What’s the Grinnell College student body like?

The co-editors-in-chief of The Scarlet & Black news organization seem a good representation of those attending the smartest college in the state.

GRINNELL, Iowa – I’ve found a good quick way to tell you what the student body is like at Grinnell College. Let me lead you over to the student newspaper office and classroom on the second floor of the “Joe Rosenfield ’25 Center” on the campus.

The co-editors-in-chief of the weekly “Scarlet & Black” student newspaper and its aspiring 24/7 online news companion are seniors Nora Kohnhorst, a history major from Queens in New York City, and Charlotte Krone, a gender studies major from Los Angeles. They are both candidates to become esteemed Fulbright Scholars to teach overseas next year, Kohnhorst in Germany and Krone in Argentina.

They head a staff of 33 student journalists who come from 10 states and five or six other countries. From the co-editors themselves to the rookie reporters, “we’re pretty bi-coastal,” said Kohnhorst. “We have a lot of New Yorkers and a lot of Californians. It’s great at Grinnell that way. It’s really nice – especially at the newspaper – to have a diversity of perspective like we do.”

The co-editors-in-chief Nora Kohnhorst (left) and Charlotte Krone.

That has helped “The S & B,” as most readers refer to it, be selected as the “Print & Multimedia Association of the Year” the last two years by the Iowa College Media Association.

And it now has the additional distinction this year of being the only unionized newspaper staff in Iowa, and that’s among all student and professional newspapers in the state, according to officials of the Iowa Newspaper Association.

Negotiations for the labor contract – covering all students in what you might think of as “work-study” positions – began in the fall of 2022. It was ratified in the fall of 2023, signed in April of 2024, and the 3-year contract took effect with the school year that started last September.

The bargaining unit is called the “Union of Grinnell Student Dining Workers” because the unionization effort began among those working in the dining halls. The co-editors told me they believe Grinnell now has “the first wall-to-wall union of undergraduate students” in the nation.

“It’s an unusual labor contract because it covers a real range in the kinds of student jobs there are,” said Kohnhorst. “Dining hall workers, lifeguards at the pool, newspaper editors and reporters, staff at the student radio station, so many different jobs. It hasn’t been perfect, but we’ve been able to keep everything working while we’re all getting used to the rules.”

Students are limited to 20 hours of work per week. Wages have increased, from the $7 or $8 per hour they earned before the union, to about $14 per hour now.

“The biggest difference I see in our operation with the union is an adherence to work hours,” said Lyle Muller, 71, who in a 25-year career with the Cedar Rapids Gazette became editor-in-chief. He’s been the “professional advisor” for The Scarlet & Black at Grinnell since 2018. “The union contract spells out (the limits on work time) and the college is careful not to allow students to work extra hours.”

Professional advisor Lyle Muller with co-editors-in chief Kohnhorst and Krone.

That’s probably a good thing, Muller noted, because “journalists are heinous violators of work hours, mainly became they cannot control when news happens or when sources are available.” He said he’s been a union supporter over his career, including helping organize one at a TV station in Austin, Minn., in the late 1970s. He said it’s good now at Grinnell “having a framework so that the students are not taken advantage of, when they also have high demands with their studies.

Grinnell College has no journalism department and thus no journalism majors. But as the student news operation’s advisor, Muller drives to Grinnell from his home in Tiffin to “teach the staff basic journalism” on Mondays. He returns to campus other days as needed, particularly to answer questions on the nights when the first printed newspapers of each semester are put together.

The S & B prints 450 to 500 copies of the paper, which are available on Mondays. Those printed copies are snatched up quickly by the college’s 1,700 or so students, plus faculty members and staff. Thousands – including alumni around the world – read it online.

Muller is as highly regarded by the Grinnell students as he is by news professionals across the state. In February, the Iowa College Media Association gave him its highest honor, the “Eighmey Award,” for “lifetime achievement in college media advising.”

“We all know Lyle is a brilliant journalist and a devoted advisor for us,” said co-editor Krone. “We are incredibly grateful he’s here at Grinnell.”

The Grinnell news operation has produced some graduates who are distinguishing themselves in professional journalism.

Among them is Hayes Gardner, who was on the Pulitzer Prize-winning team of reporters for the Louisville Courier-Journal who covered the misguided police raid that resulted in the murder of Breonna Taylor there in 2020. Gardner is now a top reporter with the Baltimore Sun, and was involved with the coverage of the collapse of that city’s Francis Scott Key Bridge after it was hit by a container ship in 2024. Another notable Grinnell alumnus in journalism is Stephen Gruber-Miller, the lead legislative reporter for the Des Moines Register.

The S&B’s news coverage of the campus – and the community of Grinnell – is ambitious and wide-ranging.

“On a campus like Grinnell, local news is really important,” said co-editor Kohnhorst. “We have sort of a captive audience, and we’re producing the news they read. And we offer our readers a kind of ‘entry point’ on how journalism works and how important it is.”

Staff columnists and guest columnists from the campus community show readers how opinions develop from news coverage.

As with most college papers, there’s a lot of attention to the arts, culture, and sports, besides news and opinion. There’s impressive use of data analytics in stories. On The S&B website, they do video stories, too. And, as there should be in any college news operation, there is fun.

One example of the latter is The S&B’s extensive coverage of the twice-a-year drag shows that Grinnell students present. (But last year, when a student was physically assaulted by a non-student at a post-show party, the coverage of the resulting criminal prosecution was serious.)

Another example of the fun is the “advice column” that co-editor Krone writes. It’s called “Sage & Blunt” – kind of a take-off on the “Scarlet & Black” name of the newspaper. (And while we’re explaining, scarlet and black are the school colors.) In a recent posting of the advice column, the writer (Krone is not named) gave relationship advice to a reader “Rural Romantic.”

“All the letters I answer in Sage & Blunt are real – I don’t make them up,” Krone said, “but it is true that many of them come from our close friends. I think one reason the column is as popular as it is, on a small campus like ours, we are such a close-knit community. We’re all enmeshed in each other’s business.”

While the authors of the letters are assigned pseudonyms, everybody else on campus is guessing who wrote it.

The “Gallery of Flags” in the Spencer Grill at Grinnell College. The flags of all the home countries of current Grinnell students are displayed from the ceiling. There are now 60 nations represented!

Overall, The S&B’s coverage of the campus reflects the tense times the whole country is experiencing now.

“I certainly can’t speak for all Grinnell College students,” said Krone, “but I think the general feeling is probably similar to how people felt here during the first Trump presidency, but scarier now. Things are happening so quickly, like cutting scientific research funds, the Palestine situation being so tense, not knowing what else is coming. There’s a sense that if you’re standing outside the dining hall protesting, you wonder what might happen to you.”

Kohnhorst agrees that the level of student activism at Grinnell College “has declined some in my time at Grinnell,” and cities a couple of other interesting reasons.

“One is that this is a more competitive institution,” she said, referring to the academic rigor. “Another is the demise of the Democratic presidential caucuses in Iowa. I think those caucuses attracted a lot of students to Grinnell, students who were more interested in politics and knew that if they were in Iowa, they’d get to meet all the presidential candidates and could get involved in the campaigns.”

Current students at Grinnell know only vaguely of the college’s impressive history of activism in the turbulent 1960s and early ’70s. I found this quick synopsis in the online archives of the college’s Burling Library:

“It should come as no surprise that Grinnell College, with its focus on social justice, felt the currents of the protest movements. The administration supported many of these movements, as shown by the three-day long convocation, ‘The Liberal Arts College in a World of Change,’ in which notable activists like Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. received honorary degrees and gave speeches. However, some protests received less college support. For example, in 1969, students staged a ‘nude-in’ to protest the visit of a Playboy Magazine representative and the magazine’s demeaning stance in regard to women. Less than a year later, students took over the ROTC building for several days to protest the U.S. bombing of Cambodia. Grinnell College even closed early in the spring of 1970 after the massacre at Kent State.”

If you’re intrigued and want to read more, I recommend a pamphlet that was published in early 1986 by my great friend and mentor Glenn Leggett, who served as Grinnell College’s president from 1965-’75. Available in both Grinnell’s college and town libraries, it is titled, “There is trouble running any college. If you are president, the trouble happens to you.”

As I told the Grinnell College journalists of today when I visited with them last week, Leggett’s brief, delightful memoir of that era included vignettes about dealing with the media, particularly their predecessors at The S&B.

His description of student journalists in the late ‘60s: “…those hippity-hoppity sages and savants.” Since I was a college editor myself in that time, Leggett delighted in reading me that passage. The only way I could respond was with the truth: “I resembled that remark.”

*

ANOTHER IMPORTANT NOTE ON TODAY’S COLLEGE MEDIA IN IOWA: While the Grinnell Scarlet & Black has been honored the last two years as the best in the Iowa College Media Association, the student-run Daily Iowan at the University of Iowa has been a big winner on a whole other level.

In February, the “DI,” as most readers know it, was named the 2025 “Iowa Newspaper of the Year” in competition with all the professional newspapers in the state. The U of I student paper has won that award a total of five times, with three of those honors coming in the last six years.

Maybe that’s a reflection of the weakening of the professional news operations in the state. But I pick up the “DI” when I can, and check it online frequently, and it’s a very impressive operation.

--

You can comment on this column below or write the columnist directly by email at chuck@offenburger.com.

--

Have you explored the variety of writers, plus Letters from Iowans, in the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative? They are from around the state and contribute commentary and feature stories of interest to those who care about Iowa. Please consider a paid subscription. It helps keep them going, and it keeps you in the know.