Off the Cuff: VP of CBS News Jennifer Siebens, OC '72

Alumnus Jennifer Siebens returned to the Oberlin campus for the first time since her graduation in May 1972 during the first weekend of December to participate in the College's World Views symposium. The conference explored perspectives abroad of America with particular consideration of the current special political environment. Siebens is currently the Vice President and London Bureau Chief of CBS News. The Review caught up with Siebens to speak about her career, her time at Oberlin and more.

Memories of Oberlin:

My father and two of his brothers -- two of my uncles -- were Oberlin grads, so it was a huge feeding frenzy to get me to apply. I had no interest because, of course, the whole family was saying, "go there." I applied just to get everybody off my back and I walked on campus in the spring of my senior year of high school and I just fell in love with the place. It was teeming with hippies. I was from this very proper, suburban school in northern New Jersey and I had no idea that these were my people.

Oberlin has so much flexibility. I did a semester off campus my junior year and came back. My last three semesters were great. It wasn't like I hadn't liked it before. The College was very amoeba-like. We went to pass/fail grading and I went off grades my freshman year. It became a little complicated when I decided to go to grad school because I had no grade point average.

I thought about dropping out. I really had doubts. The world was really screwed up and nothing made sense and why did you need a college education? Today it seems really stupid that you could be that riled up, but there was a lot of this then -- a lot of alternative communities. There was a big one in Taos, New Mexico and a lot of people were into the whole hippie thing, dropping out and going to a commune in the middle of nowhere.

On student protests in the late 1960s:

I was here from September '68 to May of '72 and it was rocking and rolling. It's so quiet here now. The Vietnam War was raging; the Students for a Democratic Society -- SDS -- had a chapter on campus. There were a lot of groups on campus, but the SDS was the most radical, the most anti-war.

I was just sort of stumbling around at Dascomb and trying to figure out what was going on. The two leaders of the Oberlin College chapter of the SDS were going to be expelled -- I [didn't] know what they had done or why. The then-president was William Carr and it was just a generational clash. He was in over his head.

I'm a new freshman, and the next thing I know, I'm sitting in, in the [Cox] administration building. They're all about free speech and due process and constitutional rights. It was crazy. I got politicized so quickly. I had never done anything like that in high school...so I got thrown into this and it never stopped. [There were] riot police on Tappan Square at one point. There was no tear gas, but there was the threat of tear gas.

Kent State Shootings, 1970:

It was just beyond belief. It would be as incredible today as it was then. There was nothing to prepare for [what happened], for guns to be turned on students. The College shut down and we all went to Washington. There was a big, big protest. We didn't finish our sophomore year -- [professors] just gave grades, wherever you were. I think the College didn't want to rock the boat. If it happened at Kent State, it could happen here.

Being a journalist:

I knew from the time I was 12 that I wanted to be a journalist. At the time I was growing up, my dad [worked overseas]. I was born in Germany and we moved back to the States. The Berlin Wall had gone up and people were jumping the wall, tunneling under the wall, making a run for freedom. There were these incredible stories of people trying to escape. I wanted to be the next [New York Times foreign correspondent] Eric Pace.

It's very stressful. If you don't like long hours and need sleep, it's not a good career choice. But it's sort of like being paid to stay in school.

The future of media:

I think TV news will stick around, I really do. There's a very natural conversion to the computer. If it's coming off the screen, it will survive, but who will be bringing it to you and what it will look like, I don't think anybody knows.... I think in the end that instead it's all doing storytelling, and the audience is going to find the best storytelling.

What's so great about the new technologies is that you are getting more people. You're also getting kind of eruptions. There was some difficult [citizen journalism situations] in Mumbai because nobody was there. We were getting a lot of...shards of this and shards of that. You don't really know what you're looking at, and people were grabbing it and throwing it into reports. It's pretty raw. And that's for those of us who came up with the discipline that [when] we go to press and go on air the piece is polished, it's researched, it's edited, it's the best of the story ever -- and now it's moving at hyper-speed and you are getting it in short takes.

2008 presidential election abroad:

They [Europeans] were so convinced that [Obama] was going to win [and that is because] they don't understand the role of religion in the conservative side of the United States, even though they saw Bush get elected twice. There are always surprise twists.

I was fretting that I was going to be overseas for this election, [but] if you're in a first world country like the UK, you've got TV, you've got blogs -- it's really like you're there. By the morning after the election, all the [London Times] had a double-wide spread with a map of the United States and a state-by-state recap of what happened. The whole world was watching and I was surprised [to see such interest] because when I went back overseas, I thought everybody hated us. That it was a 'my way or the highway" approach. People really believe in the American dream. Even if they live in Kenya or if they live in Germany.

On President-elect Barack Obama:

He's not going to be a perfect president -- there's no such thing as a perfect president, but it's amazing that we've actually elected a person of color. He's a realist. We have a lot to learn and the great thing about Obama is that he gets it. He understands because he lived it. I think Obama is the real deal and the world is hungry for something -- [people are saying], 'Get us out of here.'