How a liberal arts education prepares college grads for adulthood

By Alyssa Sanford

I’m well-acquainted with the Question.

It’s not so much a question as it is a bemused look, a slight lift of the eyebrows, a faint smirk tugging at the corner of the lips.

Entering my senior year in college, I’ve found ways to cope with the condescension that comes with the Question, short of crafting little voodoo dolls of my well-intentioned critics and sticking them deliberately with pins.

“And what are you studying?” the Questioner will politely inquire, after asking my younger sister, an aspiring urban elementary school teacher with a double major in Spanish the very same question.

I smile, a little ruefully, and drop my chin. “English and journalism.”

The Questioner, sometimes a relative, sometimes a recent college graduate, sometimes a parent of a friend or an elderly woman at my grandmother’s church, blinks. “Oh. That’s… wonderful.”

I can hear the question lingering behind it. And what in the world are you going to do with that?!  

Dirty little secrets about banned YA novels

By Alyssa Sanford
for Magazine Writing (JPW 350-01) | 2/16/16

With over 55 percent of adults picking up books intended for readers between 12 and 18, according to a report in JSTOR Daily Magazine, it should come as no surprise that young adult literature is one of the most frequently challenged genres on the market. Why? Because adults who devour YA lit are sensitive to objectionable topics and mature themes because they’re deemed unsuitable for young readers, and subsequently, those books get taken off the shelves.

Criticism of YA lit dates back to the 1950s when Lord of the Flies (1954), William Golding’s classic, was criticized for being too disturbing for audiences young and old. In spite of selling only about 3,000 copies in its first year of print, the novel surged in popularity. Echoes of its haunting message reverberate in pop culture in massively successful YA series like Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games (2008).

Six reasons for challenging books

1. Not knowing what purpose our teens serve in society.

Dr. Gabrielle Halko, associate professor of English at West Chester University, attributes the frequency of challenging YA lit to the cultural construct of adolescence. “YA lit is challenged so frequently because we cannot decide what purpose we want teenagers to serve in our culture, and we can’t decide what we want adolescence to be,” says Halko.

2. For trivial, “less subversive” reasons than you might think.

“I personally think the book banners ban the texts for reasons (masturbation, swearing, etc.) that are often way less subversive than other elements of the texts (critiques of social inequality and colonialism, etc.), other elements I wish everyone would pay more attention to,” says Dr. Mandy Suhr-Sytsma, English lecturer at Emory University.

3. The targeted audience falls into a broad age range.

University of Richmond’s Dr. Elisabeth Gruner stands by the belief that “YA is a very broad category, usually aimed at ages ranging from 12-18, and what some people think is appropriate for an 18-year-old may not seem to be so for a 12-year-old—and that may bring a challenge as well.”

4. Parents are wary of sensitive material in YA novels.

“Parents want to exert more control over what their kids read,” says YA blogger Nikki Boisture of Are You There, Youth? It’s Me, Nikki. “I get the desire to do it (my own nine-year-old can’t read violent comic books), but some parents just take it too far in trying to determine what ALL kids should have access to, rather than just their own.”

5. Themes of sexuality are deemed inappropriate for young readers.

John Green’s 2005 novel Looking for Alaska, which has been #3 on the NYT Bestsellers List for young adult fiction for the past 24 weeks, featured a short scene in which two boarding school students engaged in oral sex, prompting school districts across the country to remove the book from recommended reading lists. The continued backlash against the book prompted Green to proclaim on a Jan. 30, 2008 video blog entry, “I am not a pornographer.”

6. Magic and mysticism tend to offend conservative audiences.

“A couple of semesters ago, I had a student who worked in a bookstore for a couple of years,” says Halko. “She told our class about a regular customer who would come in, buy all of the Harry Potter books on the shelf, and then announce that he was taking them to his church to be burned. My students and I talked about how despite his intentions, his actions ended up selling more HP books,” due to a low inventory at the bookstore that prompted re-printings.

Live from New York, it’s… the Republican primary season?

Comedy routines are bolstering the frontrunners’ campaigns… or so we think.

By Alyssa Sanford
for Magazine Writing (JPW 350-01) | 3/8/16

It’s getting hard to know where the Saturday Night Live sketches end, and the real campaigns begin.

Republican frontrunners Donald J. Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz dominated the news cycle in the days leading up to and immediately following Super Tuesday, an evening where Trump snatched up seven out of 11 possible states, and Cruz secured his home state of Texas as well as neighboring Oklahoma and Alaska. Of course, the headlines reflected the looming inevitability of Trump’s nomination to be the GOP candidate, but something slightly less doom-and-gloom crept up on the horizon and encroached on the public’s consciousness.

That is, a viral six-second Vine of Chris Christie’s seemingly horrified expression as he flanked Trump’s shoulder at his Super Tuesday victory speech, set to the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme, replete with circuslike tuba music and slow zooms into Christie’s dead-eyed stare. It was, as TIME magazine declared, “the real winner of Super Tuesday.”

And in spite of the sensation of dread that accompanies Cruz’s mounting primary victories, the Internet rejoiced over a Bad Lip Reading video featuring clips from Cruz’s campaign videos with preposterous voiceovers about his appetite for human hair, and canned campaign slogans—“I Need a Bogel for the Glotch,” for example.

Kid lit in the college classroom

Why academia is beginning to embrace young adult literature for its literary merit

By Alyssa Sanford
for Magazine Writing (JPW 350-01) | 3/29/16

Nikki Boisture, a 38-year-old fan of young adult literature who chronicles her enduring love for ‘80s and ‘90s-era series like The Babysitter’s Club and Sweet Valley High on her blog Are You There, Youth? It’s Me, Nikki, stands between two firmly-entrenched camps in the literary world: critics who excoriate popular literature targeted at young audiences, and scholars who see the value in both teaching and studying it.

“I think there are a lot of reasons YA appeals to adults more now than it did ten years ago,” Boisture says. “First of all, there’s been a huge boom in YA publishing, mostly thanks to the success of Harry Potter.”

First published in the United Kingdom in 1997, and released in 1998 by Scholastic Press in the United States, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone ignited the spark. Almost two decades after its initial publication, skeptics have largely warmed to the wildly popular seven-book series, and the smash hits that followed in its footsteps.

“The ‘Harry Potter effect’ is a real thing—it completely changed the way children’s and YA books are written, published, marketed and read,” Boisture says.

For all the criticism of young adult literature—largely based on the genre’s controversial themes and substandard prose—there is a captive (and decidedly adult) audience, especially in the world of academia. The prevalence of academic journals that focus on the genre, including the ALAN Review (Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of the National Council of Teachers of English), and the growing number of English departments that feature young adult literature courses, suggests that the genre is not juvenile fare, but a treasure trove of enlightening, worthwhile literary texts that even esteemed scholars can learn something from.

‘Facing the nation’ with an objective outlook: objectivity in media

By Alyssa Sanford
for Media Ethics (JPW 309-01) | 12/1/15

While CBS News has had some notable scandals in the past, its well-reputed Sunday morning panel program Face the Nation has maintained its journalistic integrity over its 61-year history.

That isn’t to say that viewers and media watchdog groups haven’t voiced concerns, particularly over the moderators’ apparent political biases—former moderator Bob Schieffer for his connections to George Bush, and current moderator John Dickerson for his gentle treatment of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during a recent interview.

“Can he perform the role of objective moderator given the ‘difficult[y]’ of ‘cover[ing] someone you know personally’?” Nicole Casta of the nonprofit watchdog Media Matters for America wrote of Schieffer in 2004, when he was set to moderate the final presidential debate between his “golfing friend” George Bush and the Democratic senator John Kerry. Journalists wondered if Schieffer was capable of setting aside his political and personal affiliations in order to an objective and fair moderator.

Similarly, the conservative watchdog group Newsbusters accused John Dickerson of “fail[ing] to push back against [Clinton’s] standard talking points defending her e-mail practices” in a September 2015 interview, thereby revealing a liberal bias. As a moderator of weekly political panels, could Dickerson be trusted to keep his opinions out of the discussion?

All major broadcast news networks must strive to be as objective and unbiased as possible, but for shows like Face the Nation, accusations of bias are few and far between because of the level of professionalism.

The challenges of sourcing

By Alyssa Sanford
for Media Ethics (JPW 309-01) | 10/28/15

Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Laker of The Philadelphia Daily News understand how difficult it is to locate sources.

For their 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative series, “Tainted Justice,” the reporters interviewed drug dealers, former strippers and colleagues of corrupt cops to uncover corruption within the Philadelphia police department’s narcotics task force.

A key source, former drug informant Benny Martinez, was also an addict and “a convicted drug dealer with questionable credibility,” the reporters wrote in their book, Busted: A Tale of Corruption and Betrayal in the City of Brotherly Love.

These sources, while not the most trustworthy of people at first glance, provided detailed accounts that allowed Ruderman and Laker to pursue a lead on Officer Jeff Cudjik and his fellow corrupt officers. But many of these sources were nearly impossible to find, and often, they were scared to go on the record or wary of the reporters’ motivations.

Martinez was one of those sources who wanted to provide an anonymous account of his dealings with Cudjik. Yet the Daily News reporters couldn’t “allow Benny, a convicted drug dealer, to accuse a decorated cop of wrongdoing without using his name. Benny had to go on the record,” they wrote.

Clearly, sourcing is a constant challenge. Even so, good ethical journalists understand that locating reliable sources, verifying their accounts and maintaining a relationship with them is essential to good reporting.

Putting ethics codes in practice in the newsroom

By Alyssa Sanford
for Media Ethics (JPW 309-01) | 9/21/15

While it’s generally understood that ethics codes are “voluntary and cannot be enforced,” according to Gene Foreman in The Ethical Journalist, news organizations tend to adopt similar ethics codes because they are common practice in the field, but when it comes to politics, the codes are often different for each organization.

“Times are changing,” said Rick Edmonds, a media analyst at the Poynter Institute in a phone interview, referring to the way news organizations are adapting to a world where social media makes it difficult to completely obscure a journalist’s personal opinions.

As a result, media ethicists and prominent journalists are equally divided on the subject. Some believe that journalists have a right to express their political opinions, while others find that a journalist’s integrity will come into question if he or she actively participate in politics.

When reporting goes astray

By Alyssa Sanford
for Media Ethics (JPW 309-01) | 9/14/15

Compassion for an alleged rape victim, and fear of losing a crucial source, led Sabrina Erdely astray in her reporting for the November 2014 Rolling Stone article, “A Rape on Campus.”

It was a story that captured national attention, and a story that drew harsh criticism from the public and journalists alike when Erdely revealed that she harbored doubts about her source’s narrative just weeks after publication.

The editors at Rolling Stone who oversaw the publication of the article from its inception to its final draft consulted a team of media experts from the Columbia School of Journalism to examine the problems inherent in the article, and ran the report in an article entitled “‘A Rape on Campus’: What Went Wrong?”

College begins revising existing strategic plan

April 1, 2015 | Alyssa Sanford, Signal Staff Writer

Members of the College’s Strategic Planning and Resource Committee (SPARC) met with Student Government to evaluate the College’s mission statement and update it for the future at the general body meeting on Wednesday, March 25.

SPARC seeks to revise the existing strategic plan from two and a half years ago and present the new plan to the Board of Trustees in February 2016 for their vote of approval.

The new plan, if approved, will be implemented in fall 2016 and extend through 2021.

Greek life hazing must stop, more punishments needed

April 1, 2015 | Alyssa Sanford, Signal Staff Writer

College fraternities all across the country are making headlines, from Penn State to the University of Oklahoma to Dartmouth College. Their misdemeanors are nothing short of deplorable, and the media storm swirling around them is more than warranted.

Still, the question remains: Are the repercussions strong enough?

Former University of Oklahoma student, and SAE brother, Levi Pettit apologizes for his actions

The public seems to think so.

Members of the University of Oklahoma’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity appeared in a viral video in the beginning of March, joining in a racist chant with references to lynching. The response was immediate: Within hours of the video leaking online, the University closed the chapter and forced members to leave the fraternity house. Later, two of the students leading the chant were expelled and have since made public apologies for their actions, according to the New York Times.

University of Oklahoma was lauded for its swift handling of the scandal. It denounced SAE and expelled the chief offenders from the University, much to the satisfaction of both the black student union on campus and the general public.