'Expert in everything he does': Journalism professor retires after 27 years

When Dr. Tom Linden started medical school at the University of California, San Francisco in 1973, he never imagined he would one day return to journalism, the career he had pursued as an undergraduate student at Yale University.

“I had a vision that I was going to be a country doctor,” Linden said. 

But Linden’s career would eventually take him across the country to UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, where he began working in 1997 as the Glaxo Wellcome Distinguished Professor of Medical Journalism. 

Linden retired from Hussman at the end of 2024, after 27 years of teaching.

When he graduated from Yale in 1970, Linden was working as the New Haven correspondent for The Los Angeles Times and had a contract to write a book about American draft resisters. He never finished the book.

“I got very disappointed and discouraged in my journalism path,” Linden said. “You know, I thought I didn't have what it took.”

Linden decided to enter medical school instead, but he soon discovered that he missed the excitement of being a journalist. After completing his residency and opening a private psychiatry practice, he found his way back to journalism, beginning with a part-time job hosting a health segment for The Today Show.

UNC sophomore Aaliyah Mitchell, who took Linden’s Media and Journalism 252: Audio Journalism course in the fall of 2024, said he was open with his students about challenges he faced as a journalist. 

Mitchell said that in addition to teaching about the mechanics of audio journalism, Linden talked to the students about strategies to manage their mental health and deal with stressful work environments.

“[He’s] equally kind, just as much as he is an expert in everything he does,” Mitchell said. 

Though he came to UNC to teach medical journalism, Linden eventually expanded to environmental and science journalism. Undergraduate students often lacked the medical knowledge to produce accurate reporting, he said, and it was difficult for them to gain access to medical spaces.

After making the switch, Linden got to go out in the field again. He and his students traveled across the state, producing reports about nearly all of the North Carolina state parks. He said one of his favorite memories was a visit to Jockey’s Ridge State Park in the Outer Banks, where people hang glide off the sand dunes. 

“One thing is to learn journalism,” he said. “Another thing is to have fun and feel satisfaction, not in just the product that you produce, but in the process of getting the product.” 

Students in Linden’s Media and Journalism 562: Environmental and Science Documentary Television class worked closely with Frank Graff, a producer at PBS North Carolina, to create documentaries that aired on Sci NC. 

Graff said the collaboration was a great match.

“I look forward to it every fall," he said. "I'm going to miss it." 

The documentaries they produced covered a vast array of topics, from green burials to Indigenous farming practices to the process of making beer. Along the way, Graff said, students learned to problem solve and persevere. 

Scott Geier, an assistant professor at the Hussman School who took one of Linden’s classes while getting his master’s degree, said Linden was a demanding but fair professor who gave assignments like shadowing an ER physician for an entire shift or reading a 300-page book over the course of a weekend. The work was tough, but Geier said it was the kind of challenge he had hoped for when he started graduate school.

Geier said he sees many professors adopting a consumer-based mindset and becoming reluctant to do things that students don’t like. Linden wasn’t like that.

“He’s old school,” Geier said. “And so we needed him.”

Linden said in his last few years of teaching, he’s become worried about the impacts of artificial intelligence and social media on students’ learning and well-being. He’s also concerned about what he sees as an anti-democracy shift in North Carolina and across the country, and he said he hopes to get involved with political advocacy in his retirement.

Linden will continue teaching a monthly communication course to medical students at UNC. He also said he hopes to learn to play the piano, get back into painting and visit his daughter in California. 

Though Linden will no longer teach at the Hussman School, Mitchell said the guidance he gave her will continue to impact her.

“He said that I should never limit myself, that I can be exactly what a newsroom needs,” Mitchell said.

Linden’s words, she said, changed her life.

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