Jay Harris

newspaper executive

Personal Information

Born 1948. Married; three children.
Education: Lincoln University, B.A., 1970.
Memberships: American Leadership Forum-Silicon Valley.

Career

Began as reporter for Wilmington News-Journal, Wilmington, DE, 1970, editor, until 1975; Northwestern University/Medill School of Journalism, assistant professor of journalism and urban affairs, 1975-82; also served as associate director of the Frank E. Gannett Urban Journalism Center and associate dean of Medill School of Journalism; Gannett News Services, Washington, D.C., national correspondent, 1982-85; Philadelphia Daily News, executive editor, 1985-88, and vice-president of Philadelphia Newspapers, 1987-88; Knight-Ridder Newspapers, Miami, FL, assistant to the president, 1988-89, vice-president of operations, 1989-93; San Jose Mercury News, San Jose, CA, chair and publisher, 1994-.

Life's Work

Jay T. Harris, publisher of the San Jose Mercury News, is considered one of the most influential minority newspaper executives in the United States. Head of the influential West Coast daily since 1994, he has enhanced the reputation of the already well-regarded Mercury News and continued to expand its role as an important media source in California, especially in its coverage of Silicon Valley. The paper itself made headlines in late 1996 when it published a controversial story that linked the crack cocaine epidemic and drug traffickers to a right-wing Central American political group that received erstwhile covert support from the Central Intelligence Agency. Harris was praised for allowing the story to run, and for sticking by the paper and the reporter after the story generated intense scrutiny.

Harris began his career in journalism not long after earning a degree in English from Pennsylvania's Lincoln University in 1970. His first job was as a reporter with the Wilmington News-Journal, a Delaware paper, where he made a name for himself relatively early in his professional career for an expose on heroin trafficking in the city. The series won Harris an Associated Press award, and he was soon promoted to an editor's desk. Within a few years he had been singled out for a fellowship by the Frank E. Gannett Urban Journalism Center at the Medill School of Journalism. Medill, at Northwestern University in suburban Chicago, is considered one of the foremost training grounds for journalism in the United States. Harris was made a Gannett Fellow, the first ever, when the Urban Journalism Center was created. In 1975, Harris left the day-to-day world of newspapers when he was offered a job at Medill. There he taught classes as an assistant professor of journalism and urban affairs; he also served as associate director of the Urban Journalism Center and associate dean at Medill before leaving in 1982.

Harris returned to newspaper work that year when he arrived in Washington, D.C., to take a job with Gannett News Services, one of the largest print media companies in North America and publisher of USA Today. There, he served as a national correspondent and wrote a weekly column. In 1985, he left Gannett when he was wooed away by its top competitor, the Knight-Ridder News Corporation. He was hired by the family-owned media company to helm its Philadelphia Daily News. Not yet forty years old, he became one of the youngest executive editors of a major metropolitan daily in the country. He also became one of a few minority newspaper executives in such a post as well. A 1988 article on his achievement by George Garneau in Editor & Publisher called Harris's rise, especially at such a young age, "exceptional ... in a field dominated but middle-aged, white men." Harris remained optimistic that that particular demographic would change: "I think more people will do what I do over time," he told Garneau, and remained philosophical about his own situation. "My color is a factor in everything in my life," he told Editor & Publisher. "Race is a factor in American society. Obviously, some people think I'm pretty good."

In 1987, Harris was made a vice-president of Philadelphia Newspapers, and remained in the number-two spot at the Daily News until he was summoned to Knight-Ridder headquarters in Miami for a post there. From 1988 to 1989 he served as assistant to the president, and was named vice-president for operations in 1989. In this post he oversaw Knight-Ridder's newspaper holdings in the Midwest and Plains states, including its dailies in Akron, St. Paul, Gary, Duluth, and Grand Forks. In 1993 Harris was offered the plum position of chairman and publisher of the San Jose Mercury News upon the retirement of its top executive. The newspaper, based in the northern California city of San Jose, was a widely-read, respected newspaper with a circulation of 300,000 and considered the "Wall Street Journal" of Silicon Valley. In Santa Clara County, located at the south end of the San Francisco Bay, it was estimated that 57 percent of the population read the Mercury News's daily edition.

Harris stepped into the publisher's job in San Jose in 1994. Some notable accomplishments of his tenure include the launch of a foreign bureau in Hanoi, Vietnam--the first permanent news bureau there since the Vietnam War ended--and the paper's on-line edition, the Mercury Center, with its special focus on high-technology business news and a customizable personal news service called NewsHound. About two million visitors "hit" the paper's Internet site at peak hours. Harris also oversaw the launch of Nuevo Mundo, a Spanish-language weekly paper and the only such news source in Northern California.

But it was the newspaper's publication of "Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion," that made headlines around the country and made the San Jose Mercury News known to a far more extensive number of people than just residents of Santa Clara County. Written by an investigative reporter on its staff, Gary Webb, the three-part series detailed possible links between some California-based supporters of "contras"--the anti-Communist guerrillas in Nicaragua-- the crack cocaine problem in Los Angeles in the 1980s, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Webb obtained information from informants who were involved with the first two. There arose a massive controversy about the reports, and the story was in some cases misconstrued as an allegation that the CIA had flooded South Central L.A. and other pockets of urban misery with crack. As Harris clarified in an interview with Victoria Valentine in Emerge magazine, "the heart of the story is ... that close associates of the Nicaraguan Contras, in the early 1980s, were selling very significant amounts of pure cocaine in the United States; that much of that was going into South Central L.A.; that others, persons in L.A., including people associated with the gangs there, were turning it into crack; and that, finally, these same persons associated with the Contras were sending money back to support that effort."

Some in the African American community had long suspected a tie between the government and the rise of crack, a drug that was cheap, addictive, and deadly. Unusual methods of financing the Nicaraguan contras, a pet cause of the Reagan Administration, were not unknown: during the 1980s, it was discovered that agents for the U.S. government were secretly selling arms to Iran, a sworn foe of the U.S., and using the money to finance the contras, who were struggling to overthrow a leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Though the story Harris had okayed initially caused little stir, its publication on the Mercury Center site and subsequent rapid dissemination throughout cyberspace--as well as the interest given it on talk-radio programs hosted by such prominent pundits such as Joe Madison--helped the "Dark Alliance" story gain notoriety. Several prominent political figures, including U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, and U.S. congresswoman Maxine Waters, called for an official government investigation into Webb's allegations.

Other newspapers and media outlets found fault with the "Dark Alliance" story, and Harris had to weather criticism that the reporter's tactics and conclusions were flawed. Peter Kornbluh, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, remarked that "their editorial decision to assault, rather than advance, the Mercury News story has, in turn, sparked critical commentary on the priorities of those pillars of the mainstream press."

Harris is married and has three children. He is involved in numerous professional and philanthropic organizations, and is a trustee of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. He is also the recipient of numerous professional accolades, including a 1991 citation from the Institute for Journalism Education for his contributions to racial diversity in American newspaper journalism, and the Ida B. Wells Award from the National Association of Black Journalists in 1992. His prediction in the Editor & Publisher interview proved prophetic: a decade later, even the first newspaper that had hired Harris, the News-Journal in Wilmington, had an African American executive editor.

Awards

Par Excellence Award, Operation PUSH, 1984, for distinguished service; special citation from the Institute for Journalism Education for contributions to the cause of racial diversity in American newspaper journalism, 1991; Ida B. Wells Award, National Association of Black Journalists, 1992.

Further Reading

• Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 1997; May/June 1998, p. 26.
• Editor & Publisher, May 7, 1988, pp. 11, 38.
• Emerge, December/January 1997, pp. 34-37.
• Additional information for this profile was provided by press materials from the San Jose Mercury News and Knight-Ridder Newspapers.

— Carol Brennan

View more History, Politics, Society videos

An important educational philosopher and statesman of the late nineteenth century, William Torrey Harris served as the chief administrator of the St. Louis Public Schools from 1868 to 1880 and as the United States Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906.

Beginning his career in 1857 as an elementary school teacher in the St. Louis public school system, Harris progressed through the ranks, becoming superintendent in 1868. During this same period, his life as a philosopher flourished. He founded the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1867, and became an important part of a small group of scholars and educators who studied the German philosopher Georg William Friedrich Hegel, a community that would become known as the St. Louis Philosophical movement.

Like Horace Mann, Harris was an advocate of the free common public school. He was an egalitarian who helped to extend the reach of the school, and provided a national model in St. Louis for the kindergarten in the school system. He believed in the separation of church and state in public schooling and reinvented the nature of school discipline by criticizing corporal punishment and favoring self-discipline that was based on internalized moral values. He made the library a normal feature of the school's infrastructure, expanded foreign language education in the curriculum, defended the importance of coeducation, was open minded about new pedagogical ideas (including Pestalozzi's object teaching), and emphasized the importance of perpetual self-education. He worked to universalize public education across class, gender, and racial lines, seeing the school as fundamentally a child-saving agency, and served under four different U.S. presidents during his seventeen-year tenure as United States Commissioner of Education. Many of his views on schooling can be discerned from the twelve annual reports he wrote for the St. Louis pubic schools during his time in the superintendent's office and from the various reports he authored as U.S. Commissioner of Education.

His philosophical life overlapped with his actions as a school leader. A dutiful follower of Hegel, Harris's philosophy of education elevated the importance of freedom and reason - and self-direction as it was guided by the institutions of civilization. Schooling was one of the processes that allowed youth to rise above their inborn savagery and to participate in a civilizing life. The school was supposed to bring students face-to-face with the accumulated wisdom of humanity and to teach them to find their place in the spiritual nature of all existence. The core philosophical tenets in Harris's life not only played a significant role in his handling of school matters, but also kept him quite busy with philosophical disquisitions, writing essays such as "Goethe's Theory of Colors," "The Phenomenology of Spirit," and "Aristotle's Teleology." These were certainly not typical writings for a professional school administrator. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, which Harris founded and edited, produced a very real contribution to philosophical discourse, highlighting the work of various important thinkers over its twenty-one year run, including John Dewey, William James, Charles Pierce, Josiah Royce, G. Stanley Hall, and George S. Morris. It also featured much of Harris's most gritty philosophical essays, an output of more than 35 articles over the life of the journal. In 1879, Harris became a faculty member at A. Bronson Alcott's Concord School of Philosophy, where he taught primarily on the topic of Hegel. He stayed there until 1888, when the school closed because Alcott died.

Harris sided squarely with a subject-centered view of learning, believing that the wisdom of humanity resided in modern academic subjects and that, for democracy to flourish, public schools had to bring this civilizing insight to the experience of all American youth. This was a prejudice reflected in Harris's influence over the Committee of Ten and the Committee of Fifteen reports, which both helped to crystallize the subject curriculum in the school. Harris, in fact, established the foundational principle of bringing the common academic curriculum to the common school, not for preparation for college but for life in a self-governing democracy.

To Harris, the nature of course study in the public school was largely reducible to what he saw as the five great divisions in the life of civilization, which he labeled "the five windows of the soul." Two of the windows (or areas of inquiry), mathematics and geography, were committed to humanity's conquest and comprehension of nature. The other three, literature, grammar, and history, were more connected to human life: literature speaking to literary works of art; grammar, to the study and the use of language; and history, to a multifaceted understanding of the nation's institutions. Harris reflected these ideas in his various circles of influence. He was, for instance, the main author of the Committee of Fifteen 1895 report, which was designed to offer a course study blueprint for the American elementary school. Harris maneuvered against the American Herbartians, who sought to unify the course work in the elementary school around German philosopher Johann Herbart's idea of curriculum concentrations, where one subject, usually literature, is made the central core of the learning experience, and other subjects are organized around on the basis of their interrelations to the core's main features. Harris did not accept this idea of concentration, believing that the five windows of the soul would be weakened when made subordinate to one core area. Instead, he called for a kind of coordination, where each subject is given a definite place and equal attention. The Committee of Fifteen report bears the unmistakable stamp of Harris's five windows of the soul and is an early example of the kind of subject-centeredness that would mark Harris's ideas on the curriculum.

Harris's dedication to the common cultural canon eventually earned him the tag of conservative among some historians, a label that some modern-day scholars have found to be unnuanced and not nearly appreciative enough of the many progressive ideas that Harris also supported. Yet, Harris was undoubtedly among the most effective critics of educational progressivism in his day. He was especially critical of ideas that failed to capture what he believed to be the intellectual and civilizing qualities of the subject curriculum. Harris held in low regard the Progressive ideas embodied in the American child study movement, American Herbartianism, and the expansion of the curriculum into manual or vocational arts instruction. For him they were essentially anti-intellectual endeavors largely wasted on youth. In this sense, Harris became the subject-centered foil to the prevailing child-centered views favored by Progressives at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Bibliography

Harris, William T., ed. 1867 - 1888. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. St Louis, MO: Knapp.

Harris, William T. 1868 - 1880. Annual Reports. St. Louis, MO: St. Louis Board of Education.

Harris, William T. 1889. Introduction to the Study of Philosophy. New York: Appleton.

Harris, William T., et al. 1895. Report of the Committee of Fifteen. Washington, DC: National Education Association.

Harris, William T. 1970. Hegel's Logic: A Book on the Genesis of the Categories of the Mind (1890). New York: Kraus.

Resse, William J. 2000. "The Philosopher-King of St. Louis." In Curriculum and Consequence: Herbert Kliebard and the Promise of Schooling, ed. Barry M. Franklin. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University.

Schaub, Edward Leroy, ed. 1936. William Torrey Harris 1835 - 1936: A Collection of Essays, Including Papers and Addresses Presented in Commemoration of Dr. Harris' Centennial at the St. Louis Meeting of the Western Division of the America Philosophical Society. Chicago: Open Court.

— PETER HLEBOWITSH

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