happy trails

New professorship will honor Hugh Cunningham

by Martin Schram

	Cunningham (center) with Bob Haiman, JM 1958 (right) and Gary Williams, JM 1966 View more pictures from the Celebration >>

At first glance, setting out to do a piece about Hugh Cunningham, there seem to be many grand stories.

There's the 1950s story told by Dan Rather in his autobiography, The Camera Never Blinks, about a Texas kid who never would have become a journalist but for the extraordinary efforts of a young professor at Sam Houston State Teachers College.

Time and again, the stories they tell are about a sometimes-crusty, yet always-caring professor whose drive for excellence and intolerance of errors was exceeded only by a boundless enthusiasm for a profession that is simply about pursuing the truth and reporting it to the people. His enthusiasm was infectious--and usually incurable. Once you caught it, you had it for life. That was probably his greatest gift.

“The dream begins, most of the time, with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called truth. Mine was named Hugh Cunningham.”
That's how CBS Evening News anchor Rather chose to begin the first paragraph of his autobiography. “…How Hugh Cunningham happened to wind up there, with a master's degree from the Missouri School of Journalism, young, with a mind that could light up a room, I do not know. But it was a break for me. Otherwise, I would not have lasted in college longer than three weeks and most likely would not have gone on to whatever career I have had.

Cunningham taught journalism at Sam Houston State and then put it into practice for two years as editor, in Texas, of the Bryan Daily Eagle. That's what he was doing in 1955, when Rae O. Weimer, founder of the College of Journalism and Communications at UF, contacted him.

“It was not easy to coax Cunningham away from the editorship of the Bryan Daily Eagle…when I set out to establish a new kind of professional journalism school,” Weimer said in 1990. Cunningham agreed to join the UF faculty as long as he could also continue working on newspapers. And that's how Cunningham maintained two parallel careers. He was a journalism professor in the fall, winter and spring. He was a newspaper editor and/or reporter during the summer.

“Hugh Cunningham is a complete journalist who has had a unique combined career as a newspaperman and teacher,” Weimer said Cunningham was “one of the outstanding teachers in the field.”

…No wonder, after arriving at UF, Cunningham created two unique courses:

Public Affairs Reporting--The entire class covered a public affairs story (city council meeting, court trial, interview of a public official).

Applied Journalism--It was an unassuming name for an unprecedented course that was probably Cunningham's most impressive academic contribution. One day a week, he and his students arrived at The Gainesville Sun at dawn, worked all day to put out the entire newspaper. Of course, all the responsibility and pressure fell upon Cunningham, who spent his Thursdays in perpetual motion as professor and editor-in-chief. All deadlines had to be met. All stories and headlines had to fit. And mainly: No story or headline could be erroneous--let alone, libelous.”

… Many people retire by heading south to Florida. In 1989, Cunningham retired as a Florida professor--and headed north to Alaska. He spent part of 1990 as editor of the Anchorage Times. Today he's back in Gainesville, occasionally instructing by writing salty letters of critique about some journalistic effort that appeared in the Sun.

Dean Terry Hynes missed the Hugh Cunningham era. “One of the first people I ever heard about when I got here was Hugh Cunningham,” said Hynes. “Members of the faculty and the alumni would talk about what a deep, deep impression he had made on them: Spell the names right; get all the facts; see how they fit together. A standard of excellence. A toughness--but also a civility in the way he taught that symbolized what fair, balanced, accurate reporting means.What I associate with Hugh Cunningham is the very highest quality of journalism.”