At LNP, we are justifiably proud of our three 2024 Southern California Journalism Awards, which are the fruits of seven months’ worth of publishing efforts during 2023.
In researching our article about Rick Cole, we discovered that he and John Hinrichs received an LA Press Club award in 1979 during their undergraduate years as editors of the Occidental College newspaper, The Occidental.
The subject of their story was Occidental Professor Mary Jane Hewitt of the Black Studies Department, who suddenly resigned from her post. Cole and his colleague wanted to know why this popular professor suddenly disappeared.
Their 10,000-word investigative opus reported on the inner workings of the college’s Academic Advisory Council that had thrice denied Professor Hewitt a promotion. Cole and Hinrichs surreptitiously obtained the minutes of the Council meetings from the school’s office.
Through their investigative discovery, they learned that Hewitt, the only Black faculty member at the time and one of only eight women on the 100-person teaching staff, had been the victim of institutional racism and ingrained ethnocentrism. Her promotion was held to a different standard than other faculty members, questioning her research and teaching style.
As a result of their story, the Occidental community rallied around Hewitt and pushed to have improved racial representation and gender parity among the faculty.
Cole and Hinrichs were disciplined for wrongfully obtaining the meeting minutes.
A subsequent article in The Occidental in 2021 by Divya Prakash quotes Cole as saying, “In Occidental’s liberal arts mindset of the time, someone who spends their life writing about Plato and Aristotle is more valuable than someone who is trying to unearth what happened in the slave society in Greece and Rome.”
The ACLU offered to defend Cole and Hinrichs in the honor board trial. According to Prakash, Cole’s disciplinary penalty amounted to “a slap on the wrist.”
They received the LA Press Club award for Best Investigative Journalism in 1979 for their work.
In 2021 Occidental College announced that an anonymous gift of $500,000 will permanently endow the Mary Jane Hewitt Department Chair in Black Studies.
Sheryl is Local News Pasadena's Publisher and Pasadena Media Foundation's Founder. When not saving local news, she devotes her spare time to finding the best meatloaf in town.
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