Hasta La Ideas

The announcement that Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigative health reporter Meg Kissinger will serve as DePauw University’s 2015-16 Eugene S. Pullam Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism is extra-special for two reasons.

Kissinger, who graduated from DePauw in 1979, is coming back to the campus where she was once editor-in-chief of The DePauw. And her tenure will reconfirm the solid advice she once received from mom. From today’s announcement:

“Somewhere up there, my mother surely is smiling,” says Kissinger, who majored in political science as an undergraduate. “It was she who told me, lo, these many years ago that I shouldn’t go to the University of Missouri because I needed to be ‘a big fish in a little pond.’ Though I nearly fainted when the station wagon pulled up to the back door of Lucy Rowland Hall, I learned to love what DePauw offered me in the ensuing four years. I’m thrilled to be ‘swimming back’ to the place that taught me to believe in myself. And I aim to motivate students in the same way my DePauw professors inspired me.”

Kissinger returns to the school with a Pulitzer nomination, a pair of George Polk Awards and a life’s worth of newspaper experience.