Professor's Journey Inspires and Surprises

ATLANTA - In May, Matt J. Duffy will complete his doctoral program. It took Duffy only three years to earn his doctorate; the average time to complete the program is five years. This summer, he will be moving to the United Arab Emirates to teach at the prestigious American International School in Abu Dhabi. Right now, he's finishing a homemade boat and regularly updating his blog.

Ten years ago, he was an alcoholic and drug addict.

"I realized I wasn't happy. I was trying to tell myself that I was but it wasn't working anymore," said Duffy, 38, on his epiphany that turned his life around. He quit drugs and alcohol cold turkey 10 years ago, but still felt empty. In 2004, he began a 12-step program that has enriched his life.

Duffy was born in 1971 in Pinetown, N.C., an hour east of Greenville. Pinetown is a rural community; Duffy remembers that his neighbors were hog farmers. Although he was talented academically and interested in the world around him, his home life was unhappy. His parents divorced when he was 13. It was around this time that Duffy began his drug use.

"As soon as I heard about marijuana, it sounded like a great thing to try," Duffy said. He said wanted to escape, and he found a group of people who came from similar backgrounds who also wanted to escape. "We had a community, something that we didn't have in our home lives," Duffy said. By the time he was 16, Duffy admitted that he was a "big screw-up." He had to drop out of J.H. Rose High School in Greenville during his Junior year because of poor attendance.

Instead of languishing, though, Duffy earned his GED and in the following March began attending Pitt Community College, which accepted students with GEDs and not SAT scores. Duffy's plan was to attend Pitt for a few quarters then transfer into East Carolina University, located in Greenville.

A trailer fire put an end to these dreams. Two months after entering Pitt, Duffy and two women decided to have a party in an abandoned trailer that one of the women owned. There was no electricity, so candles were lit to give some light. Duffy and the women began drinking.

"The next thing I knew, I woke up on the couch and there was a fire in the trailer," Duffy said. Fighting for air, Duffy managed to roll off the couch, find the door and escape just in time. The two women he was with also escaped. He had his life, but received deep second and light third-degree burns all over his face and arms. After a three-week stay in the hospital, Duffy was released, but the trauma of the incident only fueled his drug and alcohol dependence.

Two years later, Duffy transferred into East Carolina University. He majored in English and minored in philosophy. During his stay at the university, he became involved with the school paper, tapping into a lifelong interest in the news.

"I'd always been a news hound," Duffy said. "I remember buying a subscription to the local paper when I was 18, which was very rare."

The camaraderie of the newsroom also appealed to Duffy.

"I wrote a couple news stories and got good feedback on them, so that boosted my self-esteem," Duffy said. This trend of finding self-gratification at the workplace continued for many years for Duffy, and he now sees it as a "self defect."

Duffy eventually rose to the positions of news editor and managing editor at his school newspaper. At the time, the general manager of the newspaper was Tim Hampton. Duffy credits Hampton, an older Master's student with a few years of real world journalism experience, with showing him the ropes and shaping Duffy's writing and his "nose for news."

While he was still in college, Duffy started a newspaper with his brother. The Greenville Independent was a labor of love for Duffy for three years and helped him hone his journalist skills. He remembers a series of articles about wasteful spending in the local government on the eve of a referendum to raise taxes. The referendum failed.

Although the reporting was solid, the money was not. Normally, the Independent sold just enough advertising to break even. In retrospect, Duffy admits that at the time he didn't know enough to be the managing editor of his own newspaper, but felt that his time at the Independent was spent wisely.

After graduation, Duffy left North Carolina for Jackson, Miss., because it was "somewhere to go." A friend of his was going to school in Jackson and had a contact at the local newspaper, and after a year of freelancing Duffy joined the staff of the Clarion Ledger. Duffy worked at the copy desk, writing headlines and editing news stories. At the Ledger, Duffy had another mentor in Ralph Baldwin, who instilled in Duffy the importance of being accurate, a journalistic credo that Duffy still holds today.

Duffy had always wanted to live in a big northern city, and after his new wife Ann got a job in Boston, the couple relocated to New Hampshire. Duffy worked for eight months at the Nashua Telegraph in Nashua, N.H. before his resume was accepted by the Boston Herald.

During Duffy's two and a half years at the Herald, newspaper journalism was in its last great hurrah. In the days before online newspapers, blogs and iPhones, Duffy and his coworkers at the Herald were on top of the news world.

"It was great," Duffy said. "We'd get in around 4:00 p.m., wait for the stories to come in at around 8:00 p.m., edit them and be done by midnight. We were so well funded and well staffed back then the stress level was really low."

On Sept. 11, 2001, planes took off from Boston's Logan International Airport that eventually crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As Boston was the home of many of those killed that day, the Herald and other Boston news outlets felt the impact the nearly as much as their colleagues in New York. After nearly 10 years, the sadness of that day still haunts Duffy. "Those planes took off from Boston," Duffy said with tears in his eyes. After a long pause, he continued, "we had to write a lot of obituaries."

It was around this time that Duffy first swore off drugs and alcohol. One weekend, Duffy was on a bender while his wife, Ann, and two young children were at home.

"I was in some incredibly unsafe situations," Duffy said. "I'm probably quite lucky to be alive. That was the point that I realized that I had to change the way I was living. Although Duffy managed to quit drugs and alcohol by force of will alone, he still felt something was missing in his life. In 2004, Duffy finally decided to get his house in order. Duffy began a 12 step program to get his life on track.
"The big thing about this program is stepping back and looking objectively at your life, and deciding whether or not you're living it the right way," Duffy said. Duffy also attributed his new-found success in life to his sponsor, who he said "calls your B.S."

The team approach was new to Duffy. "What was the name of my paper? The Independent! I was always all about, 'I'll do it all on my own,' so this whole process was really about seeking help from an outside source," Duffy said.

Duffy came back to the South to work at the Marietta Daily Journal, which was much less generously staffed and funded than the Herald. After a year at the Journal, Duffy quit the newspaper business to be a stay at home dad. Soon after, Duffy decided to earn his master's degree. He then went back to the classroom as a teacher of journalism at Georgia Perimeter College. It was in the classroom as a journalism teacher that Duffy realized that he wanted to start his second career behind the lectern.

Chuck Austin, a colleague of Duffy's, told Duffy over the phone that a Ph.D. was an unwritten requirement to be a full-time journalism professor. "There was a time in this world where a person with a master's degree and real-world experience could get that full-time teaching job, but those days are rapidly ending," Duffy said. Weeks later, Duffy applied to Georgia State University and enrolled in the Ph.D. program.

Three years later, on April 23, 2010, at 4:50 p.m., Duffy let his friends on the popular networking site Facebook know that he had successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, which dealt with the overuse of anonymous sourcing in the news media. Aside from Facebooking, Duffy also runs an eponymous web site blog, where he crusades against anonymous sourcing, posts extra credit assignments for his students, and keeps the world informed on the progress of "Das Boot," a home-built wooden powerboat which is rapidly approaching completion. Duffy loves to chat with his students on Facebook and keep track of them after they graduate; his proudest achievements are the students of his who enter the journalism field after taking his classes.

In his classes, every day is a frolicking good time. The lessons are taught, of course, but not without occasional funny asides, stories about Duffy's weekend and or sordid past. Duffy's sense of humor, which he feels helps him relate better to students, was on display when he began to tell his Communication Law and Regulation class about a case regarding "crush" videos, which graphically depict women in high heeled shoes crushing small animals to death.

"In order for us to fully appreciate this sort of thing, I think we need to watch one of these videos," Duffy said.

The class tensed up. Many students were anxious and afraid of what they were about to see next.

When Duffy hit the space bar to advance the PowerPoint presentation to the next slide, instead of a disturbing video, there was a picture of several happy puppies in a basket surrounded with flowers.

Duffy is quick to credit his "Salad Days" of drugs and drinking with molding him into the person he is today.

"Ten years ago, if a student would have asked me a question I didn't have the answer to, I would have just made something up," Duffy said. "Now, I'll flat out admit that I don't know." Duffy said he feels this approach is refreshing to his students, but admits he occasionally gets anonymous performance reviews from students that complain that he doesn't know the material.

"I'm fine with that," Duffy said. "I'd rather be honest."