station's local programming), Friendly reluctantly placated members of the Nixon administration who perceived NET as a propagandistic front for the Eastern Establishment. Despite his relative dearth of formal education—not atypical among contemporaneous practitioners—he was appointed to the tenured faculty of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism as the Edward R. Murrow Professor of Broadcast Journalism in 1966. Over the next thirteen years, Friendly assumed stewardship of the school's hitherto threadbare broadcast journalism concentration. To the chagrin of some of his colleagues, he often eclipsed other top administrators (including 1970s-era dean Elie Abel, who was personally recommended by Friendly for the post) in the popular consciousness. The non-degree Summer Program in Journalism for Members of Minority Groups (renamed the Michele Clark Fellowship Program for Minority Journalists following the death of a distinguished alumna in a December 1972 airplane crash) was directed by Friendly from 1968 to 1975, enabling many individuals (most notably media-savvy attorney Geraldo Rivera) to switch careers during the tempestuous epoch. A proposed "University Broadcast Laboratory" (an experimental Sunday news magazine initially proposed by Friendly in partnership with the Ford Foundation, Columbia, and NET) only manifested in attenuated form, however, as Public Broadcast Laboratory from 1967 to 1969; administrative and content circumscriptions imposed by the University trustees precipitated his divestiture from the program and hastened the retirement of Journalism School dean Edward W. Barrett in 1968. As chair of Mayor John Lindsay's Task Force on CATV and Telecommunications that year, Friendly revived his revenue-sharing proposal by advising cable companies to set aside two channels that the public could lease for a minor fee, ultimately enabling the development of public-access television. Spurred by classroom discussions, he inaugurated the Media and Society Friendly Seminars under the auspices of the Journalism School in 1974 as private conference fora on media, law (particularly the Constitution and the First Amendment) and public policy for the edification of professionals from disparate fields. Drawing upon the case method employed by many professional schools and the Socratic method for interlocution, these eventually evolved into PBS's long-running Fred Friendly Seminars in 1981. Following his statutory retirement in 1979, Friendly relinquished control of the Journalism School's broadcast program; however, he continued to teach and produce the seminars at Columbia as an administrative officer of the University before retiring in earnest in 1992. By the time of his death in 1998, Friendly "was criticized by some working in network