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Alumni Association Home > Past Issues > 2005 > March-April 2005	Print View

National President
By Andrea Hjelm, B.S. '65
We’re happy to count CNN anchor Aaron Brown as an alumnus of the University of Minnesota, even if he was a student here only a brief time. And we’re even more pleased that he’ll step back on campus May 10 for the 2005 UMAA Annual Celebration.

A familiar face for those who watch NewsNight with Aaron Brown, he took a few minutes recently to share his thoughts about his Minnesota roots and his profession. Let’s call it a perfect lead-in to what promises to be a fantastic annual celebration.

Brown admits that September 11, 2001, was a defining day for him. Within an hour of the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, Brown was on a New York City rooftop reporting on the day’s horrific events as they unfolded around him. It was his first day on the job as CNN’s lead anchor, and he provided insightful and informed, nonstop, on-the-spot coverage.

“The power of the event was overwhelming,” Brown says. “I was in the center of something. I was privileged to be in the center of it. And in some respects, I suppose, it was defining in how some people see me.”

Brown, however, simply defines himself as a Minnesotan. He was born in St. Paul and grew up in Hopkins. He lists Hubert Humphrey among his most prominent influences. And it shows in his work. Brown has distinguished himself with his thoughtful, humble approach to reporting the news. He’s known for injecting reflective pauses into his program and for asking open-ended questions. He encourages his viewers to think critically about the information he’s conveying.

“I have this great respect for viewers to work it out—that if you give them good information, they’ll figure it out. Their solution might be different than my solution, but it’ll be the right solution for them. And my job is to kind of help that process along,” he says. “I’m one voice in what’s become an incredibly crowded universe of voices.”

Brown says he was dead-set on being a reporter beginning when he was 8 years old. He traces his journalistic passion back to a tour of a Minneapolis daily newspaper. “I looked around and there were all these men—they had their sleeves rolled up, they were smoking and talking on the phone. The noise level was loud. There were these pneumatic tubes with copy flying all over the place,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘This is the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen in my life.’”

Brown actually began his broadcasting career in the Twin Cities, though not by the road one might expect from a journalist of his stature. He enrolled at the University in the fall of 1966 and lasted about a year. “I was just an academic disaster,” he admits. Still just 18, he landed a job at WLOL radio, sweeping floors and answering phones. But it wasn’t long before he was hosting his own Sunday talk show. Brown marvels at how so many of the social and political topics he discussed on his show then—including war, abortion, gun control, and gay rights—are still being debated. “By and large, it seems to me that we talk about the same things now that we talked about then, which is a little discouraging,” he says. “We don’t settle anything—we don’t move on from anything.”

So topics might Brown discuss on May 10? Well, when asked this question, he still had more than three months—practically light-years to someone accustomed to covering breaking news—to prepare his speech. He did admit, however, that he won’t pass up the opportunity to use his abbreviated academic history to have some fun at his own expense.

“Coming back—I don’t think it’s a moment of great vindication, I just think it’s a moment of wonderful irony. I intend to enjoy it that way,” he says. “But to be allowed back into Northrop Auditorium, let alone be allowed to speak there, I think will be one of the great fun moments of my life.”

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