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At first it was that simple text without context from someone that puzzled Michael Lindenberger that surprising day, but the unexpected message soon was reinforced by an excited call from his boss. He was working from home, as were several other co-workers, when the journalists learned they were Pulitzer Prize winners.

They scrambled back into the Houston Chronicle office to share in their victory, small-scale and COVID-era style, as the four 2022 winners for for 2021 pieces about voter suppression in Texas. The series, called “The Big Lie,” detailed tactics to restrict voting, rejected claims of widespread voter fraud and advocated for voting reforms.

The UofL alumnus, 51, called the achievement “super affirming.”

“It was fun not just to win myself but to see my team and others win,” Lindenberger said, adding that the work of the editorial board and other staff members also elevated that of the winning four. “It was a real team success.”

As deputy opinion editor, Lindenberger directs the day-to-day editorial operation and edited much of the submitted copy along with his boss. He also wrote some of the entries, including one installment that gave a nod to his home state under the headline “The Big Lie: What happens when a GOP state tells the truth about voter fraud? Ask Kentucky.”

Lindenberger already knew whom to ask in Kentucky, and his experience likely gave him an advantage in securing the high-level interviews. He figures he has interviewed nearly every Kentucky governor since Wallace Wilkinson in the early 1990s, so he was able to add Andy Beshear to the list that already included Beshear’s father and former Gov. Steve Beshear. And he also knew from his UofL days fellow student Michael Adams, the Kentucky secretary of state who worked with Beshear on a bipartisan approach to expanding voting options in the state during the pandemic.

“We try to do our own research and our own reporting when we can, and I think that makes a difference,” he said about the Chronicle’s editorial operation.

Louisville readers may recall Lindenberger’s byline from the Courier Journal, where he served as a bureau chief, and LEO, for which he was chief political writer, or before that, from the Louisville Cardinal student newspaper, where he wrote and served two terms as its top editor in the mid-1990s.

“The Cardinal was fantastic training for journalists like me,” he said. The staff grew and the paper sent reporters throughout the country to report on some stories. Lindenberger recalled that lessons he learned while working there – “leadership, management and just journalism” – helped shape his career. “It was a truly great time.”

Then-Cardinal adviser Bob Schulman later became a good friend and served as an important mentor, teaching about fairness, the connection of the press to a community and the role of the press in a free society, Lindenberger recalled.

“All that was extraordinarily useful,” he said.

He also credited several faculty members, in particular, Charles Breslin, Paul Weber and Phil Laemmle, as meaningful influences.

The student wrote some UofL Magazine stories then and did research for some historical markers on campus, including the one that shows the resting spot of the ashes of Louis Brandeis beneath the portico of the law school that is now named for the Supreme Court associate justice.

The Louisville native wrapped up his bachelor’s degree in political science in 2003, having returned home after a reporting stint at the Dallas Morning News.

“I was deeply interested in the law,” he said. So he kept going, working on his law degree at night while writing for the Courier Journal. Lindenberger decided to finish it up full time, ultimately in 2006, after the newspaper closed some bureaus and made him rethink and expand his career options.

Although he interviewed with some law firms as he was winding up his second degree, he felt the pull back to his newsroom roots.

“My heart was still in journalism,” he said.

Lindenberger returned to the Dallas Morning News in 2007 as a senior reporter, enjoyed the honor and “great experience” of a Knight journalism fellowship in 2012-13 at Stanford University and was promoted to a Washington, D.C., correspondent for the paper. He was recruited back to work in Dallas, this time on the editorial staff, all the while relying on his legal experience.

“The law degree did two things for me,” he said.

Starting with contract work while he was still in school, Lindenberger contributed to Time magazine and Time.com more than 100 articles for almost a decade “writing for a very international audience about legal affairs for one of the most prestigious publications in the country,” he said.

And when he returned to Dallas after UofL, he was covering areas he described as “very political and policy heavy,” particularly about transportation issues in high-growth areas of Texas. “These were hugely important stories.”

“I was equipped with a legal education that allowed me to not ever be intimidated by anybody,” Lindenberger said. “That context and that capacity proved extraordinarily important as I became more and more an investigative reporter.”

After his varied roles at the Dallas paper, the Houston Chronicle hired him for its opinion team four years ago.

“We definitely had a goal of doing the kind of work that the best of our peers do,” he said.

Lindenberger said the editorials in the Pulitzer-winning series showed that widespread voter fraud in Texas “just doesn’t exist,” despite claims, and that voter suppression tactics were not new, dating back to Jim Crow-era efforts to limit minority votes. One part of the series called for U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to resign, and others were critical of the Texas Legislature.

“We really do believe…  that the work we do changes lives. We change opinions and that changes lives because it changes conditions in the state,” Lindenberger said, adding that effort takes a long time.

“You don’t write one editorial and suddenly everyone starts taking climate change seriously. It’s time and time again. It’s honest recording or use of the facts – and writing that makes people care about it.”

And the good news of the Pulitzer arrived after some personal losses and challenges for Lindenberger and for colleagues during the pandemic.

“All that together, and then to realize that the work we did in spite of all that stuff, to know that the work we were able to accomplish was judged to be the best in the country that year was really, really gratifying,” he said.

“Overall, I could not be happier. I am more optimistic today than I was three or four months ago,” she said. “Now, I feel good because I better understand the challenges we face.”

Her favorite part of the job, she adds, has been the students.

“We really have some extraordinary students here. They always impress me. They are innovative and excited and they are ready to be a part of the solution,” Bendapudi said.

Still, she did not sugar coat that UofL still has a long way to go to recover financially from the past few years of operating through deficits.

“There’s no money tree. We’ve got to be responsible with what we’re doing,” she said. “That means, would want your parents to know what you did? Would you want your children to know what you did? Would you want the newspaper to publish what you did? We all have to be accountable in order to move in a positive direction.”

Bendapudi said each department will see the entire budget – currently being worked on – to help inform them of their decisions.

“This is not going to be solved if I have the materials and you do not,” she said. “We will be transparent with this moving forward.” 

She asked senators to be patient for a little while longer and said she hopes some solutions come out of the strategic planning process.

Mark Hebert, an advisory board member for the Louisville Cardinal, told the Staff Senate that the newspaper is running out of funds and that advertising opportunities are drying up. The Cardinal has soft launched a fundraising campaign that kicked off with a donation from Congressman John Yarmuth.ĚýThe publication is autonomous from UofL and therefore doesn’t qualify for university-specific fundraisers like Raise Some L.Ěý

“This newspaper serves a really important function on our campus. Every ACC school has a student-run newspaper, and we don’t want to be the first without one,” Hebert said.

Cardinal alums Kyeland Jackson, who now works for WFPL, and Shelby Brown Greenwell, who now works for CBS Interactive, provided stories about how much the Cardinal has meant to them personally and professionally.

“Working for the Cardinal gave me experience I wouldn’t have otherwise gotten, like having a byline or filing an open records request,” Jackson said. “A lot of people go their whole lives and never find their passion. I found mine because I worked for the Cardinal.”

A donation button for the Cardinal’s fundraising campaign is .

Todd Kneale, director of Total Rewards, told senators that HR is looking at the possibility of adding a health savings account benefit. Such implementation would take some time and would require a few other changes, however.

“We don’t have a high deductible plan and an HSA has to be attached to a high deductible plan,” he said.

Kneale said HR will continue to host town halls around campus and encouraged everyone to attend to provide feedback on this and other ideas.

Reports

Staff Senate chair John Smith said he’s been pleased with the “results-oriented focus” of the strategic plan committees. .Ěý

April’s Staff Senate meeting opened with a report from the Student Government Association. Among the SGA’s updates: the HSC lighting project is underway, as is the work on the Brook Street corridor in between the BAB and Houchens. The SGA is looking to add monuments in that area to celebrate our historically black fraternities and sororities.

Louvelo’s bike share program is now available on campus, so students don’t have to buy bikes. The SGA is also looking at installing water bottle-filling stations on the HSC campus.

Four SGA officers are participating on committees for the strategic planning process. The association has been working with parking to extend fine deadlines from seven days to 14 days to give students a little more time to come up with that money if necessary. Crosswalks are going to be installed on the Belknap Campus near the BAB, the SAC and the School of Music.

Also, the Cardinal Cupboard food pantry for students and employees who are food insecure is having trouble securing donations. The SGA is trying to facilitate food drives within specific schools and departments.

Finally, the SGA is working on its strategic plan for 2025.

The Faculty Senate heard updates from Provost Beth Boehm, Libraries Dean Bob Fox and from Rehan Khan, new chief information officer. The is available online.Ěý

Committee reports are . The next Staff Senate meeting is May 13 in Chao Auditorium.

Still, that doesn’t mean the university doesn’t have any mystery or intrigue. After all, the cremated remains of Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis and his wife, Alice Goldmark Brandeis, are buried underneath the portico at the law school. Students leave coins and animal crackers on their graves before exam week, attempting to conjure up some luck from the dead.

We asked Tom Owen, archivist for regional history in Archives and Special Collections, if he knew of any more detailed campus ghost stories.

“The only thing we can come up with is the fact that before our campus was developed as a city-owned orphanage/reform school in 1860, it was a city cemetery for almost 10 years called, variously, Southern or Oakland,” Owen said. “We have evidence that there were burials, but our sources indicate that the bodies were disinterred and reburied at Cave Hill.”

There is, however, the story of UofL’s Chi Omega sorority house, which is outlined in the book, “,” by Michael Norman (2006). He writes:

“The sisters at the Chi Omega sorority house got along famously with a ghost named George. They knew it was a male because passersby looking through the large front window at night sometimes noticed a bulky figure wearing a suit and standing on the staircase. Just who it was no one seemed to know. In absence of an identity back in 1984, someone took to simply calling him George.

“The Chi Omega women didn’t live in the house, so there weren’t many instances of nighttime shenanigans by George. They did figure out that he seemed to live on a back staircase that connected with the kitchen because footfalls as if someone was trooping up those steps were heard during the daytime …”

One of the sorority sisters told a reporter that when she was alone in the house, lights would blink on and off, which seemed to be George’s favorite activity.

“The plink-a-plink of single notes struck on the living room piano also alerted sorority members that George was about.”

Uncomfortable moments aside, the sorority sisters described George as a friendly ghost.Ěý

In 2012, throughout the city, noting some haunted downtown landmarks such as the Palace Theater and the Brown Hotel. The only UofL connection mentioned in the story was the old Medical Department, 101 W. Chestnut St.

The building was formerly a part of Louisville Medical College and was acquired by UofL in 1909. It is now owned by the Greater Louisville Medical Society Foundation and it is said to harbor mysterious footsteps, squeaky gurney wheels and other heart-racing noises that are likely unsettled spirits from the old Medical School, which opened in 1893.

From the Cardinal:

“The school has a tradition of innovation in medicine. For example, in 1911, the facility launched the nation’s first trauma care center, in 1970, the Pap Smear was invented, and in 1999, the first successful hand transplant was performed. But the school has a tradition of spooky happenings as well … The medical school is home to the Wolf Gallery, a location where the art of physicians and their families is displayed. On the tile floor at the end of the gallery is a permanent stain. This stain developed when the rooms of the Wolf Gallery were still anatomy classrooms. Students would often leave the rooms carrying trays of heads or limbs which were soaking in blood or formaldehyde. Sometimes the students would let their guards down, and the solution would slosh onto the floor. After years of this treatment, the stain formed, and cannot be removed …

“In the basement of the building is the old embalming room, which was not a popular hangout for medical students. In it was a vat in which cadavers would soak in formaldehyde in the fetal position. When a body was required, it would be removed from the vat and hung on a hook to drain into a trough. This trough led directly into the city sewer. In 1996, the basement was renovated. While redoing the ceiling of one room, workers were surprised when a body part fell out of the ceiling. The school’s coroner ruled that the part had simply been misplaced.

“In the late 1930s, one student at the school failed an exam which caused him to be expelled from medical school. Distraught, the student hung himself in the school’s four-story stairwell. Some time later, his professor noticed that he had made a grading error on the mathematics portion of the test, and that the student had actually passed. The professor was so upset that he committed suicide in the same way that his student had …”

For obvious reasons, the building has been a stop on many ghost walking tours in the city.