In the spring, IUSTV’s production run was cut short by the university’s coronavirus shutdown. The last recording was with the sports crew, it was a March Thursday night. The outgoing sports director recorded a little monologue and then held a really touching meeting and he walked into the last weeks of his senior year and the first weeks of professional uncertainty. He, and every other senior, had such a scary, unenvious position just then. Some of them were starting to sign their first TV contracts at that moment. Others were doing job interviews. As far as I know and can tell, all of them, including that outgoing sports director, are working today. Almost all of them seem to be in jobs in their chosen flight path (including that departing sports director, who’s on-air at a hometown station) which is remarkable.
You couldn’t help but feel for those seniors, and all the underclassmen. When would we come back? What would that be like? And for our students in particular, you can’t thrive in Zoom meetings alone, which is what so much of those last weeks of spring became. The curriculum is so experiential, how would we deliver that?
Which brings us to the fall. We didn’t know, in March, what September and October and November would be like. We didn’t even know what April would look like. Maybe it’s still an open question, how the fall turns out, but I hope not. For all of the promise of technology, it brings some unique challenges, and pedagogical habits don’t, in fact, change overnight.
But, tonight — even amidst the unusual nature of these first few weeks, even as we don’t know how the semester will wind up — it’s developing in a familiar way for the TV crowd. The last show they recorded in the spring was sports, and so it’s fitting that the sports gang returned to the studio for the semester’s first production.
They don’t even have local sports, right now, but they were ready to be together, eager to be in a group, happy to do something. And, for a first production night, with new leadership (a solid, solid set) and some new members, and after an almost-six-month layoff, they did a fine job.
And it looks like the Big Ten may wind up reversing course to give them some sports content sometime in the next week or so, besides. Twenty, as the kids say, twenty.
When I left the building this evening:
This is the sunset view of choice around here. I’m not sure why. It is west. The fake ancient gates are behind me, but you’re just looking toward the downtown area. It seems like we could do better than this.
But we didn’t have to tonight. We didn’t have to tonight.
