Philip Merrill College of Journalism | University of Maryland

Haynes Johnson Appointed to Maryland's Knight Chair in Journalism

For Immediate Release April 15, 1998

COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- Haynes Johnson, best-selling author, national TV commentator and former Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with The Washington Post and The Washington Star, has been chosen to fill the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of Maryland.

As a fulltime faculty member at the College of Journalism, he will teach, write, advise students and oversee periodic reports on coverage of government, politics and public affairs. Johnson, considered one of the nation's leading political journalists, will join the Maryland faculty in August. He replaces Hodding Carter III, the first Knight Chair holder, who left Maryland in February to become president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in Miami.

Johnson, in addition to teaching and advising students, will be a contributing editor for American Journalism Review, the national monthly magazine published by the journalism school.

"Haynes Johnson has been among a small number of extraordinarily talented journalists who have set the pace for others in recent times with his distinguished reporting, analysis and political history," said Reese Cleghorn, dean of the Maryland journalism school. "He will add great strength to our public affairs reporting program."

Maryland's College of Journalism operates a unique public affairs reporting program for graduate and undergraduate students that includes faculty-directed student news bureaus in Washington and in Annapolis, the state capital. The bureaus' product, Capital News Service, is used by newspapers and broadcast stations in the Maryland-D.C. region. Recent graduates of the public affairs reporting program are working for major news organizations throughout the country.

The College's Knight Chair in Journalism was created in 1995 with a $1.5 million grant from the Knight Foundation, at that time the largest amount ever given by the foundation for an endowed chair. There are now 11 endowed Knight Chairs in Journalism at universities throughout the U.S.

Johnson won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for distinguished national reporting of the civil rights crisis in Selma, Ala., while a reporter for The Washington Star. It marked the first time in the history of the award that a father and son had won Pulitzers. (Malcolm Johnson won in 1949 for his "Crime on the Waterfront" articles in the New York Sun that formed the backdrop for the Academy Award-winning film, "On the Waterfront.")

Haynes Johnson was on the original panel of PBS's "Washington Week in Review" and appears regularly on the "Historians" panel with Doris Kearns Goodwin and Michael Beschloss on "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer." He has written or co-authored 13 books, among them the best-selling "Bay of Pigs" (1964), "Sleepwalking Through History" (1991) and "The System" (with David Broder) in 1996.

Johnson holds a bachelor's degree in Journalism from the University of Missouri, a master's in American history from the University of Wisconsin (graduating first in his class) and an honorary doctorate from Wheeling (W. Va.) Jesuit University. He worked for the New York Sun while attending high school and was a reporter for the Wilmington (Del.) News-Journal before spending 12 years with The Washington Star.

After joining The Washington Post in 1969, he worked as a national correspondent, an assistant managing editor and columnist until 1994. He was twice appointed Ferris Professor of Journalism and Public Affairs at Princeton University, where one of his students was current Clinton Administration press secretary Mike McCurry. Johnson has also been a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, a Regents Lecturer at the University of California Berkeley and a Public Affairs Fellow at Duke University, and has taught political communications and journalism part-time at George Washington University.

Established in 1950, Knight Foundation makes national grants in education, journalism and the field of arts and culture. The foundation, with assets of $1.2 billion, paid out grants in 1997 totalling $42 million. Included in that amount were grants supporting organizations in 26 communities where the late Knight brothers, Jack and Jim, were involved in newspaper publishing. The foundation is wholly separate and independent of those newspapers.

For more information contact: Frank Quine, College of Journalism (301-405-2394)