When I took over the Tech Editorship in April 2023, I only knew one thing about journalism: it was going to stop happening at Caltech unless somebody stepped up to lead it. With a dream of remedying the post-pandemic admin-student animosity but zero reporting experience, I was in for a daunting task. Then Richard Kipling emailed me and offered to buy me a coffee.
After a storied career at the L.A. Times, Kip came to Caltech in the early 2010s as an adjunct professor of English. His purpose was twofold: teaching the only journalism class offered by the H.S.S. department, and advising the only student newspaper on campus, The California Tech. 14 years later, I had the privilege of learning from Kip in both contexts, and found his passion, compassion, and integrity to be contagious. He helped me take my desire for cross-community communication and discipline it, to rebuild the Tech’s reputation as one of principled reporting after a long period of dormancy.
This wouldn’t be an easy process — nobody on campus seemed to trust the Tech. Faculty never bothered to read it, administrators always assumed we were trying to ‘gotcha’ them, and students were often unwilling to publish their true thoughts (or sometimes even the actual truth) for fear of retribution (only occasionally justified). I’ll be the first to admit, it was a rocky start — I made some questionable editorial decisions along the way. Many influential Institute figures were generous with their criticisms which, while not entirely unfair, were not entirely constructive. But we always had Kip to offer a warm smile, a rock-solid journalistic moral compass on which to cling, and a suggestion for a new story to pursue. Our reporting principles, printed on the back of every Tech, were directly informed by his approach.
There was no doubt about it — Kip was in it for us, the student journalists, and the community we work to inform. The H.S.S. department certainly didn’t give him many reasons to stay, consistently refusing to count his class toward undergraduate writing intensive requirements or, indeed, to take student journalism seriously at all. He continued advising the Tech after they fired him at the end of 2024. (Purely budgetary reasons, the department assured him in their email. There was more demand for creative writing classes, and simply not enough money to go around.)
He even stuck by our side after his Altadena home burned down at the beginning of 2025. All the undigitized paper ‘papers documenting decades of Kip’s work — decades of world history, from the morning of September 12, 2001 back to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond — were incinerated. (He had brought a few of them in to show me and his class just months earlier. The loss is stomach-churning. Both losses.)
I’m no longer in the loop on the progress of this, but here I have to thank the Student Affairs division (especially Diana Jergovic) for offering to search for a new advisor for the Tech, since the H.S.S. department decided it was beneath them. My aspiration for the winning candidate is that they will help elevate student journalism at Caltech. If you ask me, all Caltech students should graduate with practice in the art of objective, clarity-driven, public-directed communication that is the hallmark of news reporting. Science communication is especially critical these days. My vision is of an Institute with a world-class journalism program (like a Science Journalism minor??), and a community positively entangled in the kind of tight-knit relationships that just can’t be formed digitally. I’m not sure if it was Kip who first inspired that in me, but I’ll always associate that sentiment with him. I hope that’s how we’ll all remember him.
PRINT JOURNALISM IS NOT DEAD!