David Greene, the current host of NPR’s “Left Right and Center” and former “Morning Edition” host, graduated from McCaskey in 1994. 

The 1991-1994 yearbooks mark his joyful passage through McCaskey. A jack of all trades, he spent his years in the school plays, speech and debate, student council, National Honors Society, jazz band, AFS club, WJPM broadcasting, and, of course, the Vidette.

Greene’s career has been marked by 25 years of exceptional reporting. After receiving a degree in Government from Harvard, he moved into national newsrooms, such as The Baltimore Sun, where he covered members of Congress and the White House. 

Greene joined NPR in 2005 where he continued his White House reporting. In 2010, he did a two-year stint in Moscow as a foreign correspondent and later spent a month reporting on the Tunisian-Libyan border, seeking out “anyone with a story,” while bombs fell on Tripoli. Following his return to the US, Greene joined Morning Edition where he spent eight years waking up at 2:46 in the morning and taking roughly 13 million weekly listeners “around the country and around the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday.” 

Despite Greene’s impressive career, he has not forgotten his roots. He began, like the rest of us, at McCaskey. His journalism career started here too, with the help of the Vidette advisor at the time, Mr. Dennis Schmid. “I learned more from him than I learned from city and national newsrooms going forward.” Mr. Greene shared in an interview. “He was just that good, he taught the importance of ethics and truth and fairness and great writing. He was the real deal.” 

McCaskey was also the setting of David Greene’s first big story. 

Unfortunately lost to time, it covered the adoption of McCaskey’s first ID requirements during Greene’s senior year. Shortly after the policy was enacted, Vidette members began hearing complaints of unfair enforcement. Students familiar with staff members could skirt the policy, while those seen as ‘troublemakers’ had the policy used as a way to get them in trouble. 

“We decided we needed to do a story on this. We interviewed students, we interviewed teachers, we interviewed administrators.” While this investigative approach wasn’t immediately accepted by the administration, the article continued to be written without hindrances from school leadership. “That was a great experience for me, it taught me that you have to stick to your guns even when there are complaints and resistance because you know you’re doing the right thing.” 

The next issue featured Greene’s article front and center. 

“I remember walking through the halls and it felt like every single person was reading this, that morning we released the paper. We did what all great journalists strive to do: we held truth to power, we exposed something that was really meaningful to the whole community that we cover. It was everything you dream about as a journalist and we’d just done it at the Vidette.” 

That same year, David Greene graduated. 

He continued his education at Harvard, one of the first McCaskey students to do so in years. “I was intimidated, I came from a big public school. There were people coming from these fancy private schools and big cities. They had like ten of their classmates with us at Harvard and I was alone.” Even then, Mr. Greene refused to allow that to negatively impact his college experience, instead using his unique background to his advantage. 

“I carried this kind of scrappy pride with me where it was like: you might have come from private schools that literally orient themselves to get people into a place like Harvard but I come from a place that cares about things that are way more important.” 

Greene explained the value of that tenacity when things got intimidating, saying he brought it with him to Washington DC and while covering national politics. “It was easier because I knew that I came from a city and a school that prepared me for life in a lot of really cool ways.” 

Armed with the real-world and global education Greene received at McCaskey, he took on a career seeking truth. He believes this is more important now than ever as journalists and their credibility have been cast into doubt. “The fight that journalists are in today is not just that truth matters but that journalists can be trusted to seek it.” 

Although things seem dire—as trust between journalists and readers erodes and with national and global tensions running high—David Greene has hope. 

“I sense something in people like you who are in high school or college these days. There’s a feeling of…This world is not right and we’ve got to do something about it. And it’s across the board, no matter where you’re from or what your politics are. That gives me hope. I don’t know what you’re going to do with that responsibility but my dream is that it is some version of returning to a place where even if you disagree on every single point with someone, you can all agree, the truth matters.”