The Dean

Jeremiah O’Sullivan was dean of Marquette’s College of Journalism in the 1950s, when I was a student there. All those who studied under him and the faculty members called him simply, “the dean.”

O’Sullivan didn’t have a doctorate, which has become virtually a requirement to even teach journalism today under an academic system which puts greater weight on degrees and publication in obscure journals than experience in the profession.

What O’Sullivan had was experience as a reporter on Hearst newspapers at a time when it was the most dominant and influential chain in the country and schooling in rough and tumble journalism gained as the head of the United Press’ bureaus in Kansas City, Chicago and New York.

He knew the Who’s Who of journalism and kept in contact with local working reporters by playing poker with them in the smoky Milwaukee Press Club. He himself smoked thick, black, smelly stogies and boasted that he had gotten his first job on Hearst’s Milwaukee Sentinel when he walked in smoking one of them and the editor had said, “Any young man who can smoke one of those belongs on this newspaper.”

He gave money to needy students out of his own pocket. “O’Sullivan scholarships’” they were called. He allowed any students seriously working on a book to skip journalism classes without losing any credits and he hired teachers, for the most part, who had solid working experience in their fields of newspapering, writing, advertising and public relations.

I last saw him in 1967 when my first book, The Despised Poor, was published and the dean attended a party marking the occasion.The book was about poor people on welfare, their difficulties and how they lived. It was not a popular book.

"I'm proud of you," O'Sullivan said. "I'm pleased not only that you wrote a book, but you wrote one about the poor and the powerless."

That was the dean.