Me in 500 words

Photo: Alex Jones

Introducing Greg Lukianoff at HPU's inaugural First Amendment Day in 2018.

From Classical Music
to Constitutional Law

By Dean Smith

You can’t always get what you want? Says who?

I wanted to be a musician, so I got a degree in music.

I wanted to be a journalist, so I worked 20 years for daily newspapers.

I wanted to write for The New York Times, so I landed a job as a freelance for them.

I wanted to live at the beach for a while, so I got a job at the St. Pete Times.

I wanted to spend a year in Paris, so I got a fellowship at the largest J school in France.

I wanted to study law, so I got a scholarship to Yale Law School.

Not that any of it was handed to me on a silver platter. I grew up in an ordinary middle-class household that included two parents, three siblings, a parade of pets and a lot of noise.

Alex Jones

Smith began teaching media law,
First Amendment history and
journalism at HPU in Fall 2013. 

We didn’t have a dishwasher. That was a chore the kids did by hand. We didn’t have central air. Box fans got us through summers in North Carolina. We didn’t have a color TV. My parents wanted to save us from that particular addiction.

What we had was music. Lots of music.

Because my father was a drummer in his younger life, jazz and classical music formed our family’s soundtrack. His musical obsession meant we had a hi-fidelity stereo with $400 speakers and one of the finest professional-grade tape players ever made.

Instruments that found their way into our house included various coronets and trumpets, several saxophones and clarinets, a flute and an oboe, a snare drum and a trombone, a hulking upright piano and a full set of jazz-style drums. My father came home with a guitar one day, so I learned to play that, too.

My mother didn’t have a musical bone in her body, but she had ink in her veins. Her claim to fame as a journalist was that she landed an exclusive jailhouse interview with Velma Barfield before the state executed Barfield by lethal injection. Growing up in Cary, the first job I ever had was, naturally, at The Cary News.

After graduating with a music degree in 1986, I immediately began transforming myself into a journalist with an entry-level job at the Winston-Salem Journal. In 1990, I made the leap to The Charlotte Observer, then the largest newspaper between Washington and Atlanta. There I stayed for 14 years.

David Dalton

With author and activist Ken Ilgunas during a talk he gave at
HPU after publication of his book "Trespassing Across America.

Except when I left and came back a year at a time — for Paris, for Florida, for Yale. I’m easily bored, I suppose, so my career at the Observer was actually three in one: as an arts writer, as a copy editor and, finally, as assistant world and national editor.

Bored again, I left the newsroom for the last time in 2006. I spent the next six years studying, teaching and earning a doctoral degree from the journalism school at UNC-Chapel Hill. From that cocoon, I emerged an award-winning legal historian and a devoted instructor of media law, First Amendment history and journalism.

It's what I wanted. And I got it.