Walk into the office of journalism professor Timothy Kenny and you are greeted by an eclectic collection of artifacts, the culmination of a fascinating career.

Stacks of newspapers and recent article clippings litter his desk; a child’s finger-paintings are featured on the wall under the window that looks out onto Mirror Lake; a collection of Russian nesting dolls shares the shelf of a bookcase with 20mm bullet casings and a palm-sized piece of green, yellow, and red painted concrete. Each item reveals a bit more about the man than you might guess at first sight.

Kenny’s most recent sojourn abroad was earlier this year in Kabul, Afghanistan. He spent three weeks there in May to work with Internews, an international non-profit agency that trains journalists in developing nations, usually in countries of former Soviet influence.

“We were working with local Afghan journalists to help them to improve, develop, and assess what they were doing,” says Kenny, an associate professor of journalism in UConn’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. “As you might imagine in a country that has had 30 years of war, the level of journalism is not as high as you might want it to be.”

Kenny’s own journey into the world of journalism began after he graduated from the University of Michigan in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in English. At that time, he thought he was going to teach high school.

“I didn’t end up doing that – there were no jobs,” he says. “So I kind of just dabbled for a couple of years. I was a tree-trimmer for a while; I worked at a hospital for emotionally disturbed kids. It didn’t take long for me to realize that that wasn’t for me.”

Deciding against a future of hopping from job to job, Kenny went back to school to earn a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon in 1972.

By the time he arrived at UConn in 2004, Kenny had had wide experience: he had worked for 23 years as a newsman – most recently at USA Today – and traveled widely through Central and Eastern Europe. He has filed stories from more than 35 countries, including Russia, Bosnia, Croatia, Northern Ireland, Israel, Nicaragua, Panama – and the list goes on.

“The nesting dolls are all from time I spent in Russia,” he says, when asked about his office décor. “The bullet casings are from Sarajevo – one, I just picked off the ground; the other, somebody gave me. And yeah, that there is a chunk from the Berlin Wall. The paintings,” he adds, “are from my daughter, Caitlin Alexandra, age four.”

He acknowledges that nothing in his office is from Afghanistan, however, since he was urged to “travel light.”

Recalling his time there, Kenny relates that Afghanistan is a tribal society. He says the way Afghans look at the world is based on the tribal connections people have – not on the more Western journalistic idea of trying to walk the fine middle ground.

“There’s a huge social disconnect between what we would do as western reporters and what Afghan reporters might find acceptable,” says Kenny. “We try to teach them to be objective, or at the least disinterested and fair, but it’s a tough notion to try and get people to wrap their heads around. They try, but they just don’t have 250 years of journalism to build upon, and it’s extremely difficult.”

The war has had a major impact on the region’s journalism, Kenny notes, especially in terms of what is deemed newsworthy.

“I remember this one day I was standing in front of the non-profit that I was working with, and there was this huge explosion off in the distance,” he recalls.

“I had been talking with a local reporter at the time, and we kind of just stopped and listened. Another blast went off a few seconds later, and the guy says, ‘Oh, that’s too far away, we don’t have to worry about it.’ And that was that. He wasn’t even concerned. He was so used to that kind of thing happening that to him it wasn’t a story. I’m trying to figure out, you know, what was it? Where did it happen? But he didn’t have that kind of interest. And this guy was a journalist.”

Kenny says the people have developed a remarkable resilience to the violence of war.

“Let’s say there’s a bombing,” he continues, recounting one such event. “Helicopters come flying in to take the injured to the hospitals, and other people come out to basically sweep up the body parts. There’s a brief cessation of activity on the streets, but within a matter of minutes – maybe 15 or 20 minutes – you see people crossing the street again.

“People begin to go about their daily business again,” he says. “They just pick up the pieces and keep going.”

In a society undergoing pressure and stress like Afghanistan’s, says Kenny, it is easy for fair news and ethical considerations to go out the window. Good journalism, he contends, helps bring important issues to light; it seeks to make society and government transparent. But in a war zone, and in Afghanistan in particular, that can be a difficult task.

“Nations around the world are facing the same problems when it comes to journalism,” Kenny observes. “Africa, South America, Eastern Europe, Central Asia – it’s not just the Middle East. As a journalist and a professor, it’s my duty to foster what I see as good journalism in places that don’t have it.”

It’s both a task and a mission for him – Kenny is planning to spend Thanksgiving break at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. There he intends to work with the Open Society Institute to create a more Western-style curriculum for student journalists.