Beset with scandal and facing budget cuts, the University of Louisville is about to end funding to the best classroom on its campus

When the University of Louisville went looking for a new president in 1995, one local newspaper sent reporters to the home campuses of all four finalists, checking-in with faculty, students and alumni around the nation. One of those reporters now works for The Houston Chronicle. Another is a producer for WDRB-TV in Louisville.

When the trustees picked John Shumaker to succeed Donald Swain, the readers of the paper didn’t have to wait to find out who the new chief was, or what the challenges for the new president would be. The Louisville Cardinal had been on the story for months.

Sure, the still-robust Courier-Journal had reported the story, too. How could it not? The leadership struggle at U of L in the mid-90s was ugly, heavily politicized and seemingly interminable. (Sound familiar?) But no outlet came close to the intensity of coverage, or editorial leadership, that independent student weekly provided. [A note about the video above. Bob Schulman was long-time advisor to the Cardinal and embodied everything about why I wanted to be a journalist.]

When an assassin killed Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in the fall of ‘95, 14 editors and reporters from the Cardinal were in Washington for a national journalism conference — airfare, registration, hotel and food picked up by the paper. Within minutes, two staffers were in the Rose Garden awaiting President Clinton’s statement. Steve Bittenbender, now a veteran business journalist in Louisville, was at the Israeli Embassy and another — I think it was Dug Begley, now at The Houston Chronicle — at the State Department. Once home, a fairly new staff writer cobbled together feeds from around campus and across the country and got the story on page one. Grant Delaney sells insurance now, but I speak no lie when I say it became a seminal experience of his college years.

When future Hall of Fame coach Denny Crum led a student march against tougher requirements for GPAs for his players, the Cardinal marched along side with photos and a notebook. When, in 1989, a Black Student Alliance meeting turned tense, and the march threatened to become a riot, the Cardinal had a shooter and a writer in the thick of it, watching as things were set to boil.

I know this because I was right in the middle of making it happen. As editor-in-chief of the paper from January 1995 to June, 1996 I had a front-row seat to one of the most exciting jobs I’ve ever had — or ever will have — in journalism.

It was exciting because what we were doing mattered to our readers. They knew it, and told us often. But we knew it too, deep in our bones.

For generations, students have been having similar and equally formative experiences with journalism — with free speech, with public accountability, with writing and editing and engagement as citizens — as members of the Louisville Cardinal staff.

But after more than a century, that may end soon.

Beset by scandals of every conceivable type, and facing a series of profound budget cuts, the University has told the paper that its annual ad buy of $60,000 will be reduced to $20,000 this year and to zero after that. That’s a decision that should be reversed. [To find out how to help, join this Facebook group.] [Update 8:32 p.m. CST Sept. 19.: Additional note: I’ve been told that the $60,000 was reduced a year or so ago to $40,000. The commitment was cut against before this year to $20,000, with a warning that it would be zero next year. ML]

Those ad sales are triply important to the Cardinal because they come in the form of an advance purchase, which gives the Cardinal running room at the beginning of each school year as its ad sales turn from accounts receivable into bank deposits.

The Cardinal is more than just a newspaper. It’s a classroom. I’ve been a student and a teacher in classrooms all over the country, from Stanford University to the University of Texas, where I am currently a journalism fellow on short leave from my post as editorial writer at The Dallas Morning News. No classroom I have ever been a part of has ever taught so much as what is learned in the Louisville Cardinal newsroom.

In my case, the lessons from the Cardinal came fast and lasted a lifetime. Frustrated by my use of prepositions, one editor told me a few weeks into my freshman year: “Just remember: ‘I got fucked over more than two times.”

See, I’ve never forgotten the proper use of more than and over. I bet you won’t either, now.

Another editor, a former editor in chief pulling copy desk rotations, because he couldn’t quite stop giving helped me learned how to kill all those flowery words I liked so much at 18. He was gruff, but right. It was a better classroom — and a better introduction to Elements of Style — than any journalism course I would take.

More than that, though, the Cardinal taught me the value of an independent press. By the time I was editor, our team was 50-members strong. We covered campus uproars, racial tensions, a crime spree in a dorm — with an undercover reporter, no less, one who is now a manager at the Cato Institute — and sent reporters and sometimes photographers to the Million Man March, to the 1996 New Hampshire primaries and all over the state as required.

Working at The Louisville Cardinal was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. Later on, as board president in the early 2000s, I learned that it had been just as good a place to learn for generations of students before and after me.

A $60,000 ad buy each year is bargain for university that does so little elsewhere to see that some students, at least, leave its campus with a handle on the First Amendment, on accountability, and on the power of the written word and well-framed image.