Jacob Jaffe, the former chairman of the journalism department at Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus, and a champion of print journalism, died on March 18. He was 89.
Before his retirement from LIU in 1980, Jaffe was curator of the prestigious George Polk awards for outstanding journalism and was responsible for picking the winners.
He also was an advisory editor of Journalism Quarterly and a president of the American Society of Journalism School Administrators.
As faculty adviser to Seawanhaka, LIU’s scrappy student newspaper, Jaffe was a staunch defender of press freedom on campus, recalled Brooklyn Paper Publisher Ed Weintrob, who edited Seawanhaka in 1970.
“It was a period of great stress on campus — the end of the 1960s, the height of the Vietnam war, the emergence of the Black Power movement, faculty unrest and turmoil within the university administration,” Weintrob recalled. “Administrators, faculty and students each found their own reasons to try to silence the campus press.”
“What Seawanhaka editors learned from Professor Jaffe was to take chances and take responsibility for what we produced each week,” Weintrob added. “He let us do what we wanted and allowed us to learn from our mistakes.”
Jaffe, a resident of Princeton, N.J., is survived by his wife, Anne Papenik, and son, Mark Jaffe.