A few weeks ago, toward the end of the first semester of classes, about thirty journalism students assembled in the third-floor student lounge to compile a list of complaints about the school, which they eventually presented to Dean Joan Konner. They were busily agreeing that the school needed more Hispanics, more scholarship money for African Americans, a more culturally sensitive faculty and more awareness about aids, when a stranger crept in and took a seat. The stranger must have liked what he saw: all these prosperous-looking youths so preoccupied with their problems that they were blind to the events right in front of their eyes. Unnoticed, the stranger rifled through a student's purse. The lounge wasn't much bigger than a squash court, so he deserves some sort of prize for audacity.
It was only when the stranger made for the door that one of the students—the woman who'd been robbed—finally noticed him and shouted. The stranger raced out the door, down the stairwell, past the bronze plaque, past the bronze busts of Joseph Pulitzer, past the stucco reliefs of the Gods of Journalism and out into the night, chased by a dozen or so less swift journalism students. Standing near the fateful spot in the lounge where she and her classmates had been sitting, Kaue Noel Kelch-Mattox related the story to me. “We were literally ten to fifteen seconds behind him, but then he just disappeared,” she said. “I never would have thought this sort of thing could happen in my own student lounge.”
“Who wrote the story?” I asked. The students were required to hand in homework articles each week. The student newspaper was also sorely in need of material.
“No one,” she said. "There wasn't a story.”
