WASHINGTON – Al Gore has signed up for his first job since handing over the keys to the vice president’s office: He will teach a graduate-level journalism class at Columbia University.
After working as a newspaper reporter and then dealing with the press through 25 years in elected office, Al Gore will teach a graduate journalism class at Columbia University.
GORE WILL TEACH a course called “Covering National Affairs in the Information Age,” which will look at politics from the perspective of politicians and journalists, the university said in a statement Wednesday.
The former vice president will join the Columbia staff as a visiting professor in February and has committed to give six to eight lectures a semester, for at least two semesters.
“Al Gore is an incomparable resource for our students and others at this university,” said Tom Goldstein, dean of the journalism school. “From his unique perspective, students will see how the government and media intersect.”
Gore was a reporter at The Tennessean in Nashville for three years in the 1970s and has long held an interest in evolving information technologies. Columbia’s journalism faculty learned of Gore’s new job in a memo distributed by Goldstein.
“This is incredible for us and for any student studying journalism here,” one journalism professor, Sreenath Sreenivasan, said in a telephone interview from New York. “He brings his perspective from one of the most interesting elections in history and that will be part of the course.”
“He has the ultimate insider’s perspective,” Sreenivasan said. “He has stories that no one else could tell.”
Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism administers the Pulitzer Prize, journalism’s top honor.
In his memo, Goldstein said Gore also plans to teach in Tennessee. Another official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Gore would teach journalism but would not reveal where he would teach.
Gore studied law and religion at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, but his only degree is in government from Harvard.
The former vice president owns a home in Carthage, a rural town 50 miles east of Nashville, where his mother still lives. His wife, Tipper, inherited a home in Arlington, Va.
