Will Norton
Will Norton (UI SJMC Ph.D. 1974)
By Bob Lewis
In June of 1970, Will Norton traveled to Simpson County, Miss., where he stayed in the guest house of John Perkins. In a 3,000-word recollection written decades later, we learn that Perkins was jailed as he posted bond for several Black students from Tougaloo College, who were arrested after they participated in a peaceful march the afternoon of Feb. 7, 1970, in Mendenhall, MS.
Perkins and the students had been beaten, stomped, kicked, and cudgeled by a dozen Mississippi Highway Patrolmen in the Rankin County Jail in Brandon, Miss. When reports came that the FBI was headed to the jail, they forced the detainees to mop up their blood and clean their wounds for their booking photos. Then, they brutalized them again.
As Perkins was fingerprinted, an officer put the muzzle of a pistol against his head and pulled the trigger, the hammer clicking inertly on an empty chamber. Another officer bent the two middle prongs and shoved the outer two into Perkins’s nose until blood poured.
Will’s story in Campus Life magazine was judged the best feature story of 1971 by the Evangelical Press Association. The enduring message: people beaten and treated like animals somehow found grace and love abundant enough to overcome unspeakable pain, hatred, and hardship.
• • •
“I’m a missionary kid,” Will said in a November 2024 conversation. “Missionary kids, the research shows, try to build bridges. You live in a different culture, so you try to understand that culture.”
He lived in the Belgian Congo until age 8. It was a country under authoritarian colonial rule, effectively a Roman Catholic theocracy. Protestant families were outsiders, he said. “I began to realize how important freedom of expression and freedom of religion are.”
Will was in six different schools in six grades. He earned his B.A. in history, with honors, in 1963 from Wheaton College (IL.) with minors in English and education and pursued advanced degrees at Indiana University and Garrett Theological Seminary. He was sports editor at the Wheaton Daily Journal, on the sports staff of the Chicago Tribune, and managing editor of Christian Life Publications in Wheaton, IL. In 1971, he enrolled in the doctoral program of the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communications.
“Iowa was the perfect place,” Will said. Malcolm MacLean, “director of the School of Journalism was one of the first five to earn a Ph.D. in mass communications. I learned a whole lot of communication theory…. he was one of the authors who built the feedback model of communication.”
“He did the computation for his dissertation before computers really were developed. It took him a whole year.
“(MacLean) was a very big empirical researcher who … became much more theoretical saying, ‘We don’t need to do a whole lot of empirical studies until we build communication theory.’”
Will received his Ph.D. in 1974. Iowa forged the foundation for a career in which research defined teaching and service to enhance student learning. He gained additional practical experience by working as the managing editor of The Daily Iowan, the independent daily campus newspaper, and then as its publisher.
In 2001, Will wrote “Malcolm MacLean Jr: Ahead of His Time and Ahead of Our Time.” Will explained that MacLean believed graduates of journalism programs needed a broader educational base. They should leave college with solid grounding in complementary disciplines such as social and political science, history, economics, art, and literature. This quote from MacLean would feel familiar to Will’s thousands of students:
We spend much too much time trying to teach our undergraduates mechanical matters such as spelling and style, which might be better handled by self-instructional approaches. We don’t have them read or write, especially read, nearly enough. We tend to limit their writing to the amount we can correct, as though they could learn nothing from writing that is not corrected by a teacher.
In the late summer of 1974, Will embarked on his first full-time journalism education post at the University of Mississippi, and his career has been focused on research defining teaching and service to enhance student learning.
• • •
Jesse J. Holland spent his early childhood in Orange Mound in Memphis, TN., one of the nation’s first Black neighborhoods, before his family moved to Holly Springs, MS., half an hour’s drive north of Oxford.
Will began recruiting him as a high school sophomore, but the competition was intense. Holland had been accepted by prestigious universities, including Harvard.
Holland said he wanted preparation in print, audio, and video, and the only school that offered him practical experience at a campus daily newspaper, a ’round-the-clock campus radio station, and its own television news program was in his backyard. He was hired at The Oxford Eagle, as a freshman thanks to Will’s recommendation, won a statewide award that year for the best reporting series, and earned his degree after a year as editor-in-chief of the campus paper, The Daily Mississippian.
“I give Will credit for anything I have done in journalism,” Holland said. “He was the first person to say to me, ‘You can do this, I will help you get started but you need to work at it.’”
Holland covered Congress and the White House for the Associated Press and was the first African American to cover the U.S. Supreme Court full-time for AP. He earned a Master of Fine Arts from Goucher College in 2012, left AP in 2019, and teaches journalism at Georgetown University. He has written almost a dozen books.
• • •
Ronnie Agnew, general manager, New Jersey Advance Media, came to campus in the early 1980s from Saltillo, MS. It was Will’s brand of tough love that set him on a trajectory to become a top print and broadcast news executive.
“There was no way to fake it with Dr. Norton,” Agnew said. “He had this innate ability to spot people with potential. I never saw a person fight harder for students…, but he pushed you to the edge.”
• • •
Angel Jennings, assistant managing editor for culture and talent at the Los Angeles Times, got placed in a high school journalism class at her school in Prince George’s County, MD., and promptly tried to get out of it.
Her request was refused, and she helped revive a school newspaper that had been dormant for 10 years. When Will and one of his University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) faculty, Joe Starita, learned of Jennings, they offered her a full scholarship.
Jennings’ first airplane ride was a flight to Lincoln (NE), she said.
Will and Starita set her up with work-study programs at the university that supplied Jennings with money beyond the basics the scholarship covered. They pushed her to get clips working for the campus newspaper and then to earnestly pursue summer newspaper internships.
Jennings was an intern at the Shreveport (Louisiana) Times, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The New York Times and The Boston Globe. She received a journalism degree from UNL in 2008. In the teeth of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, Jennings took a job as a news assistant in the Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau before landing at the Los Angeles Times where she recruits and develops journalistic talent.
• • •
Steve Riley (’80) built an award-winning career as an investigative reporter and editor at the Daily Journal, Tupelo, The Clarion-Ledger, and the Raleigh News & Observer (N.C.) before going to Houston.
“I really was a late bloomer, coming from a really small school in a really small town, not really knowing much about anything when I got to college, and the first bright lights that attracted me were parties and women.”
“Will eventually convinced me of the necessity to get serious about my career,” Riley said.
Riley retired in 2021 as executive editor of the Houston Chronicle.
• • •
Fred Anklam, an assistant professor of professional practice at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, coaches student reporters and editors at the Columbia Missourian, an independent, non-profit newspaper affiliated with the journalism school.
In 1982, he was part of a reporting team that won a Pulitzer at The Clarion-Ledger by laying bare the woeful condition of Mississippi’s public schools. He then went to Washington, covering Congress, the White House and the Pentagon for USA Today, where he became a senior editor. He co-managed the development and launch of Mississippi Today, a digital-only publication.
The fork in the road for Anklam’s journalism journey came midway through his undergraduate days. “To me, it was the rigor of (Will’s) reporting course which got you prepared for the seriousness of the work you were doing,” he said.
“Halfway through the first semester that I took Advanced Reporting, I had to go in and say, ‘I’m going to withdraw.’
“Will said, ‘That’s a good thing because you’re not putting enough effort into this. You’re better than what you’re showing me.’
“I said that I’d just come back and take it again, and he said, ‘Yeah, you will if you want to graduate.’”
Will recalls that moment half a century ago with a tinge of remorse.
Will’s reporting classes were weighted with heavy news coverage and writing assignments parceled out according to beats. Daily reading requirements ranged from the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Journal Tupelo, Miss.) to the writings of Hunter S. Thompson in Rolling Stone. Pop quizzes on stories in those papers assured compliance.
“That’s the part that’s tough for a teacher and for an administrator. You want the student to be the best and you want the faculty member to be the best, and so the real issue is how do you keep from letting who you are get in the way of them being the best,” he said.
“If I had it to do all over again, Advanced Reporting wouldn’t be taught as hard as it was, but you guys probably wouldn’t have gotten as far as you did,” he said.
• • •
Leading what was then a Department of Journalism was a role that landed on Will’s shoulders in just his third year at the University of Mississippi. The department chair who hired him, the late Ronald T. Farrar, left to head the University of Kentucky School of Journalism and would later become a distinguished professor at the University of South Carolina.
In 1977, as an untenured assistant professor, Will was named the interim chair of the department. He became associate professor and permanent chair in 1979, and full professor nine years later.
“I lost most of my hair during those two years when I was the interim chair,” he said. “I had one faculty member come in during the mornings to complain about the person who was going to come in during the afternoon, and the guy in the afternoon, would fuss about the one who’d been in there in the morning.”
Nonetheless, it was a time of remarkable growth. Engagement with (and support from) Mississippi’s publishers, editors, and station managers flourished. Will secured grants from media leaders, including significant gifts from the Gannett Foundation and the Meredith Corporation. The department moved from its cramped quarters in Brady Hall, a squat, dilapidated structure that had served as a Civil War hospital. Many journalism students swore it was haunted.
The new home was the law school’s former quarters. Journalism enrollment more than doubled. Faculty with doctorates blended with seasoned media professionals on a diverse faculty as Ole Miss gained a reputation as a school for award-winning reporters, editors, broadcasters, and public relations professionals.
Among the faculty was Willie Morris, the former editor of Harper’s and a bestselling author of nonfiction books about the South — My Dog Skip, North Toward Home, The Courting of Marcus Dupree and many others.
• • •
Will was hired as dean of the UNL College of Journalism in 1990. The College’s endowment increased from $700,000 in 1990 to more than $16 million by 2009. The College relocated to a new home that had been bought and renovated with $8 million in donations, and Nebraska student journalists were annual fixtures within the top 10 of the Hearst Journalism Awards, known as the collegiate Pulitzer.
The College became an indispensable partner of Nebraska’s news industry, said Allen Beermann, retired executive director of the Nebraska Press Association who had served 24 years as Nebraska’s Secretary of State.
“(Will) was a sleuth. He was our version of the Central Intelligence Agency. He knew everything about everybody and whenever it happened,” Beermann said. “He was at all our functions, all our meetings and sessions and banquets and conventions. He would meet with groups of publishers and editors. He was in the family. The publishers revered him.”
• • •
UNL Professor Joe Starita still calls Will “a professor’s dream dean.” Starita led the college’s acclaimed depth reporting courses and stocked the world’s most respected publications with College alumni.
“When you didn’t need help, (Will) was nowhere around … because he trusted and believed in you,” Starita said, “but if you needed help, he would be right there. He’d roll up his sleeves and give you all the help you needed, and that’s atypical of most deans,” he said.
“We did outrageous things for a journalism college. I asked him one day, ‘What do you think about taking 10 or 12 of our best students to Cuba for a project?’ That’s something you would never ask a dean, but it was a normal thing to ask him,” Starita said.
“He not only jumped at the idea, he somehow wound up getting… $25,000 from a colleague or a friend or an associate or a friend of the college, and the next thing you know, we have 12 students roaming the streets of Havana!”
The project, he said, paired the finest of the college’s writing students with its best photography students and produced a 100-plus-page magazine that “won all kinds of national awards.”
Other projects would provide students with opportunities to report from venues as diverse as Paris and Sri Lanka.
• • •
Dirk Chatelain, a 2004 UNL graduate, spent 20 years with the Omaha World-Herald and is the author of 24th & Glory: The Intersection of Civil Rights and Omaha’s Greatest Generation of Athletes.
Chatelain’s non-fiction book, published in 2019, took root shortly after he graduated when he realized that in the depths of the Civil Rights Movement, the same Omaha neighborhood had produced some of the world’s most famous contemporary sports heroes, all of whom were Black: St. Louis Cardinals’ Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Gibson; Chicago Bears’ Hall of Fame running back Gale Sayers; and Nebraska Cornhuskers Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Rodgers, to name a few.
Chatelain knew the story was a great one and too much for a newspaper column, but the idea of writing a book intimidated him. Fortunately, he had remained in touch with Will.
“He really sparked my interest in that story,” Chatelain said. “He validated my discovery of that and pushed me to continue it because he cared a great deal about racial relations and the cultural dynamics in Nebraska, which can be … quite complex with little pockets of African American influence in a broader sea of white people.”
That book “became probably the best thing I’ve ever written.”
• • •
Jeff Zeleny, CNN’s chief national affairs correspondent, said Will made sure it wasn’t only Nebraska football that had big expectations and soaring achievement, but that journalism also did.
What gave many UNL journalism students an edge, Zeleny said, was the pipeline Will established with many of the nation’s premier news organizations, who found their way to Lincoln. Zeleny landed with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, where he immersed himself in serious journalism on a national scale in the early days of the Whitewater investigation of then-President Bill Clinton, a former Arkansas governor.
That led Zeleny to the Wall Street Journal and then the Chicago Tribune before he arrived at CNN in 2015 and became the White House correspondent during President Donald Trump’s first term.
• • •
Will and Charles Overby, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, former vice president of the Gannett Co, Inc., and former CEO of the Freedom Forum, traveled the world together.
“No matter the setting,” Overby said, “(Will) always cares foremost about ordinary people. His inquisitive nature is a driving force in his life.”
“His passion for students was one of his two compelling characteristics, the other being his zeal to live an authentic and humble Christian life.
“His enthusiasm for people and things around him is underscored by his exuberant laughter, when appropriate or even when it is not appropriate.”
• • •
Doug Anderson describes Will’s mischievous side that Overby mentioned.
On July 1, 1999 (Anderson’s first day as the new dean of the Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University), a receptionist nervously stepped into his office.
“I said, ‘What is it?’ and she said, ‘You have a call.’” Anderson said.
“I waited a second, and she didn’t elaborate, so I said, ‘Who is it?’
“Well, she sort of looked around and quietly said, ‘He didn’t give me his name, but he said he was calling about a gambling debt.’ I thanked her, shook my head, rolled my eyes and picked up my phone.
“The caller said nothing, but I recognized the uncontrolled laughter and, of course, it was Will.”
• • •
When Curtis Wilkie was an Ole Miss journalism student, the department had only five majors. They were taught by a faculty of two: a chairman and a professor.
In 1962 when Wilkie was a senior, rioters tried to prevent the enrollment of James Meredith. The ugly spectacle alienated him from his alma mater for decades.
Will noticed and, in 1990, invited Wilkie to speak at an alumni reunion on campus. Several years later, he was named a journalist-in-residence at the university, and he was still there when Will returned to Ole Miss from Nebraska in 2009 as the founding dean of the School of Journalism and New Media.
Enrollment ballooned when Will came back, Wilkie said.
By the spring of 2020, enrollment in the School’s journalism and integrated marketing communications programs was nearly 1,600.
• • •
Will renewed a strong bond with Mississippi’s news and communications professionals and the university.
Layne Bruce was the executive director of the Mississippi Press Association when Will returned. They made multi-day road trips together to visit the state’s publishers, reporters, and editors in their workplaces.
“We visited maybe six to 10 newspapers on each trip, and it really made an impact with the members,” Bruce said. “They could believe that I would show up.
“I’m paid to do that, but that the dean of journalism at Ole Miss would take two days out of his schedule to go to remote places in Mississippi and meet with one- or two-person news staffs… meant a lot to folks.
Listening to those struggling small-town papers led to the creation of student reporting expeditions in which six to eight student journalists were dispatched with faculty on reporting assignments over several days in those communities for their newspapers.
“It allowed them to … operate beyond their resources and do some impressive work for special editions or editorial projects,” Bruce said.
Those projects tackled in-state dilemmas such as the worsening crisis of hospitals and healthcare in rural areas and, in collaboration with the UNL, a thoroughgoing examination of how state government’s habitual disregard of climate change threatens Mississippi agriculture, energy, and other economic mainstay industries.
Top student journalists would fan out from Oxford to cover stories nationally and internationally, including Ethiopia and South Africa. Their work earned many awards for Farley Hall.
• • •
Will met Zenebe Beyene, assistant dean of the School of Journalism and Communications at Addis Ababa University, a little more than 20 years ago.
Zenebe intended to earn his Ph.D. in journalism in the United States, and Will sold him on UNL, but the U.S. embassy in Ethiopia rejected his visa request.
The logjam broke only after Will returned to Ethiopia bearing letters from top former State Department officials.
“If it had not been for Dean Norton, I would have never been in the United States, let alone in the position where I am,” he said.
At UNL, Beyene earned his master’s in journalism in 2007 and his doctorate in political science in 2012.
He returned to Addis Ababa University and served in the President’s office. In 2017, Will asked him to join the Ole Miss journalism faculty.
Zenebe is recognized internationally as an authority on media, violence, and conflict resolution, the representation of minorities in media, and on the role media play in emerging democracies. He was on a panel tied to the Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies in Oslo, Norway.
“For me (Will) is a person who preaches the Gospels with his deeds,” Beyene said. “I always see what a good Christian does in him.”
• • •
“You know, the older you get, the more you realize … you haven’t done it,” Will said.
“One of the good things about the last four years is knowing how difficult it is to have grace and forgive.
“That’s what an administrator’s role is. It’s to involve people who make mistakes and do things not always right.
Long-ago students, now captains of their own successful careers, look back with gratitude for his caring enough to speak truth to them and to extract from them a measure of excellence that their profession would demand.
• • •
Now 83 years old, much of Will’s focus is on forgiveness. He has regrets and he struggles to forgive, as his faith commands.
For guidance, he draws from venerated mentors. One is John Perkins, the Black pastor who had found a way to forgive white police officers who had battered and dehumanized him in 1970. Will visited him just two days before his interview for this story and shared an essay that Perkins penned at the age of 94. It included this paragraph:
The emphasis has to be on forgiveness. There is a God who has forgiven me, a fallen human being. While others may have had experiences that were not as discriminatory as those I experienced, I have to forgive them if I truly understand the meaning of forgiveness.
• • •
The other mentor is Will’s father, who endured his share of hardship and betrayal.
“About a month before he died, … I was with him and I said, ‘Dad, how do you forgive people who treated you so badly?’”
“He put his hand on the railing of the bed and then over his head, and he said, ‘If I’ve been forgiven, how can I not forgive?’”
Bob Lewis is a former student of Will Norton’s and a 1978 journalism graduate of the University of Mississippi. He edited a weekly in the Mississippi Delta and worked at dailies in Clarksdale, MS., and Jackson, TN., before beginning a 28-year career with The Associated Press. Lewis retired in 2019 after six years overseeing media relations for a major national law firm based in Richmond, VA. Today, he is a contributing political columnist for the Virginia Mercury.