For most, holding a Nieman Fellowship is like having your father's Diner's Club card and eating all your meals at Elsie's. After all, you were brought up on hamburgers.
Were it not for Nieman reports--perhaps the best publication of its kind--the Fellows might easily be confused with one of Harvard's Final Clubs. can achieve for himself at Harvard," he said.
Maynard did not spend much time at Adams House last term but hopes "to spend a lot more there this spring." He plans to travel abroad over the summer and return to the Gazette before fall.
Although he is generally satisfied with the Nieman program, "You sometimes get a sleeper in the seminars," he says. "But I guess that would happen in anything like this."
Maynard does not go along with Sargent's conception of the Nieman year. "This is not a workshop for discussing how you do your job," he said. Maynard has not treated his year as such, and unlike most of his Nieman classmates, he has explored the breadth of Harvard.
Maynard's urbanity and bachelor status give him an advantage to begin with, but Dwight Sargent and the Nieman Office could do much to decrease the handicap of the married Southerner or Westerner. They could also make the Nieman Fellowship more profitable for all its beneficiaries.
In order to integrate the Fellows into the University community, the Nieman Office should handle all housing arrangements for the incoming class, keeping all the Fellows close to Harvard Square. The office should also explore the possibility of placing unmarried Fellows in the Houses.
Stipends for married Fellows should be raised above those for unmarried Fellows to give both the same social mobility.
The Nieman Office should encourage academic diversity by putting all seminars and dinners on a voluntary attendance basis. This way Sargent would not be pressured to find one professor to please all the Fellows and would reach more often into departments other than History and Government.
Most important, the Nieman Office should strongly encourage imaginative and original study plans. The experience of Robert J. Manning, a United Press reporter and a Nieman Fellow in 1945-46, shows that a broad plan of study can contribute to late service in journalism. Although not a college graduate, Manning studied elementary Russian, Shakespeare, American literature, modern British and American poetry, anthropology, and several subjects in the social sciences. He is now Executive Editor of The Atlantic.