“Colby College, from which I with difficulty graduated — studying interfered with what I regarded as my infinitely more valuable experience as a reporter — had no courses either in journalism or in Chinese. If they had had (they do now) I might have been better prepared to cope with the Chinese Revolution years later.”
John Roderick ’36
Roderick entered Colby College in the early 1930s, graduating with what he himself characterized as some difficulty — not from any deficiency of intellect, but because newspaper work continued to interest him more than coursework. By his own account, he regarded his ongoing reporting at the Sentinel as the more valuable education. Colby in that era offered neither courses in journalism nor instruction in Chinese, two omissions Roderick would later identify, with characteristic understatement, as gaps that left him underprepared for the Communist revolution he would eventually find himself covering. Yet his time on Mayflower Hill gave him something his later career would draw on heavily: the temperament of a working reporter rather than a credentialed expert, an outsider’s eye, and an instinct for clear prose unburdened by academic theory. It was a formation that would, in retrospect, suit the kind of journalism he came to practice — patient, observational, and skeptical of received frameworks.
At Colby, he was an active member of Interfraternity Basketball and Press Club. He was also the Sports Editor.
Later in his career, when his more credentialed colleagues revealed their journalism school pedigrees, such as UMissouri, Roderick could only reply, lamely by his own admission: “Colby College — we didn’t believe in journalism schools.”