Fall 2009 Issue

 

Harold Koplowitz

A different path

Writer’s graduate degree led to teaching gig – and material for his first book in 27 years

Harold Koplowitz

 

By Roland Klose

Harold Koplowitz is hardly the first person rocked by a midlife crisis. He may be one of the few to go public about it.

More than a decade ago, the then-40-something ex-journalist decided to pack his bags, leave Illinois, and chase his dreams in the land of make believe. His goal was to jump-start his writing career; to pay the bills, Koplowitz edited for a news service and taught on the side.

The teaching was supposed to be the easy part, but things didn’t turn out that way. Koplowitz – a child of the Sixties who still retains a goodly share of that era’s optimism and confusion – faced daunting challenges in the classroom, and ultimately left teaching in 2002.

The experience, however, left Koplowitz with something every writer craves –great material. His just-released “Blackspanic College” – an account of his years at an inner-city community college in Los Angeles – is his first book in 27 years, and it’s an entertaining, insightful read that wrestles with awfully tough issues.

If Koplowitz’s name is vaguely familiar, it could be because he worked in Springfield as a journalist, state government spokesman, and college instructor. While here, he also earned a master’s degree in public-affairs reporting from Sangamon State University (now the University of Illinois Springfield).

More likely, though, Koplowitz is remembered for his first book, “Carbondale After Dark,” which has acquired something of a cult status in some Illinois circles since its release in 1982.

Koplowitz grew up in Carbondale, and after a brief time on the West Coast, he returned home to attend Southern Illinois University, and found himself sucked into the whole protest and party scene.

Sex, drugs and rock & roll – wrapped in a veneer of youthful righteous indignation -- were his preoccupation, and he wrote about those issues in sometimes painful-to-read essays, some of which are included in “Carbondale After Dark.”

It’s said that if you remember the Sixties, you weren’t there – and that’s probably why “Carbondale After Dark” still resonates with Baby Boomers who attended SIU. For them, the slender volume is a scrapbook of bizarre times in an otherwise typically conservative Midwestern town. For most others, the book could be described as an odd artifact from a time when freedom and self-indulgence were synonymous.

Koplowitz, in a recent telephone interview, says his intent was simply to produce an anthology of his early writing, but figured there wouldn’t be much of a market. A history of Carbondale’s strip, on the other hand, ensured an audience – albeit a limited one.

There are accounts of panty raids and protests gone wild, mayhem fueled by alcohol and drugs, and all-around debauchery and bad behavior. Koplowitz takes note of most of the unusual characters of the time – a hairy anarchist known as “Freedom Man,” a local transvestite, dope heads, beleaguered university and city officials, streakers, musicians and owners of the various bars that populated the area along Illinois Avenue known as “the strip.”

Koplowitz says he turned to writing and journalism as a way to understand and explain the world; it was his way of questioning authority.

Copies of the first edition are priced as high as $120 on eBay. In 2007, Koplowitz reissued a 25th anniversary edition, which includes a foreword by actor Dennis Franz (“NYPD Blue,” SIU Class of 1970).

During his time in Carbondale, Koplowitz founded and edited a campus literary magazine, nonSequitur; he also served as editor in chief of SIU’s student paper, The Daily Egyptian.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in journalism in May 1977, he left Carbondale for Springfield to become a reporter for Illinois Times, a local weekly. His time there, he says, was “very stressful” because he made every rookie mistake possible – and managed to stay in the editor’s doghouse all the time. It wasn’t just what he was writing: “He didn’t like it when I came in late – he saw it as a sign of disrespect.”

Koplowitz returned to Carbondale to work for the Southern Illinoisan as a feature writer and beat reporter, then worked as a correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, covering southern Illinois. He liked that job, because he was able to select the big stories in the region, but as a stringer, he didn’t have the benefits of full-time employment – and the Post made it clear he shouldn’t expect a staff job. “We don’t hire stringers,” he remembers being told.

“I was going nowhere fast,” so he decided to return to Springfield in 1987 to pursue a graduate degree. The PAR master’s program places degree candidates with Illinois news organizations, giving them real-life experience covering public policy issues and breaking news; during Koplowitz’s internship he worked for the State Journal-Register.

“It was a great experience,” Koplowitz says. “I got to cover the Statehouse and meet a lot of people.” But when he started looking for work, it was mostly small dailies that were interested, so he took a temporary job as public information officer for the state. A six-month contract turned into an eight-year stint with the Illinois Department of Rehabilitation Services. He was writing speeches, annual reports and press releases. During that time he ghostwrote Illinois: The State of the State for Gov. Jim Thompson. He also taught composition at Lincoln Land Community College.

Koplowitz says he was poorly suited for government work. “I did not have a positive attitude. I was not a people person. It’s fair to say I loathed that job.”

He was single, childless and still stuck in “a dead-end job in a no-fun town.” His journalism career, he felt, had been lackluster; his work as a state-government flack was “stultifying.”

Lonely and bored, he met a woman online – in America Online’s chat room – who “lured me to the city of second chances.” He enrolled in film school, found a job as an editor for City News Service – a job he still holds – and also wrote columns for Entertainment Today, a now-defunct Burbank weekly. (He started as a video game reviewer for $15 a week. He’d never played a video game before and had to plunk down $2,000 for a computer fast enough to run the programs he was reviewing.) Needing additional income, he applied for a teaching job in the Los Angeles community college system, which had nine campuses.

A year later he was offered a part-time position to teach introductory journalism classes at Los Angeles Southwest College. Along with the classroom responsibilities, he became the faculty advisor to the school’s student newspaper, The Explorer.

Southwest – its name, as well as names of most individuals there, is changed in the book – is located in one of the toughest sections of Los Angeles, an area of grinding poverty, drug use and gang activity. Adding to the tension, it’s a predominately African-American institution in an area that’s increasingly Hispanic.

He organized students into something that resembled a newspaper staff, but it was a struggle. Poverty seemed to be an overarching enemy – some students were enrolled just to live off their loans, some were in his class because they were told it was an easy way to get a writing credit. One of the student paper’s stalwarts, Blackjack Loco, was an ex-gang member who’d just gotten out of prison; another student staffer used the paper’s computer to surf porn sites; another once brought her baby to class.

Like other faculty, Koplowitz had to adjust to a dysfunctional system that has more to do with the recent mortgage-lending crisis than with education.

As he writes in “Blackspanic College”:

“Education loans to students were drying up because numerous students had used the system to live off student loans but not attend classes until they maxed out their eligibility. Then, a goodly number defaulted on the loans. Then there was the matter of faculty collusion, if not complicity, in another aspect of the scam. To keep the spigot flowing and avoid having to repay the loans, students had to stay in school, and at least one teacher I know gave passing grades to some students who were attending classes seldom if at all. And I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. All the part-time teachers – nearly two-thirds of the faculty at the time – had a financial incentive to inflate enrollment so their classes wouldn’t get canceled. The same incentive applied to grade inflation – teachers who gained a reputation for being tough graders often saw enrollment in their classes go down.”

In such an environment, it was almost impossible to marshal a regular staff to produce a paper – students would arrive late, or not at all, to class – so Koplowitz ended up editing, writing and designing much of the paper himself.

“I was trying to teach by modeling – hoping they’d start doing the work themselves. Instead what many learned was to let me do the work,” he says.

Sometimes his efforts met with disastrous results. Trying to jazz up a lede, he wrote that Al Gore was “slumming’ when he brought his presidential campaign to the college campus. The dig was aimed at the Gore campaign; instead, it was felt at the college, where people didn’t appreciate being told they lived in a slum. He apologized to his class, only to discover few, if any, of them had even read the newspaper they produced.

It wouldn’t be the first time his lack of circumspection caused him trouble – one wisecrack got him in a jam with some activist students, who pushed for his termination. He chafed at being called a racist, but still found a reason to smile when one of his accusers circulated a broadside that dubbed him “A fungus among us.” Although many students and the administration were in his corner, he regrets not taking a more forceful stance in his own defense, choosing instead to remain “above the fray.” But being called a racist stung, and it took years to get past the hurt and anger. That’s what motivated him to write about his experience, but what he’s produced is a straightforward, sympathetic account devoid of resentment or ill will.

Koplowitz says he turned to writing and journalism as way to understand and explain the world; it was his way of questioning authority. What he had difficulty understanding was that his students, those who seemingly had more reason to want change, didn’t see journalism as making a difference. For them, there was an overwhelming sense of powerlessness; that “things weren’t ever going to change.” Still, despite the hardships these students endured in their personal lives, they were the happiest bunch he’d ever been around – they lived in the present, with all the camaraderie one associates with wartime conditions.

Ultimately, it was California’s financial problems and cuts in higher-education funding – not his teaching – that cost him his job. He’s stayed in touch with some of his students, some of whom ended up back in prison. Venus, who showed promise, still works for the California Department of Motor Vehicles. Another former student is showing success in his photography business. That none of his students ended up in journalism is a disappointment, but given the state of the profession, Koplowitz isn’t surprised.

The emphasis in journalism education seems to be less on critical thinking and the building blocks of the craft, he says, and more on the technology. “We’re in a transitional stage now. Colleges seem to be looking for journalism teachers who know how to Twitter and Facebook.” The 58-year-old ex-hippie says that while he knows his way around social networks, he’s much more interested in “old-fashioned journalism”: teaching students how to get the facts, how to find and develop sources, and how, most of all, to think critically.

Koplowitz says he’s already hard at work on his next book, tentatively titled “Misadventures in Journalism,” which will tell the stories behind the stories he’s worked on.

He’s already got his opening line: “I love journalism, but journalism does not love me.”

Roland Klose is the former editor of Illinois Times.