Early last year, Jodi Kantor, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at the New York Times, got an email from her alma mater, Columbia University. They wanted her to give the undergraduate commencement address—a great honor for any alumnus.
“But also, as you know, it was kind of a bad offer, given what was going on there,” Kantor told the crowd last week during her event in the Elon University School of Law’s Distinguished Leadership Lecture Series.
Student protesters had occupied the lawns in front of the Butler library on campus, creating an encampment in solidarity with Palestinians and demanding the school divest from Israel months into the war in Gaza. Tensions would escalate with President Donald Trump’s administration announcing a $400 million cut in federal funding to the university and detaining and attempting to deport Palestinian student activists. Ultimately, the university would settle with the administration, agreeing to pay $221 million, issue multi-year suspensions, expel student protesters, revoke degrees, and adopt the administration’s preferred definition of antisemitism.
Kantor’s friends urged her to turn down the commencement speech. But she felt it was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up.
“There was something in me that was like, ‘Give me those kids for 15 minutes,’” Kantor said. “Because as an alum and as a mom and as a citizen, I was just so upset at seeing a place that had been so transformational for me descend into this mire of negativity.”
Kantor had a video call with students before she wrote her speech. They didn’t want to talk about Israel or Gaza, she was surprised to hear. They didn’t want to talk about Trump. Instead, they wanted to talk about the one anxiety that united their entire class: “How, in this crazy environment, are we supposed to find and start our life’s work?”
Kantor was riveted by the question—and she knew it was one gripping an entire generation. She had a 20-year-old daughter herself. As a journalist, she had covered the digitization of the workplaces that evolved into the current anxiety over artificial intelligence and a pervasive feeling of disconnection. She felt the confusion and hopelessness of young people trying to imagine their futures in a fractured and fractious society.
With all that in mind, she did what writers do—she wrote. First, the commencement speech. Then, because she could not stop writing, a new book—How to Start: Discovering Your Life’s Work.
At last week’s event, held at the Proximity Hotel, Kantor talked with Elon Law Professor Catherine Ross Dunham about the new book and her own life’s work. From breaking the Harvey Weinstein abuse scandal to her current groundbreaking work covering the U.S. Supreme Court, Kantor described her journey in journalism as the kind of fulfillment she hopes all young people will find for themselves.
Ultimately, Kantor said, there are three essential goals in a working life: financial stability, a feeling of pride and accomplishment in one’s work, and the sense that one’s work is helping people.
“I think all three are important,” Kantor said. “You want a life that is balanced between all three goals.”
It’s not always possible to get all three in every job, Kantor said, making it important to measure them over a lifetime.
“Especially in this climate, or in this economy, or when you’re in your first job out of school, you’re not yet at a place where you can get all three,” Kantor said. “But can we get you on a journey towards all three?”
A first job isn’t just about earning, Kantor said, but about learning.
“Are you learning?” Kantor said. “And are you working for good people? Are you working for people you’re comfortable with? Who do you admire? People who have integrity, people who have wisdom?”
Course corrections may be necessary, Kantor said. She dropped out of law school herself, but now sees her experience there as one of the best things she has ever done. It taught her something about herself, she said.
“And look, now the joke’s on me—I’m covering the Supreme Court now,” Kantor said. “But also, it’s full circle. I was drawn to the law, just not in the way I thought I would be.”
Kantor’s work in the realm of courts and law has included the flying of what seem to be very partisan flags at the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and the emergence of a rushed, secretive“shadow docket” that has changed the way the nation’s highest court considers issues and flexes its power.
“Critics, I think, are really worried about the Supreme Court that for a really substantial chunk of its work has decided to bypass some of the time-tested steps in the judicial process,” Kantor said. “And do things quickly and without transparency at a time when trust in the Supreme Court and trust in courts generally is imperiled.”
In recently reporting on 16 pages of justices’ private correspondence, Kantor said, she was able to examine their less-seen, unvarnished views—and the way they are sometimes at odds with their public personas. Chief Justice John Roberts may be the most surprising example, she said.
“The Chief Justice, as you know, has cultivated a very even-handed tone and style,” Kantor said. “Even as he’s very conservative, there’s no mistake about that. But he speaks in magisterial tones, talks a lot about independence, talks a lot about being a kind of minimalist who only is calling balls and strikes. And he comes off differently in these memos.”
The sometimes shocking dissonance between the public and private was also a core theme of the work Kantor did, with her reporting partner Megan Twohey, on movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s long history of sexual assault.
The Weinstein and Supreme Court stories are the sort of work that make her feel part of something larger that is helping society, Kantor said, one of the keys to a successful work life she explores in her new book.
“Part of the way journalism upholds democracy is that it tries to get to problems before they become critical,” Kantor said.
Weinstein’s company did everything it could to prevent the negative attention of stories about what he was doing to women in his employ and professional orbit. But if there had been a story 15 years earlier, when people knew but were keeping the secret, things may have been very different.
“I wish there had been,” Kantor said. “If 15 years earlier, somebody had done a smaller story about what Weinstein was doing, so many women would have been spared. And also, his company might not have gone under.”
In the same way, journalism can be a pressure valve for the larger democracy, Kantor said, helping us discuss difficult societal issues in real time.
“I would rather us have rigorous coverage of the Supreme Court that explores these issues and leads to productive debate about them than a thousand other things, including the really destructive political violence we’re seeing all across the spectrum,” Kantor said. “We need to work out our problems using our most time-tested tools. And for me, this is one of them.”