The Origins of the Lovejoy Award and Convocation
By Dwight E. Sargent, Colby Class of 1939

The Elijah P. Lovejoy Award and the annual Lovejoy Convocation at Colby College pay tribute to a man who fought and died in the front line of our nation's battle for a free press. They also honor a Maine institution of higher learning that since its founding has championed liberty for all, including the nation's newspapers.

The program involves the selection of a distinguished American journalist to come to Colby's Waterville campus to deliver the nationally recognized "Lovejoy Lecture." The award recipient receives an honorary doctoral degree before an assembly of the Colby community and invited newspaper people and scholars from all over the country. The spirit of Lovejoy's martyrdom is thus preserved. What was the genesis of the Lovejoy Convocation? When I was first asked this question, I pointed to the facts mentioned in the first paragraph above. The idea was spawned by the similarity between Colby's free-press mission and that of its ennobled graduate of the Class of 1826.

When Colby friends asked me to be more specific, I decided to practice what I often preach about journalistic objectivity and tell the literal truth. The Lovejoy Convocation idea came to me one evening as I was sitting in my fourth floor room in Adams House at Harvard University during my 1950-51 year as a Nieman Fellow.

Why not, I asked myself, commemorate the life and times of a Colby College graduate who was this nation's first martyr to freedom of the press? Surely there should be a way of creating an historic salute to a Maine boy who gave his life for a basic liberty and a way of doing so at the college that provided the intellectual foundation for Mr. Lovejoy's monumental achievement. So it occurred to me that an award might be made each year to a journalist who would come to Colby to make a speech and receive an honorary degree.

Such an idea had of course to be clearly outlined and presented to Colby's president and other college officials for their approval. So I took pen in hand (or, to be more precise, put my portable Royal typewriter in lap) and outlined in detail a proposal I would make to Colby authorities. Here are the three paragraphs I typed about the purpose of the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award:

"1. To honor and preserve the memory of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, America's first martyr to freedom of the press and a Colby College graduate (1826) who died bravely rather than forsake his editorial principles.

2. To stimulate and honor the kind of achievement in the fields of reporting, editing and interpretive writing that continues the Lovejoy heritage of fearlessness and freedom.

3. To promote a sense of mutual responsibility and cooperative effort between a newspaper world devoted to journalistic freedom and a liberal arts college dedicated to academic freedom."

Then I added this: "The recipient may be an editor, reporter, publisher. It is important only that he or she be a newsman or newswoman, regardless of title, who, in the opinion of the judges, has contributed to the country's journalistic achievement."

Next step was a telephone call to J. Seelye Bixler, one of the world's great philosophers and one of Colby's great presidents (and a raconteur par excellence). After listening to what I had in mind, he invited me to an evening in his Mayflower Hill abode to talk about it. This was generous of him in view of his busy schedule and my relative anonymity in proposing major programs for the College. On the appointed evening I sat in friend Seelye's parlor along with Vice President A. Galen Eustis and Richard N. Dyer, Colby's esteemed and trusted director of public relations. After three engaging, professionally incisive and good humored hours of conversation, the unanimous response to my suggestion was this:

We will do it.

The Lovejoy Convocation was born on that fateful evening in 1952. The rest is history, thanks to the devotion to the free-press theme on the part of Presidents Seelye Bixler, Robert E.L. Strider, William R. Cotter and a host of others.

The first chapter in that history was written by the first recipient of the Lovejoy Fellowship, James S. Pope of Louisville, Ky. Subsequent chapters have been brilliantly chronicled by Robert Strider, who has done a remarkable job of depicting the progress of Lovejoy Convocations for nearly half a century. The award recipients have been selected throughout this period by a committee composed of some of the nation's top journalists and the Colby presidents and chairmen of the Board of Trustees. They have made their choices on the basis of what was outlined in my prospectus: "Integrity, without which no newspaper can function in its traditional role as a public servant. Craftsmanship . . . character, intelligence and courage."

As for the program's success, let it be said that anybody can have an idea, but the credit goes to those with the vigor and vision to carry it out.

I would be falsely modest if I declined to take credit for initiating the spark that glowed into the Lovejoy Convocation. But it cannot be emphasized enough that the project's vitality is due to those who implemented the perception, leaders like Messrs. Bixler, Strider, Eustis, Dyer, Cotter and their colleagues in a never-ending crusade. Theirs are the hands and minds that created Colby's durable institution in the world of press freedom.

Dwight Sargent, Colby Class of 1939, was a founding member of the Lovejoy Award Selection Committee. A distinguished American journalist, he was curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University from 1964-72. Sargent also served as president of the Freedom of Information Foundation at the University of Missouri, editorial page editor of the Boston Herald and national editorial writer for Hearst Newspapers.