Philadelphia Weekly

With an audience of more than 200 students, 64-year-old John Street, sporting a navy blue suit accented by a colorful Liberty Bell tie, takes the floor in Temple's Gladfelter Hall, a guest lecturer at PW writer G.W. Miller III's journalism class. Beads of sweat appear on his forehead as he paces 2 feet in front of the first row of seats.As he emphasizes his points, his voice becomes louder and his hand gestures more emphatic.

"He'd be an amazing mentor," says sophomore journalism major Sarah Bergstein, 20, a member of the Air Force ROTC program at Temple.

Others are more skeptical. Junior film/photojournalism major Kevin Cook, 20, asks Street about Time magazine calling him "one of the three worst big-city mayors" in 2005. Street replies that the piece unfairly emphasized a program he'd just started at the time, and suggests the magazine had it in for him.

Street closes in on the front row as he talks about his rules for interviewing and a real-life example of the media getting it wrong.

There was the time, he explains, when City Council was voting on ethics legislation. The bill failed because it didn't get 12 votes. But the Inquirer reported that Street had vetoed the bill because he wasn't for ethics. He called and told the Inky there was no veto because the bill never even made it to his desk. Then, he says, the paper made the same mistake again in its retraction.

Street's explanation of the problem, which would ring true to anyone working in print media today, doesn't offer much encouragement to the room full of budding journalists.

"Unfortunately," he says, "in my experience, particularly over the course of the last 10 or 15 years, I have come to understand that reporters are younger, they have less experience, they're given less help, they have less budget, they have less support than at any other time in my memory.

"Every time one of these pa-pers does a restructuring, every time one of them has new bud-get goals or new profit goals to meet, the older and more experienced reporters are moved off the scene, and younger people take their place. But in many cases the younger people have no background. They're given very little training, and they're expected to do a job that in many cases two or three people were previously assigned to do."

The former mayor is teaching two urban politics courses as an adjunct. "He brings a wealth of practical experience as opposed to a theoretical understanding, which is a lot of what you get in a university setting," says senior political science major John Hebert, 38, who registered for the last spot in Street's 8:40 a.m. class.

Hebert likes that the former mayor brings guests to his class. "I'm really happy with the money I spent for this class because it's worth a great deal," he says. "I'm seeing these people and getting to interact with them." Among Street's list of guest lecturers are Michael Nutter, Bob Brady, Joe Hoeffel, Vince Fumo and (he hopes) Gov. Ed Rendell.

Wearing a red Temple track jacket, Street sits at his desk in a small office in the political science department in front of shelves decorated with potted plants and a framed picture of himself with Elton John.

He says he decided to teach at Temple because of his connections to the university. He attended Temple's law school, lives near main campus, and has a son who's a third-year Temple student and a daughter who teaches in the architecture school.

"Another thing I like about Temple is the students," Street says. "You have a lot of commuters who tend to be a little different than students who graduate from high school and hang around college campuses enjoying college life."

Temple students tend to be mature and serious about their studies, he says. And the kids in his classes are no exception.

"There are a lot of students who live in the city and in the Philadelphia region," he says. "They have background in the things that have happened in this city and this commonwealth over the last 30 years, and I pretty much know all about it, having been involved in all of it."

Street says he's planning a virtual City Council budget meeting so that students can discuss issues and decide how much money to apply to each initiative.

He plans to send his students to City Council meetings and ask Council members to coach students on how to play their roles.

It seems he'd like to do the same thing for the assembled student journalists, because despite his rocky relationship with the press, he claims to appreciate its power for positive change. "The difference between our country and many other countries around the world in the future is going to be you," he says. "You're that difference, and to the extent you have the interest, the wherewithal, the resources and the capacity to do a great job of reporting local events, we'll be a stronger city, a stronger region, a stronger commonwealth and a better democracy."