Staff members from different sections of The Miami Student wrote columns about what the publication means to them
Before I began teaching journalism at Miami University in 2014, I taught English at a Cincinnati high school, where I was also head coach of the varsity girls’ golf team for 10 years. In my final three years as coach, we won the state championship each season. It was a far cry from the first year I led the team, when I had one senior who chose to use only her 5-iron for every shot because she said her other clubs were mean to her (as you can surmise, we did not win the state title that year).
During those three championship years, I didn’t suddenly become a great golf coach. I just had incredibly talented golfers.
Since the fall of 2021, I have lived a similar life as the adviser to The Miami Student. During each school year, it’s as if I’m back in that golf cart, pointing my skilled golfers to the first tee and then watching them shine; only this time, it’s the student journalists who thrive.
Oh, I might offer a bit of advice occasionally, but The Student is filled with self-motivated journalists with big and bright ideas. They rarely need me.
These students care deeply about journalism. For their efforts, they have gained some glory. Through the years, The Miami Student has won a slew of honors, both for the paper overall and for individual efforts. However, none of these journalists produce content because they want to win awards.
Instead, they do it because they see the value of journalism in a democratic society: serving as a watchdog that holds power accountable; providing a forum for all ideas, even ones they might abhor; and holding up a mirror to our society to show who we are, warts and all.
It's been this way at The Student for a long time, and it will be this way, I hope, for at least another 200 years.
I studied journalism at Miami and graduated in 1993. During my four years, I had internships at local newspapers and was president of the Miami chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
But I never joined The Student.
It’s been so long, I can’t remember why. Now, when I look at the work these students do, and when I talk to The Student alumni, I realize what I missed: A chance, yes, to report on Miami and Oxford life, but more than that, the opportunity to be a part of the most important organization in Miami history.
Deciding to be a journalist in the United States is a magnanimous pursuit. The slings and arrows journalists face from powerful people mean you must have courage to write the truth, believe that what you are doing matters and have faith that the public will understand the true value of journalism.
Enjoy what you're reading?
Signup for our newsletter
And so, to the current staff of The Miami Student, and to all of those students before them, through two centuries … thank you. Thank you for shining a light. Thank you for being leaders.
And thank you — through the noble profession of journalism — for embodying the motto of love and honor.
Fred Reeder Jr. has served as faculty advisor to The Miami Student since 2021. Prior to Miami, Reeder was an AP English teacher at a National Blue Ribbon high school. Before teaching, Reeder wrote for The Cincinnati Enquirer. He is a 1993 Miami University graduate and received a master's degree in education from the University of Cincinnati in 2000.
Read More
The words we bled for the broadsheet
By Burton Glass | 16 hours agoMy memories of The Miami Student start with wax, not words. In the mid-1980s, when Bruno’s Pizza slices were 50 cents and dinosaurs roamed Oxford freely, student journalists burned fingers twice a week applying hot wax to two-inch wide strips of news copy spat out of a phototypesetting machine and trimmed with X-Acto knives. We literally bled for, and often on, our work.
Long-lasting impact of the unsigned editorial
By Bob White | 16 hours agoDuring my stint as The Miami Student’s editorial page editor in 1974, I put considerable energy into opposing the university’s proposal to build an ice skating rink. I was paying my own way, and considered a $20 student fee for an ice rink to be an extravagant waste.
Finding my home away from home at TMS
By Stella Powers | Yesterday"If it weren’t for the relationships I’ve built through this newspaper, I don’t think I would still be at Miami today. When I say joining The Student is the best thing I’ve ever done, I mean it."