Thank You, Mr Hostetter

I’ve never met cable legend Amos Hostetter, but I already know I like him. So should college students at three different schools across this country.

That’s because Mr Hostetter, very quietly, has reached into his pocket and extended funding for a unique program run by C-SPAN and The Cable Center. The program allows students to benefit from cable technology and provides them with an experience they’d never get without it.

The early money for the program, much of it provided by Mr Hostetter in the first place, was set to expire last month. Mr Hostetter’s recent gift will keep the program going for another three years. “[The program] is doing very well,” says The Cable Center’s president/CEO Larry Satkowiak.

The effort’s formal name is The Cable Center’s Distance Learning Program. Others call it The C-SPAN Classroom. For several years students at The University of Denver have referred to it another way. They’ve called it ‘the best class on campus’ in a number of surveys. Well, giving students a chance to interact with people from both sides of the aisle, like former Presidents Ford and Clinton, news legend Walter Cronkite, DNC chief Howard Dean and former Senator Bob Dole is heady stuff.

This semester the roster for the program includes Dee Dee Myers, Tucker Carlson and Pat Buchanan. Most students read about these people, or see them on television. The Cable Center, and Mr Hostetter, are allowing some students to do something more intimate.

This is how it works. In the summer C-SPAN Senior Executive Producer and Political Editor Steve Scully scours his Rolodex (ok, perhaps his online contacts list) and invites top-notch political players, often sitting in C-SPAN’s studios, to speak, via closed circuit cable, about a certain topic with the class, which is seated around the country: at The Cable Center in Denver, on the campus of the U of Denver, George Mason University in the suburbs of Washington, DC, and Pace University in NY City. Scully, who’s also the course’s professor for the Denver students, is sitting in D.C. and goes to Denver periodically to be with the students there. A teaching assistant takes attendance when Scully is  not in Denver. Through the cable hookup, though, he can see the class when’s he’s in D.C., and students can see him in Denver on three large TV screens. The other schools have similar set-ups.

This semester’s class is titled, appropriately, Politics and the American Presidency.

After the guest addresses the class and takes questions, each professor (there are professors at each of the other schools’ classes, too) either has the class listen and watch Scully’s lecture or they provide their own lectures. Scully’s talk is probably the best, by the way.  In addition to his interactive style he mixes in a slew of video clips of significant political events, modern and historic.

And this class has not been rated the best class at the U of D because it’s easy.  Students must complete reading assignments, take quizzes, mid-terms and  finals, and write papers and book reports. “They can’t just watch TV for 2 hours,” says Scully, who’s handed out a few D’s and F’s along the way. The professors at the other two schools are responsible for grades for their respective classes. “This is a traditional class taught in a non-traditional way,” he says.

I attended a session of the class last year at The Cable Center. I mentioned above that the class goes by several names. So how do I refer to it? ‘Darn, how come they didn’t have something like this when I went to college?’

Cable doing something for education with quiet dignity. Sound familiar? Yes, this class was the idea of C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb, who’d been talking with Mr Hostetter about ways Mr  Hostetter could extend his support of The Cable Center.

So, we say thank you, Mr Lamb. And we say thank you again to Mr Hostetter.