Bryce E. Nelson

Bryce E. Nelson ’59 took a year to muster the courage to go out for the editorial board of The Crimson.

“I left Harvard on the day of the Harvard-Yale game and I could hear the cheers in the crowd—I felt like Charlie Chaplin with my knapsack on my back,” he said of the day he left to study for a year at the University of Utah. After writing for the daily newspaper at Utah, Nelson returned to triumphantly attain a spot on the Editorial Board. Two years later, he was elected president.

As President, Nelson drew the attention of the campus to important events as he saw them from what his Adams housemate and Oxford classmate Robert C. Darnton ’60 called his “observation post” as President of The Crimson.

For Nelson, The Crimson proved a launching pad for his future career. Though he entered the College with hardly an inclination toward journalism, Nelson wound up devoting most of his life to just that, becoming an award-winning journalist and, eventually, teaching his craft as the head of USC’s Annenberg School of Communication.

Nelson strove to keep students informed and involved in campus events, using the newspaper to create what he calls “a center of discussion in that pre-internet age.” The crest of controversy during his tenure came with The Crimson’s coverage of Reverend George A. Buttrick’s refusal to allow Jewish services in Memorial Church. The Crimson ran a letter from Univeristy President Nathan M. Pusey ’28 supporting the Reverend’s decision, as well as editorials disapproving of Pusey and Butrick’s stance. In the end, the Corporation overruled Pusey.

Though a Social Relations and History concentrator at the time, Nelson now says his identity is “largely shaped by being a journalist”—a change that dates to his college years.

“If it hadn’t been for the Crimson I probably wouldn’t have gone into journalism,” Nelson said. “I devoted all my life to it beside the minor amount of time I spent studying.”

Nelson said that he was influenced to go into the field by former editors like David Halberstam ’55 and Anthony Lewis ’48 who became Pulitzer Prize winning journalists. Former editors also inspired Nelson to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship. After receiving the scholarship, Nelson went on to attain an M. Phil in politics from Oxford. He began his career after graduate school as an instructor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh before moving to Washington D.C. to report on Congressional and foreign affairs for the Washington Post.

Before accepting an offer as the head of the Annenberg School of Communication at USC, Nelson worked prolifically as a journalist writing for newspapers including New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Science magazine, and the Washington Post. His most notable pieces include a series of articles for Science magazine that helped to eliminate government blacklisting on advising panels, winning him the Albert Deutsch Award; and a series on chemical poisoning in America that landed him a spot as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

But Nelson said his most well known achievements are not necessarily those he deems his most influential. One of the pieces he is most proud of was his front page New York Times editorial coverage of the 1971 Attica Prison uprising. He also wrote speeches for Senator Frank Church of Idaho, one of the first senators to speak up against the war in Vietnam.

“In journalism you aren’t going to affect the world greatly every week or every month,” Nelson said, “But if you can do it a few times than it makes your work worthwhile.”

In 1984, Nelson left the New York Times, where Darnton says that he expected Nelson to become Editor-in-Chief, to head the USC School of Journalism, which would later become the Annenberg School. Nelson said he found teaching “more rewarding than any bureaucratic tasks.”

“I’ve noticed… an evolution of this bright young man from the back-country who cut a wide swath through Harvard, had a superb career as a journalist and wound up as a professor like so many of us,” Darnton said.

His former students, who themselves comprise a formidable list of the country’s top journalists, attribute their success to Nelson, whom CNN Anchor Kyra Philips called “not only a fantastic professor but a true friend.”

“Bryce is sort of the quintessential intellectual yet funny professor, he just looks like a professor yet he has a very accessible quality about him that really endears him to all of his students,” said Fox News correspondent and former student Anita Vogel.

But while endearing, there is something shrewder that lies behind Nelson’s knowing smile.

“He has a very sharp eye for pomposity and mendacity and pretense,” said John Womack ’59, Professor of Latin-American History and Economics. “He has a very friendly but sharp way of making it clear that stuff like that is laughable.”

Philips agrees, “You better know what the hell you are talking about in front of Bryce.”

—Staff writer Jillian K. Kushner can be reached at kushner@fas.harvard.edu.

CLARIFICATION

The June 1 news article "Bryce E. Nelson" incorrectly stated that Nelson became head of the Annenberg School of Communication at USC in 1984. In fact, when Nelson first jointed the school, it was called the USC School of Journalism, and was only later renamed the Annenberg School. The text of the article online has been updated to reflect this clarification.