Enrolment of first year students in journalism leaps up by 30% in 1979. Why?
"Possibly because the Information scandal has made journalism seem like a glamorous profession." At least this is the opinion of Journalism staff who compare the jump in numbers with a similar phenomenon at journalism schools in the United States after Watergate.
Of course, the increase may also be linked to the growing reputation of the Rhodes department, the only one of its kind at an English-language university in South Africa.
Bulletin, 1979 (2): 3
Voice
Jon Inggs (1974)
Voice
Jon Inggs was a student in the SJMS from 1974 to 1976.
Voice
"Please find attached a page from my Rhodes photograph album (1974-1977) – I am afraid it is the only reference to the Journalism Department in about 50 pages of photographs.
The staff in the photos were Les Switzer and Peter Temple (whose wife Anita taught Press History, court courants et al). He later emigrated to Australia and became a popular author of crime novels.
John McCormick was editor of Rhodeo for a couple of years and I was the photographer and helped with the Letraset headlines.
Learning to type on a manual typewriter in Journalism I stood me in good stead for the computer age which only dawned in the 1980s. I never used the T-Line shorthand again after the final exam.
I remember monitoring the SABC news during the June/July 1976 vacation as a Journalism III project – it happened to coincide with the Soweto uprising. The SABC only mentioned the events in passing.
Instead of doing Journalism Honours in 1977, I did Economic History.
I was the Rifleman in charge of the Eastern Province office of the army magazine Paratus 1978-1979.
I briefly worked for the EP Herald 1980-1982 as a photographer before going back to Rhodes in 1983 to do an MA in Economic History.
I wrote my thesis on a Commodore Business Machine PC that had 32K of memory which meant it could only store 2 pages at once. To print thesis one had to string the 2-page chunks together in a print command. No spell checker let alone a graphics capability. I eventually upgraded the external tape drive to a floppy drive.
Halfway through 1983 I was offered a job at Wits as a Junior Lecturer in the Department of Economic History.
In July 1985 I moved to Unisa to teach Economic History in the Economics Department. I retire from Unisa next year and will have completed 34½ years. All my Journalism skills came in very useful when initially setting up my course study guides and tutorial letters.
Scary to think I started at Rhodes almost 45 years ago."
