Club and its whites-only policy, the cover story by ace reporter Beth Goodwin, who followed me to the editor’s desk the following year.

One morning, while working on the next edition, I heard footsteps up the creaky stairwell of the old house where The Critograph was housed. It was President George Rainsford.  He set foot in our office — perhaps for the first time — to remind me that the paper was published at the pleasure of the college.  I said yes sir, as a veteran does to the chain of command. I quaked as he left, wondering if I’d just lost my position. Professor Greenberg told me that such intimidation tactics would not work, and that Lynchburg News & Advance editor Billy Cline had volunteered to run any piece the college would not and that the Associated Press would be happy to pick up the story. So we ran with it.  

The Critograph was published, some uproar ensued and shortly thereafter the college did indeed acknowledge it would have no investments related to South Africa and withdrew its country club membership. Score one for the Fourth Estate. 

I have to wonder what would happen if I’d written the same anti-authoritarian piece today. Would I be summarily taken off the streets by armed government thugs as was Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish graduate student arrested by federal agents in Massachusetts last month, and then detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Louisiana?  She had a visa to study in the U.S. and co-authored an op-ed in Tufts University’s student newspaper that criticized university leaders for their response to demands that the school divest from companies with ties to Israel. 

It’s an eerie echo across journalistic generations: two young women expressing political opinions in American college student newspapers against repressive regimes, separated by 40 years’ time, light years in national character, and a whisker of chance that placed one in an awkward position and another in fear for her life. Would I have stood as firm as Rümeysa? I’d like to think so. But today we all must stand with her and others on the right side of history, in defense of press freedom. If we don’t, who will speak when they come for us? 

Cassie Morse ’89

Morse is a graduate of Lynchburg College and former editor of The Critograph who worked under the mentorship of retired Lynchburg College professor Woody Greenberg. She now resides in Northfield, Vt. with her husband Charlie, where they operate a small farm raising pigs, chickens and vegetables, with their dog Lincoln, and puppycats Tango and Mayhem. Before living her dream in Vermont, Cassie served in the U.S. Navy, then built a career as a branding, marketing and communications professional in corporate America, primarily in the commercial nuclear power sector.