Huntly Collins, M.A.

Huntly begins her day with The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Huntly Collins, who grew up in a small farming community in Oregon, fell in love with journalism as editor of her high school newspaper. An admirer of Walter Lippmann, the nationally syndicated columnist, she led the Gresham High School Argus to All-American honors in national high school press competitions by providing insightful commentary on local, national and world affairs in addition to covering school events.

Her experience as a high school journalist shaped her understanding of the role of the journalist in a free society. The school principal confiscated one issue of the student newspaper when Huntly bannered a story about lax student discipline across the front page. It was an early lesson about the First Amendment - one she never forgot.

Huntly became editor of her college newspaper, The Vanguard of Portland State University. During the Vietnam War, she exposed the university's bid for federal funds to conduct research on chemical and biological warfare. As a result of her reporting, the university withdrew its grant application to the U.S. Department of Defense.

During the civil rights movement, Huntly went to Mississippi to help start a newspaper serving the black community of Greenwood in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. It was a town where Byron de la Beckwith, the accused assassin of civil rights worker Medgar Evers, walked the streets a free man. (Beckwith, a white supremacist, was finally convicted in 1994 after two all-white juries were deadlocked in 1964.)

In 1974, Huntly went to work as a reporter for The Oregonian, the daily newspaper in Portland, OR. Her award-winning reporting on Portland school desegregation played a key role in the school board's decision to throw out its one-way school busing plan and develop a new plan that was equitable to both white and black students,

Drawn by the journalistic excellence at The Philadelphia Inquirer under Eugene Roberts, the paper's former editor, Huntly left her beloved Oregon in 1983 and went to work as an Inquirer business reporter. During her 18-year career at the paper, she did distinguished reporting in each of the three beats she covered: regional economic development and labor; higher education; and public health, with a focus on the global AIDS epidemic.

Her reporting on public health took her around the world. It included a trek by camel into an isolated village in India to cover the global campaign to eradicate polio virus, as well as in-depth reporting on the AIDS epidemic in South Africa and the effort to develop an AIDS vaccine.

Huntly holds the record for the longest single story ever published by The Philadelphia Inquirer - a narrative reconstruction of a 46-day strike at the newspaper in 1985. The story, written under deadline pressure, began on page one and filled eight pages in the A section. It later became part of the curriculum at the Harvard Business School - a case study in how not to conduct labor relations.

Huntly took a buyout from the Inquirer in 2001. She moved to South Africa for a year to mentor reporters covering AIDS at English-language newspapers in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban. She has also helped train AIDS reporters in Botswana, Kenya, Nigeria and China.

Huntly, who joined the faculty of La Salle's Communication Department in 2006, gets her news the old fashioned way - by reading newspapers. She begins her day with The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She also likes to bike, swim laps and, from the comfort of her living room on Sunday afternoons, help the Philadelphia Eagles move the ball into the endzone.

Huntly holds a bachelor's degree from Portland State University and a master's degree from the University of Missouri. She has also been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard; a Ford Foundation Fellow in educational journalism; and a Kaiser Family Foundation Teaching Fellow in South Africa.

OFFICE:
Com Center 203

PHONE:
215-951-1844

EMAIL:
collinsh@lasalle.edu