"The world is our oyster," slick TV suit Hank Price told Intro to 21st Century Marketing students Friday with a twinkle in his glassy eyes.
Price, while reportedly no match for Steve Duke boytoy Ed Baron in bed, had quite a twinkle to his smooth speech. Decked out in head-to-toe black, he seemed to offer a Faustian bargain to his intrepid audience of young journalists: Adapt with the rest of the media and become adept across many platforms or you won't have a job.
Soon thereafter, however, he seemed to veer into the Lavinespeak students have been saturated with for weeks. "In the future," he said, "everyone's going to be a content producer or content seller."
He then proceeded to gush about the "ambitious" plans Lavine has layed out, saying that "Lavine is doing something for Medill that no other journalism school in the country is yet doing."
Price may yet be the Rachel to Lavine's Ross, or, if you will, the Baron to Lavine's Duke.
But reports were that Lavine's interest in Price was solely to ensure that parents, many of whom visited the class due to concurrent scheduling with Family Weekend, were not treated to another love-in between the Duke and the Baron that might jeopardize the Dean's monopoly on the future of journalism (or at least 180 kids' parents' $45k/year.)
The situation underscored the tension between Lavine and Duke for control of the new-fangled class. Though the Dean helmed its development and sees the class of 2010 as his group of highly-educated lab rats, Duke was given the reins while Lavine sat in the back of the Fisk lecture hall. Today, however, marked the first time one of his proxies has directly stepped in to right the ship.
Duke, left listless by the students' captivation with Price, wandered the aisles like a bald Vanna White, handing out mikes to students with questions.
A key indicator of who wins the battle for control of the class may be which guest speaker's words worm their way into the all multiple-choice midterm next week.
Price, whose return remains up in the air, left the freshmen amiably, saying "usually they don't let me talk to undergraduates because you have your whole careers ahead of you."
Anything to avoid another in-class reacharound sesh, we guess.
Friday, October 13, 2006
Dispatch from Medill: Lavine:Price::Duke:Baron?
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2 comments:
My favorite part of the entire lecture (ok, so I attended half of it. My favorite part of the first half) was hearing my father call out Medill at the end for pandering to all of the now $45,000 poorer parents in attendance. The essence of Hank Price's entire speech was, "Medill is the greatest thing since sliced bread. And it's a good thing too, because if your kids were anywhere else, they'd be destined to live in a box with the rest of the decent newspeople soon to be replaced with robots."
l-a-v-i-n-e
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