By Bill Tammeus
NSNC Member and Former President
If NSNC member Russell Frank’s upcoming year as a Fulbright Scholar in Greece is anything like what was to have been his day of departure for Athens, it’s going to be a trying but exciting time.
Frank and his wife, Han Wingate, boarded a late-September-afternoon plane in New York, and “we all got settled into our seats. Then the cabin began to fill with a sort of mist or smoke, according to the captain. They tried to find the sources of it, couldn’t, and then cleared the plane.”
Twenty-four hours later they finally were off for Greece, where Frank will teach in an international masters program in journalism at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki for two semesters and do research and writing about the way Greece has handled the million-plus refugees and migrants (https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/greece.html) that have arrived since 2015, mostly from Syria and Afghanistan.
For Frank, who teaches journalism at Penn State University, this Fulbright, his second, is a chance to do and teach the kind of journalism that he believes is needed now more than ever.
Frank, who has been to Greece several times, most recently in 2015, says he has been “frustrated with news media coverage of it (the refugee story). This is something you see over and over again, that journalism is so good at responding to the erupting events — the volcano, the hurricane, the tornado, the fire, the bombing, the outbreak of war. We’re right there. But in ongoing situations, really not so much. We sort of let it drift out of the public consciousness, which I think is unconscionable, given the severity of the situation.”
A large part of that severity has been caused because, Frank says, “the European Union pretty much slammed the door” on the refugees who managed to get to Greece and who now must figure out how to survive and thrive in an economy that has been deeply wounded in recent years.
Frank describes this Fulbright as a hybrid in that “some are teaching awards and some are research awards but this is both.” He has taught at Penn State since 1998 and won first place in Commentary in the 2019 SPJ Keystone Chapter Best in Journalism Contest. The StateCollege.com columnist is believed to be the second person to win a Fulbright while an NSNC member — following former NSNC president Peter Rowe, who lived in Japan on a Fulbright in 2003. Though Frank is the only NSNC member to have won two Fulbright awards.
While Frank is in Greece he also hopes to do some research and writing about Thessaloniki’s historic Jewish community, most of whose original members came to Greece after being evicted from Spain in 1492. By the 1920s, the city was about one-third Jewish, Frank says, but was pretty much wiped out in the Holocaust. It’s now begun to come back, he says, with a Jewish population of between 1,000 and 2,000.
That story connects to Frank’s 2012 Fulbright, which sent him to Lviv, Ukraine, where Jews had a similar experience. (“My claim to fame at my college,” he says, “is that I’m really good at writing Fulbright applications.”)
Frank says he’s not done much in the way of foreign correspondence, so “I’m going to be sort of a very old greenhorn.”
When I suggested to Frank that his work would result in two books, III Thessalonians and IV Thessalonians, he promised to “get on that right away.” More seriously, he said, “I hope I’m productive and am able to do some useful work while I’m there.”
While Frank focuses on journalism in Greece, his wife, a psychotherapist, plans to work with a women’s center in Thessaloniki, dealing with issues refugee families face.
“The only bad thing about all this,” Frank says, “is that we’re new grandparents twice over,” a newborn and a one-year-old. And it will be hard being away from the children for that long “because I’m kind of obsessed with them at the moment. But that’s what FaceTime and Skype are for.”
As the press release announcing Frank’s award notes, “Frank is one of over 800 U.S. citizens who will teach, conduct research, and/or provide expertise abroad for the 2019-2020 academic year through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program. Recipients of Fulbright awards are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement, as well as record of service and demonstrated leadership in their respective fields.”
Bill Tammeus, a former NSNC president, spent most of his career as a columnist for The Kansas City Star.
