New York Times‘ Steven Greenhouse ’73 Teaching Journalism as Koeppel Fellow

Steven Greenhouse ’73, P’08, will bring his years of experience in journalism back to Wesleyan this semester as the Koeppel Journalism Fellow.

The longtime New York Times reporter, who covers labor and workplace issues, will teach “Journalism, Nonfiction Writing and the Search for Truth.”

“It’s an honor to be invited to teach at Wesleyan, but it also feels a little daunting because I’ve never taught a full course before,” Greenhouse said. “But I imagine that I’ve learned a thing or two about journalism and writing and editing since once upon a time, when I was editor of the Argus eons ago.”

For Greenhouse, who has been with the Times for 31 years, the student interest in his course is as gratifying as the opportunity to teach it. “I’m thrilled that in this turbulent, difficult era for journalism, and for newspapers in particular, there are still many young people who are interested in working in the field,” he said.

Greenhouse joined the Times in September 1983 as a business reporter, covering steel and other basic industries. He then spent two-and-a-half years as the newspaper’s Midwestern business correspondent based in Chicago. In 1987, he moved to Paris, where he served as the Times’s European economics correspondent, covering everything from Western Europe’s economy to the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. Five years later, he became a correspondent in Washington for four years, first covering economics and the Federal Reserve and then the State Department and foreign affairs.

This year, Greenhouse, along with two New York Times colleagues, won the Loeb Award for spot news business reporting for covering the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh in which more than 1,100 workers died. He is the author of “The Big Squeeze, Tough Times for the American Workers,” which won the Sidney Hillman award for non-fiction writing.

The Koeppel program, launched in 2010, brings distinguished journalists to campus each year. Past fellows include The Jewish Daily Forward editor Jane Eisner ’77, who taught “The Citizen as Journalist,” and noted author and reporter Tracie McMillan, whose course was called “Writing and Arguing About Inequality.” Bloomberg’s Larry Roberts and ABC’s Martha Raddatz were also fellows.

The Koeppel courses are offered through the Writing Certificate program, which allows students from all majors to develop proficiency in creative writing (poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, screenwriting, playwriting) and forms of non-fiction such as criticism, biography and autobiography, science writing, political and literary journalism, and writing about academic subjects for non-specialists.

Greenhouse also is the father of Emily Greenhouse ’08.