Upon being inducted into the Vanderbilt Student Media Hall of Fame, Sen. Lamar Alexander remarked that the selection committee must have created a ratio. “For every bonifide four media stars,” he joked, “we must induct one media victim.”
Alexander is in his second term as the senior U.S. senator from Tennessee. A former Hustler news editor, Alexander also served as the first two-term governor of Tennessee, a U.S. Secretary of Education under George H.W. Bush and a president of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. After signing fellow inductee Sam Feist’s bumper sticker from his 2000 run for the White House, Staff Reporter Justin Tardiff asked him several questions about his time working on The Hustler … and which Tennessee teams he supports.
Vanderbilt Hustler: When you were an editor at The Hustler, I understand that you habitually made speeches in Spanish at really early morning hours. What were those about?
Lamar Alexander: I don’t remember what they were about. They were at 2 in the morning. I had gone to Latin America; I was a Latin American major, and I traveled in Latin America the summer before I was a senior. I was impressed with all of the student demonstrations in Latin America so I had nothing better to do than make a speech about uprisings and revolutions and that kind of thing.
They made no sense. And they weren’t serious. But they were in Spanish, so nobody else knew what they said either.
VH: What disciplines of the newspaper environment helped you in becoming a political leader?
LA: The most important thing I learned from The Hustler, and from Vanderbilt, is how to write a sentence and a paragraph. Good grammar and the importance of a declarative sentence.
I see so many young people today who graduate from very good colleges who can’t write a sentence or paragraph, and don’t know what a declarative sentence is. Those who do go right to the top of the list. I don’t know whether it’s because we’re so visual, watch so much television, play so many games, if writing isn’t as important. But The Hustler taught me how to write, and I had some terrific English teachers who simply made me write papers every week, and then they’d edit them and send them back, and if they weren’t right they’d correct it. Learning how to write was the most important thing.
VH: In addition to being part of the campus media here, you also worked for the Nashville Banner (a competitor to the Tennessean before folding in 1998). How did working with both the Banner and campus media have an impact on your dealings with media today?
LA: Well, they helped me pay my way through college, so that helped. I learned that people in the media have a job, so you may like people in the media if you’re a politician, but if they’re unfriendly you should treat them as a member of the media, if they’re friendly you should treat them as a member of the media. Their job is to report, not to be your friend or your enemy. So I learned that there’s got to be a little professional distance between the reporter and the person the reporter’s covering.
And that’s served me pretty well. It doesn’t upset me when a reporter writes something bad or make me too happy when they write something good, because I know that they’ve got a job to do and I respect that.
VH: And lastly, while you are a Vanderbilt alum, you served as the president of UT for several years. So, when the Dores take on the Vols on Nov. 21 in Knoxville, who will you be rooting for?
LA: I’ll be watching on television. (Laughs) Good question.
