Seminar courses give students a taste of the real world

Phil Busse has quite an eclectic resume: attorney, news editor, mayoral candidate, adjunct professor, blogger and more recently, campaign-sign stealer.

Phil Busse has quite an eclectic resume: attorney, news editor, mayoral candidate, adjunct professor, blogger and more recently, campaign-sign stealer.

During the 2008 presidential election, Busse wrote an online essay in which he confessed to stealing McCain-Palin signs from houses along a highway. The revelation later led to his resignation from his teaching position at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, where he was teaching a course on media studies.

All this experience makes Busse, the co-founder and former managing editor of the Portland Mercury, a good fit to teach a weekend seminar class called “Media and Social Reality” at Portland State this term.

A longtime media advocate, Busse is also the executive director for the Northwest Institute for Social Change, which hosts a dozen student-journalists every summer to study the media and get the chance to work with professionals in the business.

“I have worked with PSU students in the past through my program, which students can also earn PSU credits [through],” Busse said. “I enjoy working with them and thought it would be fun to do so again.”

Through his program, Busse got in touch with Cynthia-Lou Coleman, the chair of the Communication Department at Portland State, where the two talked about the possibility of having him teach a course in the department.

“When it comes to hiring faculty to teach one weekend class, we like to use people from the community who have experience,” Coleman said. “Students tell us all the time that they really benefit a lot from it.”

According to Coleman, under Portland State policy, seminar professors are hired by the department chair, which does not require committee approval.

“Phil brings a lot of experience to the classroom as an editor and an attorney,” Coleman said of her decision to have Busse in the department. “He’s highly qualified to teach a course on media.”

According to Busse, the two-credit weekend seminar class will look at how the media portrays reality and how it led political agenda and social expectation. 

“I have been on the receiving end of media portrayal and it gives me insight into the gap between what is reality and what is perceived, and how the media works as a mediator between those two,” Busse said.

Another adjunct faculty member who also has a strong presence in the local media is Ken Boddie, a news anchor and reporter for TV’s KOIN Local 6. Aside from delivering news on KOIN, Boddie has also been teaching a course called “Introduction to Television News” (SP 299) at Portland State for the past four years.

Like Busse, Boddie has an interest in sharing some of his experience working in the media to students.

“I happen to know Dan Bernstine, the former president of Portland State, and I expressed my interest to him,” Boddie said. “To my surprise, a couple of weeks later I got a call from the Communication Department. So I came in and made a few proposals and we picked this course and have been doing it since.”

Boddie said his class is designed to teach students what he does everyday, with each week focusing on a different aspect of the media business.

“One week we’ll talk about reporting, how to go out, do a story and make deadline, to getting the story out on the air,” Boddie said. “The next week it’ll be producing and how to help producers determine what stories go in, and the length and order of the stories.”

Students in Boddie’s class not only get an education but a look at the real world.

“I will also bring them down to see how a television station works and bring in people who do the news to talk about their experiences,” he said.

Boddie’s hope for the class is to be able to serve as a window into the professional aspect of the business. Like Busse, a fellow journalist, giving students an accurate view of reality through the media is what Boddie aims for.

“I try to make our class as practical as possible from the standpoint of ‘this is how we do it,’ as opposed to ‘this is what you read in the textbook,'” Boddie said. “Most of what I teach is based upon my own experience.”