Nicholas Johnson
- Voice: USA + 319-337-5555
- E-mail:
- Fax: USA + 319-335-9019
- Postal: Box 1876, Iowa City IA 52244-1876, US
- Parcels: Nicholas Johnson, UI College of Law, Melrose and Byington, Iowa City IA 52242-1113, USA
Guide to Retrieving Resources from Nicholas Johnson's Web Site
Note: This site links, ultimately, to thousands of pages created by Nicholas Johnson, including entire books. There are also links to even more material created by others. This page is intended to help you find what you're looking for.
Looking for Nicholas Johnson's articles, talks or transcripts from 1996 to the present? Your best bet may be to go directly to the "Recent Publications" page (which contains a chronological list with links to the full text of all of those documents).There will at some point be a detailed subject matter set of links from this page. For now, the following sketchy beginning of that -- as promised on the opening page -- will have to do.Want to know more about Nicholas Johnson? A basic beginning might include this biographical statement (or his Who's Who in America entry), activities reports from the University of Iowa College of Law publication, Iowa Advocate, writing by others about Nicholas Johnson, and a 333-page bibliography. Numerous links to material regarding his role as a Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, and media reform efforts since, are available from "Nicholas Johnson and Media Reform." (Need a print quality picture? Here's a 600 dpi, 800KB, black and white photo.)
Links to full texts of Johnson's writing from 1996 to the present are available from the "Recent Publications" page, as are all "Law Review and Law-Related Articles", "Major Magazine Articles" from 1956 to the present, some 400 FCC opinions (authored during his 1966-73 term as FCC commissioner), and most of the more recent of over 500 speeches from 1963 to the present at 125 academic institutions and elsewhere.
There is a separate Web site for his Fall 2005 UI College of Law Law of Electronic Media class.
Want to send Nicholas Johnson an e-mail? His e-mail address and other contacts are available from this page.
| About | NJ's activities, affiliations, bibliography, contacts, photos, resumes, streaming audio and videos, teaching, writing | Iowa City Community School District; school board; columns; memos; 250 K-12 research sites | Schools |
| Global | NJ-created Web sites following trips to Sofia, Tbilisi, Warsaw; other sites; student papers | NJ's courses at the UI College of Law; Law of Electronic Media; Cyberspace Law Seminar; others; student writing | Teaching |
| Links | 1500 useful sites (NJ's bookmarks); presidential candidates; K-12 schools; Wendell Johnson Memorial; others | top hits; 300-page NJ bibliography; two entire books; samples pre-1996; nearly 200 texts since 1996 | Writing |
Ultimately, as additional material is moved to this site from other locations, this page will either contain, or link to, a more detailed subject matter index as well. Of course, there are excellent search engines available, links to some of which are available below.
During the Fall 2005 semester Nicholas Johnson is teaching a three-credit-hour version of his
Law of Electronic Media
class. During the Spring 2006 semester he will be teaching the
Cyberspace Law Seminar (a link to the Spring 2005 Web site).
Many students around the world,
as well as those at Iowa, who are thinking about going to law school, or
new to law school, have found his "So
You Want to be a Lawyer: A Play in Four Acts" a useful guide.
Students already in law school have found useful his
"Final Exam: Pre-Exam Comments" (the current version for his 2005-2006 classes) and the
warnings in a Texas Law Review comment he wrote as a law student in the late 1950s,
"Unauthorized Practice by Law Students: Some Legal Advice About Legal Advice".
* Concerned about what's happening to your mass media?
Much of Nicholas Johnson's life
has involved politics in one way or another. So it's only natural that
much of the material you'll find here involves politics.
The day after the 2004 presidential
election results were in Johnson offered his fellow Democrats this reaction
and set of suggestions:
"Democrats' Recovery Begins by Looking in the Mirror"
(an [Eastern Iowa] Gazette op ed).
Before the results were in he engaged in some bi-partisan reflection on
how the candidates had done in conducting our every-four-year citizens'
civics seminar. It was published as a Des Moines Register op ed
on November 6th under the title
"Election As a Civics Class".
A couple of early op eds, equally
applicable to every presidential election season, are
"Campaigns: You Pay $4 or $4000" (a Des Moines Register op ed), and
"Questions They Never Get Asked" (a Washington Post op ed). You might also
want to look at his Earlham College lecture, also referenced in "Media Reform," above,
"Media as Politics: What's a Voter to Do?".
Because Johnson lives in
Iowa, the state where the first presidential precinct caucuses were
held January 19, 2004, there were a lot of candidates coming through
his state. Having met most of them, Johnson settled on Congressman
Dennis Kucinich as the most progressive -- in both proposed programs and
rhetoric. You will find a number of items in the
"Recent Publications" page that involve the 2004 election in general and
Dennis Kucinich in particular, including Johnson's Web site,
"Another Iowan for Kucinich" --
from which a number of these pieces are linked.
As the primaries ran their course
in early 2004, and Senator John Kerry became the almost certain Democratic
Party presidential nominee, and yet seemed to lack either theme or distance
from Bush on major issues, Johnson attempted to "reverse engineer" just
what Kerry's campaign strategy might actually be in
Nicholas Johnson, "What's Kerry Thinking?"
(with subsequent support for Johnson's thesis from columnist Richard Reeves,
cartoonist Steve Sack, the multi-million-member moveon.org organization
-- and, alas, the ultimate election outcome). Some of
Johnson's reactions to that outcome are contained in
"Democrats' Recovery Begins by Looking in the Mirror"
(an [Eastern Iowa] Gazette op ed).
*
Iowa Child (Iowa Environmental Project)
The Iowa Child Coralville, Iowa,
rain forest project, now called the "Iowa Environmental Project,"
originally proposed as a $300 million venture (by 2003 a $180 million project),
has created considerable controversy and doubts as to its financial viability
since it was first proposed in 1996. Nicholas Johnson, and others, have
written about their questions and concerns. There is a Web page with links
to much of this writing at
www.nicholasjohnson.org/politics/IaChild.
*
Terrorism and the War in Iraq
"War
in Iraq: The Military Objections" (advanced text for presentation at
the University of Iowa College of Law's "International Law Talks: War with
Iraq," February 27, 2003)
"Ten
Questions for Bush Before War" (Guest Opinion, Daily Iowan,
February 4, 2003)
"Capitalists
Can Help U.S. Avert War with Iraq" (op ed, Iowa City Press-Citizen,
Sunday Insight, October 6, 2002)
"Tell
the Rest of the Story" (op ed, Iowa City Gazette, October 2,
2002)
"Between
Iraq and a Hard Place" (op ed, Omaha World-Herald, August 13,
2002)
"Search
for Better Response Than War: Don't Reward the Terrorists, But Understand
Their Interests" (op ed, Des Moines Sunday Register, June 30,
2002)
"Rethinking
Terrorism" (text of presentation at National Lawyers Guild Conference,
University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa March 2, 2002) In addition to the very substantial
body of stuttering research for which Dr. Johnson is best known, he was
also one of the early students and teachers of general semantics, authoring
the ever-popular People in Quandaries (which is still in print)
and other books on the subject.
This site provides links to some
of Dr. Johnson's research and writing in these and a variety of other fields,
commentary by and about him, some photos, and basic reference material,
such as a bibliography and list of his doctoral candidates.
During the years 2001-2003 a rather
vicious and supermarket-tabloid-style national media attack was launched
against Dr. Johnson and one of his master's thesis students from 1939,
Mary Tudor -- for reasons not yet fully known. Nicholas Johnson withheld
his response until invited by the City University of New York to participate
in an academic conference on stuttering in December 2002. His paper, "Retroactive
Ethical Judgments and Human Subjects Research: The 1939 Tudor Study in
Context," responds to many of the out-and-out lies in the defamatory
attacks and otherwise reviews the history of human subjects research over
the years in an effort to put the issues in a more balanced and informative
context.
*
K-12 Education Issues
Nicholas Johnson wrote Iowa City
Press-Citizen columns dealing with K-12 education generally, and the
Iowa City Community School District in particular, published every other
Tuesday during the course of his three-year term as a member of the ICCSD
School Board. The first appeared October 12, 1998. The 79th, and last,
in the series was published September 25, 2001, the day of his last Board
meeting. A complete
collection of the full texts of the entire series is available.
"The
Haefner Award" Following
Nicholas Johnson's successful campaign for ICCSD School Board in 1998 the
surplus in his campaign fund was used by him to create "The Haefner Award"
endowment fund, administered by the ICCSD Foundation. This site explains
the purposes and entry requirements for the Award, designed to recognize
excellence in an ICCSD high school social studies student's execution of
a civic education project designed to identify, and resolve, a public policy
issue in local government. This site was originally created and posted
May 23, 2002. As of December 28, 2002, it contains links to a video statement
by Dr. Haefner regarding civic education and the Award, and two half-hour
television programs in the "Education Exchange" series: "Civic Education
and the Haefner Award."
*
Governance
* Looking for the link to an
item that used to be on this page but is here no longer? For
a complete listing of, and links to, all articles and speeches prior to
those listed here -- that is, those from the Spring of 1996 to the present
-- please check out the
"Recent
Publications" page. For writing prior to 1996 go to the "Nicholas
Johnson Archives" page.
[Note: The material formerly found here has been significantly expanded,
and is now available at
"Nicholas Johnson and Media Reform."]
Like many others, Nicholas Johnson
had misgivings about the Bush Administration's response to terrorism in
general, and the Iraq War in particular, from the very beginning. They,
and he, managed to predict most of the disasters that have subsequently
come to pass. You'll find in
"Recent Publications"
a number of speeches and articles on aspects of those subjects, starting in
March 2002. They include, in reverse chronological order:
"Lessons from Abu Ghraib" (Guest Opinion, Daily Iowan,
May 11, 2004)
*
Wendell Johnson: Memorial, Speech Pathology, General Semantics and the
Tudor Study
Nicholas Johnson is the son of
the world renown speech pathology pioneer, Wendell Johnson, for whom the
University of Iowa's Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Clinic is named.
Dr. Johnson died in 1965 at the age of 59. In 1997 Nicholas Johnson created
a "Wendell A.L. Johnson
Memorial Web Page," which was dedicated at the University of Iowa on
April 19th of that year, Dr. Johnson's birthday.
Nicholas Johnson served on the
Iowa City [Iowa] Community School District Board from 1998-2001. This
site contains a significant amount of material related to those years
and issues.
Nicholas Johnson took a special
interest in the subject of board governance once elected to the school
board. If you serve on a board -- for-profit, non-profit, school board,
city council, church, or any other -- he strongly urges you to familiarize
yourself with at least some of the summary articles of John Carver's that
he makes available at "Board
Governance: Theory and Practice."
Note: To speed retrieval of this Web page, regardless of users' available equipment and connections, photos and fancy graphics have been kept to a minimum. Last updated August 3, 2005.