Students and alumni submitted separate petitions to Northwestern administrators Friday asking for more information about Innocence Project Director David Protess’ removal as instructor of Medill’s spring quarter investigative journalism course.
In one petition, all ten students of Protess’ winter quarter investigative journalism class said that they had not been contacted by investigators whom Northwestern asked to review the professor and the Innocence Project. In the other petition, more than 340 people — including many former students of Protess — asked Northwestern to publicly explain why Protess was removed.
“We would like to add to the chorus of disappointment with the decision to remove Protess from teaching this class in the spring,” the winter quarter students said in their petition. “We respectfully request that Medill administration reconsider their decision.”
Both petitions were emailed to Medill Dean John Lavine and University President Morton Schapiro. Medill Senior Director of Undergraduate Education Michele Bitoun also received the winter quarter students’ petition. The university declined to comment on the petitions, Northwestern spokesman Al Cubbage wrote in an email to North by Northwestern on Friday.
Lavine told Protess in an email on March 14 that the professor would not be teaching his investigative journalism course in the spring. The next day, Bitoun told the students enrolled in the course that Alec Klein would replace Protess. The students submitted a petition to Bitoun on March 17 threatening to consider dropping the course if Protess was not reinstated.
Students in both the winter and spring investigative journalism courses said in interviews that they do not mean to question Klein’s ability to teach the class. Rather, they said, they want to know why Medill removed Protess in the first place. A former Washington Post investigative journalist, Klein taught the course fall 2010 while Protess took a quarter off to visit with family.
Last week, attorney Robert Stephenson — who represents two inmates investigated by the Innocence Project — said in a phone interview that the inmates would not cooperate with the class without Protess as an instructor. Stephenson also represents Protess in his fight against a 2009 subpoena of class documents.
Throughout the course, students research the cases of inmates who may not have committed the crimes that sent them to prison. Students often post the results of their reporting on the Medill Innocence Project’s website. Since Protess founded the project in 1999, his class has helped to free 12 innocent men from prison.
But Protess and the project fell under intense scrutiny in spring 2009, when Cook County prosecutors subpoenaed documents from students’ 2003-2006 investigation of Anthony McKinney, a man convicted for the 1978 murder of a security guard. In interviews with students, sources said that McKinney was not present when the murder occurred, and that another man was responsible for the killing. Prosecutors alleged that students had illegally recorded an interview with a source and paid his cab fare.
Also in question is what happened to the documents Protess allowed to be turned over to McKinney’s lawyers in 2006. According to the Chicago Tribune, McKinney’s defense did not share some documents with the prosecution, saying they thought they had lost them or thrown them away. In October 2010, the university stopped supporting Protess’ fight against the subpoena of student memos, saying that Protess waived reporters’ privilege over them by giving all memos to McKinney’s defense. Protess denied these claims to The Daily Northwestern at the time.
Around the same time, Northwestern hired Anton Valukas, a former U.S. attorney, to investigate alleged ethics violations by the Innocence Project. Valukas also represents Northwestern in legal proceedings regarding the 2009 subpoena.
In February, Protess gave Northwestern thousands of documents from personal computers he had previously refused to hand over, saying that the drawn-out standoff with the university did not help McKinney, who is still in prison. The university has said that it will review those documents.
Full disclosure: Seven students from the winter and spring quarters’ investigative journalism classes have worked for North by Northwestern. Two other students have accounts on NBN’s Wordpress server, but have not written any stories for the website.
Read the winter quarter students’ petition below:
As students in Professor David Protess’ winter quarter Investigative Journalism class, we would like to add to the chorus of disappointment with the decision to remove Protess from teaching this class in the spring. We respectfully request that Medill administration reconsider their decision. The following letter represents only our personal interests and requests as students.
It’s difficult to quantify how much we each gained during our time in Protess’ class. Investigative Journalism is an extremely demanding course, especially when covering the topic of wrongful convictions. As our professor, Protess provided invaluable critiques and refinements of our reporting techniques. He offered advice from his years of experience, and above all, kept us focused on reporting with empathy. This class pushed us to pursue reporting challenges that are available in no other class at Medill, and with Protess’ guidance, we felt prepared to push ourselves. We also left the class with a much more thorough understanding of wrongful convictions, and the great impact that investigative reporting can have on such issues. We hope that future classes of Medill students will not be denied this same privilege.
We would like to emphasize that our support for Protess is in no way a comment on the abilities of Professor Alec Klein. Several of us have taken his class as well, and found it very valuable. There are likely many professors at Medill who are more than qualified to teach a class on investigative reporting. However, none come near to the same depth of experience reporting on wrongful convictions.
In justifying the value of such a class at Medill, we believe that the record of the Medill Innocence Project speaks for itself. It is even more disappointing that Protess has been removed from teaching his class at the end of a month that contained some of the Project’s greatest accomplishments- contributing evidence to the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Hank Skinner case, helping free a 12th wrongfully convicted man and influencing the decision to ban the death penalty in Illinois.
In addition to our disappointment with Protess’ removal from teaching this class, we are also concerned with the lack of transparency the University has provided regarding this decision. It is particularly troubling that during Northwestern’s review of Protess and the “actions and practices” of the Innocence Project, no students that he taught this year were contacted, and our classroom sessions were never observed. We would like more information about the practices and results of this review, and we would like a thorough explanation for Protess’ removal. Medill has taught us to fight for the truth and pursue accountability, and we feel that as students, we deserve the same level of conduct.
Ultimately, removing Protess from teaching this class is truly only a punishment for his future students, who will be missing out on one of the greatest opportunities available at Medill. We feel incredibly lucky that we were able to have this experience before it was taken away, and we hope that the Medill administration will reassess its decision.