Class

Here’s a good nuts-and-bolts interview with my next boss, Steve Shepard, about the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

But ask Mr. Shepard why he is here, and the first answer out of his mouth is something else. “There needs to be a publicly funded graduate school of journalism in this part of the world,” says Mr. Shepard, who took up his CUNY post last April. “There’s not one in the entire Northeast, which means if you don’t have $35,000, you’re out of luck. And that just doesn’t seem right.”

And then he segues into his diversity talk, a frequent theme: “People complain all the time that the profession isn’t diverse enough. And I don’t mean diversity just in the sense of racial and ethnic diversity, but I mean in class terms, too. Working-class people, immigrants, people who have served in the military. The press in this country is not very representative.”