Aaron Mayes/UW-Madison
Baughman, whose specialty was the history of mass communication, taught his students to take the long view.
There’s been an outpouring of grief this week from faculty and graduates of the UW-Madison journalism school since news broke that Professor James Baughman had died.
He’s been mourned as an admired colleague, a wise leader of faculty, and a stately if avuncular sage. Saturday’s official announcement from the fifth floor of Vilas Hall summed it up: “The journalism school lost a lion this morning.”
I’m sure he was all those things, though I didn’t know that seasoned academic. I wish I had. Instead, I knew him best at the beginning of his career. Oh, we kept in touch, but — how can I put this the right way? I suppose it was sufficient to have grown close so early, like an old friend you may not have seen in years, but whom you know will always love you. Still, I wish I’d made a greater effort.
He was my favorite professor, and more. Soon after I graduated, I became very ill. I remember fading in and out of consciousness at St. Mary’s Hospital. I opened my eyes and Professor Baughman was sitting in the morning light, in a chair in the corner. I opened my eyes late afternoon and he was still there. Not doing anything. Just being there.
I’d heard about Baughman long before I met him. My best friend all through high school was the only child of a UW journalism professor. I spent a couple of hours at their house almost every day, often staying for dinner. I began to follow the fortunes of the “J-School.”
The summer before I entered college, after faculty had been added to replace those lost to Stanford University, “Baughman” was a new dinner-table topic. Baughman did this, Baughman did that. Baughman was outrageous. Have you met Baughman? You have to meet Baughman.
And soon I met Baughman, in class. It was like being lectured to by lightning. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was a newly minted Ph.D., not that much older than his students. He was young, bright, wickedly funny and accessible — which somehow made it scarier when meeting with him. Other faculty we could mock, but all of us wanted to sincerely please Baughman.
I took all his undergraduate courses, and we met often. We were both huge fans of American humorist James Thurber, who, like Baughman, was an Ohio native. Best-remembered as the author of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Thurber was an influential and longtime contributor to The New Yorker. I was corresponding at the time with his widow, and for Baughman I wrote a paper on the magazine’s founding editor, Harold Ross. We would forever after trade Ross-isms, such as “Who he?” and “Nobody gives a damn about writers except other writers.” (Translated: Avoid first person.)
We became friends — good friends, I like to think, though I never could bring myself to call Professor Baughman by his first name. I showed him the rejection slips I gradually earned from The New Yorker (I’m still waiting to make that sale). He was delighted when I began contributing to MAD magazine.
I remember his office, which featured a plastic model radio station from an HO scale model railroad, and a tiny frame containing a business card from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where I guess he must have interned or briefly worked as a reporter. I don’t recall. It was a point of pride that he’d done at least some newspaper work. Some faculty never had.
It was a different time. We students in the news-editorial sequence were not only proud to be preparing for newspaper work, we were snotty about it. We sneered at our brethren in the school’s advertising and public relations sequence.
These days, you don’t even need a degree. Anyone can be a reporter, especially online. And the advertising/PR sequence is now named the hyper-hip “Strat-Com” — Strategic Communications. Today they’re the graduates with money and jobs, not us. The meek have inherited the media.
But Baughman taught us to take the long, long view. History of Mass Comm was his specialty, and that class was not only immensely popular, it was immensely satisfying. I wrote a senior thesis for Baughman about the rise of journalism as a profession. If journalism is becoming a trade again, it’s just another cycle, merely repeating.
Others have paid tribute by recalling Baughman’s charm, his social activities and endearing idiosyncrasies. I could, too, but I really don’t have anything to add. Nor do I care to; nobody gives a damn about writers except other writers.
But I think a lot about Professor Baughman, and about how he helped shape my intellect, and how much I appreciate that. And how much I love him.
I’m thinking, too, of the last words of James Thurber. “God bless...God damn.”
