Before his 1974 departure for China, Schell had already published three books, The China Reader, Starting Over: A College Reader and Modern China: The Story of a Revolution. In 1975 Schell and his younger brother Jonathan Schell (who later wrote the bestseller The Fate of the Earth, and join The Nation and the Nation Institute) became correspondents at The New Yorker. Schell has also served as a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and the New Republic. He has written widely for many other magazine and newspapers, including The New Yorker, Time magazine, Harper's, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Wired, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, the China Quarterly, and The New York Times, The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. In 1980 Schell won an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship to research and write about the reliance on drugs in the U.S. meat industry. He has also been a co-producer for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) production center WGBH-TV in Boston (1984), NBC Nightly News (1987), CBS' 60 Minutes (1991), and helped produce Peter Jennings' specials at ABC Television. In 1994 he worked for the PBS documentary program Frontline. In 1992 Schell won an Emmy Award and an Alfred I. duPont Award - Columbia University Silver Baton for producing 60 Minutes' Made in China, a documentary about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. In 1997, Schell won a George Peabody Award for his production of Frontline's documentary Gate of Heavenly Peace. Schell's selection as Dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism elicited an attack from right-wing radio talk show host, Michael Savage, who alleged the head of the search committee, sociology professor Troy Duster, had refused to interview him. Savage considered himself a qualified conservative journalist for the job, and claimed that Schell's appointment constituted political patronage, which is illegal under California's labor laws. The suit also argued that a political litmus test for the deanship illegally denied public employment and First Amendment rights to a conservative applicant. The lawsuit was dropped as having little merit and when all conservative applicants withdrew from consideration. During his tenure Schell was responsible for the hirings of Christopher Hitchens, Michael Lewis, Cynthia Gorney, Michael Pollan, Louis Rossetto, Charles Ferguson, Barbara Ehrenreich, Mark Danner, Steve Wasserman, Stephen Talbot and Tom Engelhardt, among others. In April 2006, Schell announced his intention to resign as dean. Schell is now the Arthur Ross Director of the Center