Kevin Lerner Didn’t Want Me to Write This

Kevin Lerner poses after clearing out his office on June 23. Photo courtesy of Kevin Lerner

It was the summer of 2009 when Kevin Lerner was desperately looking through job listings. He had just finished up a year-long contract teaching at Seton Hall University and was out of a job.

“Life was very bleak. I was actually on unemployment. I was paying tuition at Rutgers because I was a part-time doctoral student. And had no idea what I was going to do next,” Lerner recounted.

Then, he saw a job listing for a visiting professor role at (then) Marist College. He applied and has spent the last 16 years helping shape the Communications Department into what it is today. 

Now, Lerner is leaving Marist University to serve as the Chair of the Department of Journalism and Sports Media at Montclair State University this fall. 

Although he insists that his departure does not warrant a feature about him, his time at Marist had a profound impact on his students and fellow professors.

“He was my first friend at Marist,” Jeffrey Basinger, professor of Communication and Multimedia Storytelling, said. “It's not inherently easy to make a lot of friends among your colleagues [as a professor], but he helped me.”

Sarah Lynch ‘21 dreamed of pursuing journalism but was focusing on public relations when she took an honors seminar taught by Lerner about fake news.

“It was Dr. Lerner’s class and instruction that made me realize that I couldn’t abandon this journalism dream on the shelf,” Lynch said. “It was that semester that I committed to pursuing journalism, which then changed the trajectory of my college experience and coursework and led me to where I am today.”

Lerner worked as a visiting professor until 2011, when he became an affiliate assistant professor. Upon completing his dissertation in 2014, he was hired as a tenure-track professor. Then in 2022, he was elected chair of the Department of Communications.

In the last few years, Lerner and Basinger have worked on creating new opportunities for the journalism program at Marist, like the Community Journalism Initiative. 

“I will miss him dearly, but I'm super excited for his next opportunity, and now we have an opportunity to keep the momentum going that he helped me start,” Basinger said.

Moving to Montclair wasn’t in Lerner’s original plan, but an opportunity he welcomed. 

“I was on the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication job site trying to see if one of the three jobs Marist had listed had gone up, because we were hiring three people. So I'm looking at job ads, and I’m like, ‘Oh, Montclair. I know some people in Montclair,’” Lerner said. 

As the chair of the department, Lerner will lead a newly formed department entirely focused on journalism.  

“There are somewhere between seven and 10 faculty members in the department, and they are all journalism and sports media people, as opposed to Marist, where there are 15 people in the communication department, but two and a half of us are journalism,” Lerner said.

Lerner didn’t receive the offer from Montclair until after commencement, so he couldn’t warn his students or colleagues in advance. 

“The hardest part for me, honestly, is leaving students who I thought I'd be working with next year. Because they thought I'd be here. I thought I'd be here,” Lerner said. “There are colleagues that I’m sad about... I regret that we weren't able to get the new curriculum in place before I left.”

After 16 years, Lerner believes his impact is reflected in the success of the people he’s helped teach.

“The legacy is in the students, the alumni, particularly,” Lerner said. “The legacy is seeing students who've gone off to work and do important things, cool things, winning awards, doing journalism that's like exposing great stories. I love watching that happen. So I mean, if there's a legacy, it's in what the students do afterwards.”