The Naughty Professor
Janeway summoned his employee. Hafferkamp recalled, “Number one, he revealed that he hadn’t seen it.” But he’d heard. “He said, whatever you do in your private life is one thing, but never connect the two, the university and Libido. And I said, “I understand that, but the way you’re saying that suggests I should in some way be ashamed of what I’m doing there. And I’m not. I think that what we do there is useful and valuable. And I’m not ashamed.’ And he said, ‘I don’t care about that.’ Those were his exact words.”
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They did not speak again, but when the Daily Northwestern began preparing a long feature on Libido that would run in February, Hafferkamp sent the dean a note of warning. This article did him in, Hafferkamp fears. “What really rotated his tires was when the Daily reporter or editor called him for a comment and he was in the position of trying to duck the Daily. He didn’t talk to them.”
Janeway agrees with this thinking, and over the last couple of years he’s drastically cut down on one-year hires. But Hafferkamp, after seven years at Medill, was open to continuing under different terms. Janeway had other choices.
The personal journalism we saw before the World Cup began was pathetic. There were the writers who can’t figure soccer and made fun of it, the writers who like the sport and begged their readers to like it too, and the puritanical chauvinists who wish they could keep the event to themselves.
Amerika-Woche is running a contest: guess the two teams in the finals and win a trip to Germany. “Soccer is a major part of this paper,” said publisher Christian Baermann. “The German league is covered every week. We offer special pages on the soccer World Cup. For us Germans it’s a huge big deal.”
Perhaps. Simpson’s measured flight ahead of a phalanx of squad cars pursuing like a vision from Thelma and Louise might have been the most transfixing television since the assassination of President Kennedy. Simpson was, in a sense, Kennedy, Oswald, and Thelma and Louise rolled into one. We didn’t know Kennedy either. We would never know Oswald. Thelma and Louise we knew only because they were just pretend, invented to be understood. We explain away real people by picking and choosing from among their roots, even though they cannot explain themselves.
