During his tenure at THE HOYA, John Glavin (C’64) served as Assistant Features Editor and Features Editor before becoming the Editor-in-Chief in 1963. After graduating in 1964, Glavin earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from Bryn Mahr College. Today Glavin is an Associate Professor of English at Georgetown.

What was the production schedule like back then?

Sunday night we went into operation. Stories were submitted, headlines were written and at the end of the night everything was sent off to our own printer in Virginia. Around 5 p.m. on Monday, the galleys came back, and they were proofread and somewhat cut up. By dawn on Tuesday morning the mock up of the pages and proofread stories were sent back to the printer. On Thursday afternoon, the editor-in-chief and two or three other editors spent the afternoon reading page proofs and then finally signed off on all the pages by 6 or 7 p.m. before the paper would appear on people’s doorsteps Friday morning. Every Thursday night we had a critique of the previous issue and then set up the principal stories for the next week. So honestly it was a time consuming process.

How was coverage different back then?

There were no late breaking stories. THE HOYA had a house style and at the core of that style was the notion that we were always writing about students to present them to their fellow students. So there was a kind of traditional format where whenever a person was mentioned, in the next sentence you say where he came from, what high school he went to, what he was majoring in and what other extra-curricular activities he was in.

There was this constant desire to use stories as a way of getting people to know each other, and that grew out of the sense of a small group-a kind of intimacy that disappeared when THE HOYA was opened [to students not in the College].

The model for a lot of the features writing was The New Yorker and we tried to write as if we were writing for “Talk of the Town.” The stories were the stories you would expect coverage of: student activities, wins, losses, debate was hugely important, various activities that would be sponsored by campus groups, dances, many, many more social events than there are now were covered as well as the major events of the university.

Some researchers who I talk to now go back and look at old HOYAS to get a feel for the events back then. They are usually very surprised by the quality of the coverage back then.

What was your personal favorite story?

I can remember an individual editorial that I wrote because I got into a lot of trouble because of it. There was a professor in the English department called Cearns, and he published an article in the Jesuit magazine, America. This was the beginning of the civil rights movement and the article said that if you looked at the people, the college students, participating in the marches and demonstrations, few came from Jesuit schools.

After it appeared, I wrote an editorial saying that this was true. Now remember, this was before Vatican II. There was no spirit of inquiry, and there was certainly no spirit of change in the Catholic Church. Who knew that underneath all that, the ice was actually melting.

I wrote this editorial saying, you know those people aren’t here because the Catholic tradition makes them feel unwelcome. Well, needless to say, the dean of the college was not happy with this and let me know in various ways..

In those days, if you were an undergraduate at Georgetown, regardless of your religion, you had to make a closed retreat each year and because of THE HOYA and the schedule I described to you, I didn’t do one as a junior. We graduated on a Sunday in those days and not the week of, but the preceding Thursday I got a call from the dean’s secretary and she said, “We’re going over the records here and we have it that you didn’t do a closed retreat your junior year so that means you won’t be able to graduate.”

These retreats usually ran all weekend starting on a Friday. So I came back to the dorm and everyone was talking about graduation, and I told them what happened. So everyone called their mother because in those days the Catholic retreat was a large movement. So somebody’s mother found a retreat in New Jersey and if I could get to New Jersey by 6 p.m. on Friday, I could join this retreat for the weekend.

So I said, “All right, I’ll go up to New Jersey,” and my friends decided to go too and stay at the house of this one friend. In any case, I finished the retreat and got the retreat master to certify it and appeared in the dean’s office on Monday morning. You should have seen the look on the dean’s face.

What was the relationship between the newspaper and the university back then?

We had a Jesuit monitor in those days who technically had the right to censor anything that we published. He came every Sunday night to review the whole newspaper. He was a lovely priest and he never, in my whole time, ever refused a story, never censored anything.

My predecessor as editor-in-chief was a man who knew which controversies to avoid so I would say that I think that editorial that I wrote was the beginning of staking out a slightly different path than the path of simply being an in-house publication, although I do think that there was a certain value to that dimension of being a way in which students learn about other students and the possibilities for using their time on campus.

You’ve been at Georgetown a long time, first as a student, then as a professor. What changes have you noticed in THE HOYA over time?

It’s undoubtedly become much more the focus of opinion. We also had lots more money because we could sell cigarette ads. They were really just an amazing source of revenue for the paper. I think it has become much more interested in controversy on its opinion pages and editorials as a way of directing student opinion, but I think it does so far less than some of the college papers I’ve seen on other campuses.

– Interview by Hoya Staff Writer Aaron Terrazas