Email This Story

Former professor remembers career as journalist, volunteer

Oct. 14, 2008

By Christina Kruse
Lariat Staff

As a professional journalist, fluent Portuguese speaker, Baylor professor and first-generation college graduate from his family in San Angelo, Michael Stricklin has spent 91 percent of his life "300 miles from Interstate Highway 35," he said.

Stricklin came from a service-oriented family whose grandfather was a lay preacher in the Ft. Worth area.

Baylor alumnus understood that his alma mater also has a service-oriented attitude underneath.

"I came with the seeds ­-- Baylor gave me the tools to become who I am today."

Stricklin and his wife joined the Peace Corps the same year they graduated from Baylor in 1966. Stricklin said the event changed his and his wife's lives.

"I didn't understand that the world worked in different ways," he said.

Stricklin soon learned what a world without electricity was like. During his time in Brazil, Stricklin helped start a hot lunch program for students in a small town in Brazil and helped start a garden.

Since his time in the Peace Corps, Stricklin has worked in the field of journalism as a reporter, editor and publisher. He was publisher of the Daily Iowan and assistant managing editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Stricklin also was a copy editor and reporter for newspapers in Amarillo, Corpus Chrisiti and San Angelo.

As a professor, Stricklin has taught at the University of Iowa, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Baylor University and the Federal University of Piaui, Brazil.

Stricklin said he became a professor at Baylor in the 1970s after he returned from the Peace Corps, not because of his burning passion to be a Baylor Bear, but because people who care about their roots come back.

As a professor within the journalism department, Stricklin taught the history of journalism and an editing course.

Two of his students are currently journalism instructors at Baylor: professor Rick Bradfield and associate professor Robert Darden.

Darden was under the instruction of Stricklin during the Watergate scandal, and while it seems like a time to praise journalistic efforts, Stricklin and other professors sought to downplay the event.

"We shouldn't celebrate newspapers for what they are mandated to do," Darden said.

Darden said he recalls Stricklin teaching that the purpose of journalism was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

"What Stricklin and his colleagues taught was nuts and bolts reporting; how to get the story and how to write it." Bradfield said in an e-mail interview. "30-some-odd years later, some of those lessons still resonate."

Also, as a Fulbright senior lecturer and researcher in Brazil, Stricklin gave the first lecture on communication consequences of the Internet in 1999.

"Now that's flinging your gold and green afar," Stricklin said.

Stricklin said that he is best known for PCQ for Windows: Factor analysis Program for Q-Technique.

Stricklin generated the computer program in 1984 as a Ph. D. student with the knowledge from a computer course he took at the University of California-Berkley.

Stricklin retired in 2003 from The University of Nebraska-Lincoln to return to lecture in Brazil.

Stricklin said it was an easy decision to move back to Brazil.

"We moved to where our friends were," Stricklin said.

Stricklin does not consider himself a strong Portuguese speaker, but a serious student of the language.

"All languages are different and have an infinite capacity for innovation," he said.

Studying abroad is a necessity for journalists, in order to interpret events they are asked to write about, Stricklin said. "In this day and age, everything is interconnected."

Stricklin and his wife have two children; Woods and Robin, and two grandchildren; Ruben and Penelope.

Both of their children studied abroad in Brazil.

"No, I wouldn't do anything different," Striklin said.

If Stricklin was given the opportunity to change anything about his life as a professor, journalist and volunteer, Stricklin said he wouldn't. "To be true to myself, I give back."

More News ...