Dr. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen
Interviewee: Dr. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen
Interviewer: Johanna Bringhurst
Description: Dr. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen joins Johanna to talk about how valuable student newspapers and yearbooks are to study American history. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Media. She received her Ph.D. in Mass Communication and History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and joined the University of Idaho faculty in 2019. In addition to media history, she teaches courses in public relations and strategic communications. As a media historian, she explores the cultural role that print products played in communities in the early 20th century. Part of Dr. Cieslik-Miskimen’s research has focused on media coverage of American high schools and the origins of high school journalism. She recently published a book chapter, " A Window into the World of Students: An Analysis of 1920s High School Student Newspapers ," and is currently working on a journal article about media coverage of high school student protests in the 1920s.
Date: 2024-03-13
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Johanna Bringhurst: Hello everyone, and welcome to context. This program is brought to you by the Idaho Humanities Council with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The views expressed here today do not necessarily represent those of the IHC or the NEH. My name is Johanna Bringhurst and joining us today is Dr. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen. Caitlin is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Media at the University of Idaho.
She received her PhD in mass communication and history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and joined the University of Idaho faculty in 2019. In addition to media history, she teaches courses in public relations and strategic communication as a media historian. She explores the cultural role that print products played in communities in the early 20th century. Part of doctor Cieslik-Miskimen's research has focused on media coverage of American high schools and the origins of high school journalism.
She recently published a book chapter called A Window into the World of Students, an analysis of 1920s high school student newspapers, and is currently working on a journal article about media coverage of high school student protests in the 1920s. Caitlin, thank you so much for joining us today to talk about your research.
Dr. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: Thank you so much for having me.
Johanna Bringhurst: First, I have to ask, how did you become interested in media and journalism?
Dr. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: I would say it all started in my high school. I was able to join my high school, had a monthly student newspaper, and I joined the staff of that student newspaper, in part because one of my English teachers really encouraged me to try try it out. And I fell in love with the idea of what newspapers do.
I enjoyed covering the community. I loved the process of writing newspaper articles and laying pages out, pulling together all these different elements to kind of create a snapshot of what was important and what life was like at a certain point in time. So this idea that newspapers can represent a community at a specific point in time, in a specific place, really resonated with me, throughout college.
So. Well, and as an undergraduate, I continued to study journalism. I became a lot more interested in the historical role that these print products play in helping people navigate their life. But also find meaning and understand what it's like to live in a community or be part of a group, at a particular point in time.
Johanna Bringhurst: So American high schools have not always published student newspapers. When did that really get going?
Dr. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: So it actually got going. A lot earlier than people thought. So before the newspaper was the high school magazine, and the magazine was something that was published in a small number of high schools, as early as the first few decades of the 19th century. So we're talking the 1830s or so. Some of these early student focused publications start to spring up.
The first high school newspaper, or what we would consider a newspaper, appears in the 1890s, in some, high schools in the Midwest. But it's really after World War One that high schools embrace student newspapers as a, as a is a valuable asset to the educational experience, but also as just a really valuable asset to the school community itself.
So by the 1920s, there's records of about 10,400 high school student newspapers published across the United States. And there's several surveys of the origins of high school newspapers. And in survey after survey, many of them point to 1918, 1919, 1920 is kind of this critical moment where high schools start introducing, these products, and these opportunities for their students.
Johanna Bringhurst: What did early student publications look like and what kind of information did they share there, really?
Dr. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: I mean, the best way to describe them is I mean, it's really all across the board. You've got some student newspapers, that look like very polished professional products. In fact, there was one to at least one student newspaper, this one published by Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, Indiana, that was published daily. So five times a week, in the 1920s.
This is wow, that was putting out, a newspaper that chronicled everything in the high school. And if you were to look at it side by side with the you know, more institutional media or the daily newspapers, that were published in these places, they look really similar. They had columns, they had headlines, they covered academics, they covered athletics, they covered what was going on in the different student, clubs and organizations.
But on the other hand, some of these, do not look that professional. They're very crude. They're haphazard. The design can vary from issue to issue. A lot of these publications originally were run by student organizations or student clubs. So there wasn't a journalism class that was putting out this newspaper. And when there wasn't a class, a putting out this newspaper, when it's a little bit more unstructured.
What? It's an extracurricular activity. The end product really depends on the amount of student labor and the amount of student effort that goes into it. One of the high schools that I've focused a lot of my research on, Superior Central High School in Superior, Wisconsin, had their student newspaper run each semester by a different club.
So on top of this club's responsibilities, they also had to put together the newspaper. And it really the quality of the paper, again, really depended on the students running it. They sometimes had really bad drawings. There were issues that had very little actual content. They were mostly, jokes that the students published or complaints about other student behavior in the lunchroom.
So there wasn't really a uniform understanding of what the high school paper should look like in the 1920s, as the number of them is really dramatically increasing. And that's one of the reasons that I think the decade is so fascinating because there's so many student run publications on the scene, but no one has quite figured out yet what to do with them, what they should look like, how they should be run and operated, and how they should be controlled, should the content be censored.
All of these questions are up for debate, so you get a really wide variety in the quality of the products that these students create.
Johanna Bringhurst: How did teachers and administrators believe student newspapers served students, or did they think that they were not a valuable part of the student experience?
Dr. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: So again, it's a little bit of a mixed bag. There is a if you look at the materials produced for teachers and school administrators at this point in time, there is a pretty strong belief that the newspaper was a valuable educational tool. And there were a couple of reasons why people were trying to sell it as an educational experience.
One of the biggest, reasons it could be so valuable was because newspapers promised to combine the learning outcomes of a lot of different classes. So it was a place where you could apply the lessons that you were learning in your English classes, for example. So spelling, grammar, writing with lessons you might be learning in civics or history about how to be a good citizen and what information, what information did people need to know in order to be active and engaged and well-informed citizens in a democracy?
Even down to math, how do you layout a page? How do you calculate how many words a story needs if it occupies so many column inches? So there was a big move to support these newspapers because they were a practical outlet for some of these, a bit more abstract concepts that were taught in a variety of different classes.
And that's not to mention that this is also, happening at a time where many high schools, especially your larger high schools, are looking for ways to expand their manual arts or vocational curriculum. So at this point in time, high schools are moving away from focusing solely on a college preparatory, liberal arts oriented curriculum to what we call a comprehensive curriculum.
And that just means that high schools were trying to educate all students, rather than just those who might be going to college. So as part of that, they tried to introduce classes like auto repair, sewing, stenography, but also printing and print production. So even if a school didn't have a print shop and I will say many more did, than you would think, the newspaper, in the process of putting it together, still satisfied some of those educational outcomes for those more manual arts and vocational oriented classes.
So there was this buy in again, that student newspapers were a really important educational tool. But a big question about how much faculty oversight should be given to them. And again, a lot of this is because these are really tricky products. Student newspapers tended not to succeed unless you had student buy in. And so students needed to think the paper was important.
They needed to contribute content, provide labor. A lot of schools sold subscriptions, which is where a lot of the money came from. So these weren't necessarily initially advertising supported publications. But, faculty and administrators in particular were somewhat reluctant to give free rein to the students to determine what content went into the newspaper. So while there was this, again, this belief that, yes, this is an essential part of a modern high school, there were a lot of questions to be worked out over.
How much oversight should the faculty have? How much control should be placed on the content that students publish? And should this be something that is run by the school principal or another administrator before it is printed and circulated? This is before students are really seen as having any sort of First Amendment rights. So this wasn't a First Amendment question.
This was really a question of how do we make sure students are producing a product that reflects well on them, but also well on the school itself?
Johanna Bringhurst: During the 1920s, high school students across the United States went on strike for different reasons. And you've written about the strike by students at Superior Central High School in 1927. Why did those students go on strike?
Dr. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: So I stumbled across this story when I read through every single issue of Superior's, only daily newspaper, the Superior Telegram, from 1922 1929 as part of my dissertation research. So I didn't know about this until I was reading through the issues from the spring of 1927. And what happened was, a beloved teacher was fired over openly criticizing the school board.
And a lot of her criticism rested on their gutting of this more classic liberal arts curriculum, specifically English literature classes, and replacing them with these classes that were focused much more on the practical applications of English lessons. So moving away from like literature analysis to purely focusing on spelling, grammar and composition. And her big complaint was that to do that really undermined the educational mission of the high school, but it also prevented all of the students from pursuing certain educational opportunities, whether they were college bound or not, to not expose them to literature was to really limit their futures.
The school board justified firing her with this changed direction in the curriculum. There was a substantial amount of outcry from parents and students over her firing. And when the school board didn't rescind its decision, the students walked out. And it started with about 800 to 900 students, who didn't show up. And it eventually grew to around 1300 students who did not attend classes.
It involved students from the, well, it was focused on one high school in the city. It did grow to encompass students from the other high school who struck in solidarity. So at its height, like I said, it was about 1300 students and they stayed away from school for about a month, in protest over the firing of this teacher.
And in a lot of, newspaper coverage of this early on when the parents are talking about this, parents were largely supportive of the action of their students because they didn't they agreed that to not give their children a education that might prepare them for college, even if college wasn't in the cards, was to deny them an opportunity.
And they wanted to give their students every opportunity and not kind of predetermine their career paths and what they were or weren't, capable of.
Johanna Bringhurst: It's amazing how the same issues are happening in high schools 100 years later. How did the students use print journalism to further their cause?
Dr. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: So again, it's interesting. Student newspapers are tricky to study because one, we don't know the level of faculty involvement. We don't know necessarily, unless there's records, the amount of censorship or other things that happened. But in superior, I kind of lucked out because their student newspaper advisor, who was the printing instructor for the school, wrote a lot about what he thought a journalism, or printing instructor or newspaper advisor should do.
In some of these publications that were circulated among other high school journalism and printing instructors and faculty newspaper supervisor. And he really advocated this hands off approach, that students should be allowed to produce something that feels authentic, that is a representation of their voices, and fostered this environment in the classroom where he was noted for stepping in when students seemed at risk of injuring themselves while operating the printing presses.
And focusing on the quality, right?
Johanna Bringhurst: Yeah, I hope so.
Dr. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: No one, as far as I could tell, no one did get injured. But in giving them a lot of free rein in terms of how they approached the things that they covered. So it's kind of in that atmosphere that these six students become the, the leaders of this strike. And all six were tied to the student, the student newspaper, as well as to the student yearbook.
So they were already really active in chronicling what life was like at Superior Central High School. So they were able to use their student newspaper to publish, before the decision to strike a series of editorials and letters to the editor from other students that was very critical of the school board in particular. And then as the strike wore on, these students also printed, kind of their own, their own a newspaper.
They called it a protest newspaper, that chronicled their version of events that refuted all of the claims that were being made about them. And also carried, excerpts from other newspapers that were supportive of the students action. And part of the goal here, there's kind of two goals of publishing this strike newspaper. One was to provide their own kind of counter-narrative to how they were being portrayed in the daily newspaper in superior, but also to get students to stick with this collective action.
A month is a long time to stay away from school and to continue to win support. So you'll see in this, in these newspapers and the material that they published, this effort to kind of convince everyone to hold the line, to not cross, the picketers and go back to school. And in the end, they were ultimately successful.
The teacher was reinstated. And then there were a series of reforms that were made, at the state level about what the school board could and couldn't do.
Johanna Bringhurst: I'm so happy to hear that the students ultimately, had their concerns, really considered and that they ended up being successful. You said that at the beginning, the parents and the community were kind of positive about this strike, but did that change over time? A month is such a long time for high school,
Dr. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: Yeah. So the first, if you look at the newspaper coverage of this in the first week, the newspaper, the Superior Telegram is largely supportive of the students action. It's treated as this, you know, this example of exactly what they want students to do. They're active, they're engaged. They're they're training to be future citizens who are invested in their community.
Success and are participating in collective action. The tone starts to change as the strike wears on. So my, you know, reading through this, you can guess that it's a lot easier to be supportive of this type of action when you only expect it to last for 3 to 5 days. You know, as you head into day ten, day 20, day 25, people start to lose support.
So, at least in terms of newspaper coverage, you see a shift away from talking about the students again, is like these active participants who are drawing on the lessons of their civics classes and drawing on the lessons of their history classes and putting that into practice, into being portrayed as immature, as petulant, as people who are talking out of line and don't actually have the authority to speak on this situation and how it impacts them.
I think the, one of one of the interesting pieces coming at that that you come across in the media coverage, is the proliferation of outside voices who start commenting on the actions of students that are being granted space in the newspaper. So, for example, the Superior Telegram ran an article that, compared to the striking students to Leopold and Loeb, two men in Chicago who killed a who killed, a child for for fun.
And basically to see if they could do it. That became kind of emblematic of the the concerns about youth in this new age. So to compare these strikers to murderers, was meant to show that if you don't exert control over young people now, the path that they might go down could be really detrimental to society.
So there's this stronger effort to characterize them not just as being immature, not just as being, you know, playing at politics. But to really raise community concerns about what might happen if you don't control these students and what might be some of the bigger, more negative impacts on the community itself.
Johanna Bringhurst: You also mention that other newspapers in the community were covering this strike. Did it receive coverage at like the state level or the national level?
Dr. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: Yeah. So, this strike occurred at, you know, toward the end of the 1920s. And if you were to look at the decade, there are a number of student strikes that are happening across the United States. So it's not just Superior, so Superior because it was so big and because it lasted for so long, it did attract attention from, the Milwaukee Journal, which was the leading newspaper in Milwaukee, Wisconsin's largest city.
But it also attracted coverage in The Nation magazine. The Associated Press covered it. The Saint Louis Post-Dispatch also covered it, in part because it seemed to fit this growing trend of student protest, and student activism. These strikes. And I found records of at least 25 of them across the country, were all happening for a variety of different reasons.
But it all seemed to point to this potential, for high school students to start speaking out more, about how this high schools were run and then really starts to point to this viewing, schools as a political institution.
Johanna Bringhurst: Did these larger papers, were they supportive of this students or were they also critical as time went on of their strike?
Dr. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: So they tended to not cover it in as much detail as the superior telegram did? So the Superior telegram wrote, more than 70 articles and ten editorials in the month long time span, basically, for this strike. And the Milwaukee Journal wrote a few articles and the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, only covered it once, but in a large, in-depth, piece for its Sunday magazine.
They were all largely supportive of the students. They saw kind of this fight as being something that was indicative of larger issues within the city, a city that didn't really know what it should be and wasn't quite willing to make the steps to invest in education, even though outwardly it said that education was really important to its future.
Part of the other, like negative portrayal of the actions of the school board here, were because part of the reason that this teacher was so outspoken was. Yes, because they were eliminating some of these English classes from the curriculum and changing the focus, but also because they had professed to do this under the guise of efficiency and needing to cut the budget.
But they found the money not for English classes, but to print their annual school board report on really expensive, high quality paper. So part of her.
Johanna Bringhurst: Oh, dear.
Dr. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: Wasn't just you're not teaching these classes that are enriching to students, but you're claiming this is about efficiency, yet you are increasing your salaries. You are paying for expensive paper for this yearly report. Is this really the best use of our resources when we're talking about, you know, future generations? And a lot of the larger publications kind of caught on to that.
But it wasn't all positive. The Albuquerque Journal wrote an editorial about this trend of student strikes in 1927 and said that the only strike a student should be participating in is one that's delivered to the their behind, in punishment for speaking out against their parents. So there are these.
Johanna Bringhurst: Oh dear.
Dr. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: Of criticism as well. So it's not uniformly supportive of the students, but these bigger pieces that likely attracted more readers, were, were positive or, in the case of the Associated Press, which covered a lot of, this strike through its Wire Service reports, they were largely those were largely neutral.
Johanna Bringhurst: After spending all of this time, you know, with Superior Central High School students reading their newspapers, studying this event, what are your big takeaways from this, from this event about the importance of student journalism?
Dr. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: I think student journalism, but more importantly, student voices are really important to listen to. There tends to be this effort to look at education in particular through this top down perspective. Right? We're interested in the classes that are taught how schools are run. What curriculum decisions are made, and that it's not to say that that isn't valuable.
But it's equally valuable to look at the voices that are being directly impacted by all of these decisions. How did students react? What did students do in these classes? If we're trying to get a good grasp on the role that education can play in a community specifically, but in society more generally, we need to pay attention to the voices of the students and look to see what they took out of this educational experience.
And it's not always going to be great, you know, like students may only be attending high school for the athletic and the social aspect of it, or that might be what they take away out of that experience. That doesn't make it any less meaningful, and it doesn't make it any less impactful. We need to consider that along with these other kind of big questions.
I think the other thing with student journalism, is especially as students have or as schools have become kind of these more political sites, again, going back to the 1920s, just, you know, as a set aside, this is the same decade that seeing the Scopes trial in Tennessee and fights over the teaching of evolution and how biology classes should be taught.
So there's this big tension between parents and the state in terms of who controls their child's education. But again, to not look at how students are responding to that is to miss a really important part. I remember being in high school and feeling frustrated that everyone's talking about, you know, all these things we should be doing and who we should be coming, but it never really felt like people were listening to us when we wanted to talk about what we would like to see happen, or what we would like to see in the future.
And there's something kind of comforting in knowing that students in the 1920s are also trying to have a voice in what the future is and what progress looks like in their communities. If only kind of the adults would listen to them. The other just, I guess, kind of quick historical caution, is sometimes we can look at activism for good.
But I should note that the other large and kind of most impactful strike of the decade happened in Gary, Indiana, at Emerson High School, when the entire high school went on strike over the forced integration, of Emerson by Black students. The students and their parents refused to attend classes until the Black students were removed and a Black only high school was built.
Despite concerns from the community about how this would make Gary look on a national scale, they caved to the students. So again, it was successful. I argue that not necessarily the best, you know, for the best outcome. But again, it just points to the impact that large scale activism can have, especially as it relates to education.
Johanna Bringhurst: It's really horrifying to think about. I really appreciate you adding in that caution, because you're right, sometimes we get carried away and want to really focus on activism in and of itself as a good. But it really depends on what you're agitating for, what you're seeking for. I also really appreciate your perspective on student voice. As we discussed earlier, it's amazing that 100 years later, a lot of these issues are still really relevant to high school students in 2024.
And I'm thinking about the current debate is happening here in Idaho about books and school libraries. And I honestly don't think I've heard any student perspectives on this. I don't think I've read or heard any students questioned about what kind of books they are comfortable having in their school library, and what kind of access to books they want to have.
So that's a really interesting insight to think about into these contexts.
Dr. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: Yeah. And especially, you know, we have limited, you know, certain committees in the state legislature have limited the amount of commentary that they're willing to hear from those who are 18 and under. So this question of who is allowed to speak, and who has a legitimate voice, it is a big question. And I think it's it's something that we need to think about, especially when we try to think about what is best for a community's future.
It's easy for us to do that without considering the people who are actually going to be living that future. And I think in looking at these student publications in the 1920s, you get a glimpse of the effort to at least insert their own ideas into these larger conversations about what a city should look like, in superior and lots of other small cities across the United States.
The 1920s was really this critical turning point for them, because many of them had very grand aspirations of what they could become. So they were really tied to these ideas of moderate like modernity and progress and these, you know, futures as big commercial and regional hubs. But a lot of those conversations, again, were happening without the voices of those who were supposed to be leading these places into these very bright futures.
Johanna Bringhurst: Or doing the work that would be required to build these futures. Yeah. Caitlin thank you so much. It's been such a treat to talk to you today. You've given us so many important insights to think about, and I definitely am wanting to get on Google and see if I can find my own high school newspaper. And to take a look back, and I, I agree with you.
I hope we do get to hear more student perspectives in the debates that are happening here in Idaho.
Dr. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: I would encourage anyone, save your student newspapers. They're really valuable. They're also really fun to look at. And again, just because something doesn't grapple with big questions doesn't make it valuable for our historical understanding. I enjoyed reading the strike newspapers and these really well-written and well articulated arguments against what this school board is doing. Just as much as I enjoyed reading jokes that I did not understand, from the 1920s about dumb things freshmen did in the school cafeteria, so sometimes we can try to think only in terms of these big, important stuff, these things, and we miss that.
We can also learn a lot from these jokes and from these really poorly drawn cartoons and all this other stuff that seems a bit more frivolous, but can also help us capture, you know, an insight into the values and the expectations. And also some of the big questions that that kids were dealing with, in the 1920s and today.
Johanna Bringhurst: Perfect. So well said. Thank you so much, Caitlin. It was so great to be with you today.
Dr. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: Great. Well, thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed our conversation.
Johanna Bringhurst: Me too.