Teacher or Tyrant? : Education: Even as he retires after 28 years, journalism professor Melvin Mencher’s tough classroom tactics still sharply divide his students and colleagues.

It was the first day of classes at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in 1971, and a group of 150 aspiring reporters listened eagerly as one teacher after another welcomed them with open arms to New York City.

They expected more of the same when the last faculty member rose to speak. He was barely five feet tall, wore a rumpled black turtleneck and seemed friendly enough. But Melvin Mencher was not about to make them feel at home.

“It’s amazing how much power all of you people will have in five years or so,” he said in a flat, nasal voice, his steel-blue eyes sweeping the room. “It’s also amazing to realize that 90% of you aren’t worth a damn. “

There was stunned silence, and some faculty members shook their heads. All eyes focused on Mencher, who began stroking his black beard and seemed to be enjoying himself immensely.

“Nobody’s going to like my class,” he warned. “You’ll be miserable. But maybe you’ll learn something.”

Then, as now, Mencher was true to his word. For 28 years, until his retirement this month, he ruled the roost at one of America’s most prestigious graduate schools of journalism. Like a drill sergeant, he pummeled his students into submission and turned some of them into first-class reporters. He was petty, abrasive, cranky, chauvinistic--and brilliant.

Call it the “Paper Chase” of journalism--except Mencher was tougher and infinitely more cutting than the fictional Prof. Charles Kingsfield of the Harvard Law School.

“This man has been a very important figure in our business because he’s the kind of teacher you never, ever forget,” said Newsweek Editor Maynard Parker, who studied under Mencher in 1963. “I remember him as a hard-driving, meticulous man who never let up on his students. He was tough. And his greatest contribution is that he has gotten people started in careers that really amount to something in this business.”

More important, Mencher was a voice of conscience in American journalism, demanding that his students live up to the highest standards.

“To be anything less than excellent in your craft is immoral,” he used to say. “Our job is to elevate the standards of this profession. We deserve better role models, because newspapers shouldn’t be glamorous bulletin boards, and TV stations that just cover fires and murders are unconscionable.”

But now, it’s all coming to an end. After decades of bitter, unceasing battles with school administrators, Mencher is reluctantly stepping down, and the fireworks generated by his long academic career will subside. The 63-year-old professor says he will go bird watching in Canada, a lifelong passion, and ponder his next career move.

It isn’t the first time he has left a job under disagreeable circumstances.

Years ago, Mencher was forced out of posts at the Fresno Bee and the University of Kansas because of his penchant for boat-rocking journalistic crusades. He’s used to the old heave-ho. Yet leaving Columbia was the toughest decision he’s ever made.

“I’ve never been able to play it safe,” Mencher said softly as he cleaned out a darkened office crammed with almost three decades of students’ papers, memos, photographs, letters, books and yellowed newspaper clippings.

“But what the hell. You’re not supposed to do that in this business. I guess I just began to run out of gas. You can’t go on forever.”

Except, perhaps, in the minds of students. The legacy of Mencher’s iron hand lives on for hundreds of graduates, who insist that his voice and the values he imparted still speak to them today.

His classes were the intellectual equivalent of boot camp--a nine-month odyssey in which students were tested, prodded, humiliated and pushed to their limits. Months later, when it was over, graduates loved him or hated him.

“This guy instilled in you the feeling that there was a moral purpose to what you did in journalism, that all of this really matters,” said Jayne Garrison, a former student and now a reporter covering AIDS for the San Francisco Examiner. “That’s something I’ve never forgotten.”

The lessons also ring out in the pages of “News Reporting and Writing,” a textbook written by Mencher and used by instructors nationwide. It reflects his years of teaching and experience as a reporter in California and New Mexico.

Taking the long view, Tim Wiener, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner who works for the Philadelphia Inquirer, said his former professor is part of an important journalistic tradition and more than just a colorful curmudgeon.

“I think there’s a direct line running from muckrakers like Lincoln Steffens, through I. F. Stone and Mencher, down to us. This guy kicked my butt and made me feel stupid, but he eventually helped light a fire in my belly that’s still there. He changed my life.”

Today, there are more than 1,000 so-called Mencherites in newsrooms across America. They work at such papers as the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Newsday, the Miami Herald and the Seattle Times; some are broadcast reporters, producers or anchors, while others are successful authors.

“We’re all over the place,” said Lena Sun, a Beijing correspondent for the Washington Post. “And a lot of it’s because of this teacher. Just thinking about him now makes me want to go out and do the right thing.”

To Mencher’s critics--and there are many--that’s laughable. He alienated faculty members with abrasive complaints about academic policies, and more than a few Columbia colleagues applaud his departure. They cite his inability to work with others, a tendency to whine for no reason and a supercilious attitude that drove many of them up the wall.

“You shouldn’t treat people the way he did,” said one former instructor, who asked not to be identified. “He was hard on women--too hard, actually--and Columbia is better off with him gone.

Cynthia Hunter, a former student who is now an editor with Sunset magazine in Los Angeles, said she spent three years recovering from Mencher’s class: “He made me feel terrible as a human being, as a woman, and told me a number of times that I had no future in the field. But I’ve won several (journalism) awards out here, and I’m doing well. I must be doing something right, and whatever it is, it’s certainly not because of him.”

Even his admirers say Mencher’s methods may have been too extreme. Tom Goldstein, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, favors a blend of nurturing and toughness. “You have to know when to let up,” he said. The boot camp approach, he says, works for some people, but not for others.

To be sure, Mencher’s class was not for the faint of heart. He had little patience with students’ notions of what was important, at least initially, and took an almost bizarre delight in turning their expectations upside down.

Was a history major from Southern California interested in covering suburban issues? Mencher ordered him to visit the South Bronx for a story on gang violence and bring back a detailed story. Now .

Was a young woman from Yale curious about the classical music scene? Mencher told her to visit Times Square, mingle with pimps and prostitutes, and come back that night with a story on the underside of city life.

The streets were easy compared to his class exercises. In long morning drills, students covered mock utility rate hearings, budget deliberations and hypothetical crime stories. The worst part came when he collected the assignments, flashed them on an overhead projector and tore them apart.

“At the time it seemed unnecessary, but Mencher was trying to prepare you for the real world, where it’s very competitive, very tough and generally not compassionate,” said Richard Bonin, now a producer for “60 Minutes.”

On occasion, he could be cruel. Days after Beth Nissen broke up with her fiance in 1976, Mencher decided to dismember one of her stories in front of the class. It was a harsh performance, climaxed by the comment that she was “idea-free.”

The professor then flipped a dime in the air and told Nissen to call her fiance, saying she might be a good wife some day but would never be a good journalist.

Nissen, now an ABC-TV network correspondent, rushed out of the room and burst into tears. On the way out, she said bitterly to Mencher: “I may never be a journalist, but you’ll always be short.”

Is she angry after all these years? “Today I see the wisdom behind the cruelty,” Nissen said. “He was basically saying that if we could survive his class, we could survive anything. And he was right. He really did us all a favor.”

In his defense, Mencher said he was only trying to give students a dose of reality. Somebody had to warn them that it was a tough world out there.

“Of course, people could say it’s really psychological, that (I’ve) got a Napoleonic complex. But our students became the editors, the editorial writers, the managing editors. We had a terrific responsibility,” he said.

The pressure was unrelenting. Yet Mencher also had a grudgingly compassionate side. Insisting that his students enjoy New York culture, he handed out free opera tickets. When one student seemed too tightly wound, he ordered her to calm down and listen to piano sonatas in his office. On Thanksgiving, he invited his class to dinner.

“You didn’t have to be the next Bob Woodward to have turkey with Mencher,” said former student Jim Dwyer, now a columnist with New York Newsday. “It was a chance to forget the times when he was so hard.”

Many of Mencher’s disciples can still recite his one-line maxims, which were published in a book, “The Sayings of Chairman Mel.” They include such pearls as: “Keep your eye on the lead,” “You can’t write if you can’t think” and “Never submit the bare, hack minimum on a story.”

Above all, there was his chief admonition: Journalists have a moral obligation to tell the truth and expose hypocrisy.

For some, the message got through. David McClintick, author of “Indecent Exposure” and other books, said his teacher imparted “a new level of excellence, a new energy, a new unwillingness to settle for second best.”

But school administrators saw it differently.

The events leading to Mencher’s retirement came to a head in recent years, amid a heated debate over the future of journalism education. Although the issue is unresolved, Mencher came out on the losing end at Columbia.

In a nutshell, Mencher and other instructors believe journalism education should be just that--a tough, unsparing professional preparation. Over 28 years, he hammered away at the basics of reporting and writing.

But other experts object to what they call “the trade school” approach. They believe students must be exposed to new trends in communications, and that teachers should be encouraged to pursue research as do their counterparts in other academic disciplines.

In truth, the two schools are not the opposites they seem to be. Mencher’s courses have always included readings on the history, literature and ethical quandaries of journalism, and hardly any of the new-style media mavens want to abolish traditional training.

However, the outspoken professor failed to reverse the tide at Columbia. New administrators codified the curriculum over his angry protests and were irritated by his unceasing complaints. Exhausted by years of such wrangling, Mencher opted for early retirement.

Asked if the school will miss Mencher, Dean Joan Konner chose her words carefully. The two have clashed bitterly since she took over in 1988.

“I think time marches on,” Konner said. “Mel will be replaced by somebody very good.”

Is it a loss for students?

“It’s not a loss to the school to move on into the future and to have new ideas coming in. I don’t think he (Mencher) had his head turned toward the possibility of a positive future. I think he’d just had it,” she said.

To others, the idea that Mencher will no longer be prowling the halls at Columbia is inconceivable. They fear his retirement symbolizes the end of an era and a disturbing new trend in American journalism.

“Mencher is a character, an American original,” said Fred Kempe, a former student who is now Berlin bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal and author of “Divorcing the Dictator,” a book about Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega. “It’s a tragic thing that he’s leaving, because a whole tradition may just disappear. And he’s been very much a part of that tradition.”

Born in 1927, Mencher was a child of the Depression who knew the value of a steady job. The son of a stockbroker, he was very young when his mother died. He attended high school in Manhattan and studied mathematics at the Universities of Colorado and New Mexico but decided journalism was a good bet.

Early on, Mencher had shown a flair for writing. More important, there were plenty of opportunities. His first job, at the Albuquerque Tribune in 1947, paid $35 a week. He later hooked up with United Press in Santa Fe to cover the state capital. As a free-lancer for the Christian Science Monitor, he delved into political corruption and got his first taste of investigative reporting.

“I learned very early in the game to follow the buck,” he said. “The highway department, for example, had more federal money than many other departments, and it was a huge cesspool. I saw how highway bids were rigged, and that people could die because of shoddy construction.”

Soon, Mencher began ruffling feathers with stories about infant mortality rates on Navajo Indian Reservations. On the basis of that work, he won a 1952 Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. At 25, he was one of the youngest people to win the prestigious scholarship.

By now, Mencher was married and wanted to move to California. He took a job at the Fresno Bee and earned a reputation for unorthodox, hard-nosed reporting. With other journalists, he investigated the links between local politicians and the operators of exclusive brothels. The work was satisfying, but it got him into hot water with city officials and his editors.

“I don’t think they understood that kind of journalism (because) you got a controversy,” Mencher said. “I was getting tired and my position was untenable. I had to walk away. For some reason, I’ve always left jobs under a cloud of anxiety and animosity.”

His next stop was the University of Kansas at Lawrence in 1958, where he became a journalism teacher. As the faculty adviser to student journalists, Mencher supervised coverage of racism in university housing and other controversial stories. The articles won an award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews, but Mencher angered campus officials and again was forced to leave.

The wandering came to a halt in 1962, when Mencher accepted a post at the Columbia School of Journalism. He and his wife, with whom he had three children, settled into a comfortable life on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Soon, he began a radical reshaping of the school’s curriculum.

In the early ‘60s, most journalism professors gave students canned exercises and they rarely left the classroom. Led by Mencher and other influential professors, Columbia students were suddenly exploring every nook and cranny of New York. They covered courts, murders, welfare demonstrations, anti-war protests and other breaking stories.

In retrospect, Mencher said, the task of preparing them has been an uphill struggle.

“Educational standards in this country are terrible today. I’ve had students on the graduate level who can’t add. Who don’t know a budget from a balloon. Who couldn’t figure out a percentage .

“It’s important for them to know what it’s like to look a politician in the eye and say, ‘Tell me the truth.’ It’s important that they know what it’s like to have their work torn apart by an editor. If I can’t do that, I have to wonder if I’ve had any impact at all in 28 years.”

Those doubts were erased two weeks ago when former students held an emotional farewell party for Mencher at Columbia.

Nissen retold the anecdote about him flipping the coin and added, “he was too cheap to even give me the dime.” Kempe, a Mormon from Salt Lake City, broke up the crowd when he recalled that Mencher’s first assignment steered him unwittingly into a gay cowboy bar, where a man tried to pick him up.

Some students thanked the professor for pushing them as hard as he did, and a few seemed to be on the verge of tears. Others made sure they had his new address and promised to send copies of their work. When Mencher made brief remarks at the end of the evening, there was long, sustained applause.

Several days later, he began cleaning out his office and rummaging through thousands of files. It was an emotionally unpleasant task and seemed to affect him deeply. Asked if he felt badly that his students had reaped all the glory while he remained in the background, Mencher cracked that he “could have been a contender,” then brushed off the question.

“I’ve taught probably 1,000 students and so I have 1,000 agents out there. Not only did I help them, but they’re in positions of power to do good, to do the right thing. It’s vicarious, but what an ego builder.”

For a second, he was the old Mencher, firing off tough one-liners and telling jokes about incompetent students. Then he slumped a little in his chair, looking small and vulnerable. As if a mask was about to be torn away.

“I think I’ve become colder over the years than I should be, because I know I was very moved by that reception in my honor,” he said. “If you’re a reporter, you learn to mask emotions, which is a terrible thing, very hard.

“Those people the other night were telling me that I did something good. And who wants to be told that? I could hardly hold back crying. It was awful. Imagine, a man crying in public.”