Sticking straight to the facts

Daily Pennsylvanian - Philadelphia,PA,USA - You may know him best as the Silver Fox. Or as the host of CNN's Anderson Cooper 360. But he prefers to be known simply as Anderson, a non-partisan news anchor who considers himself privileged to have his job - a job he did not know that he would want upon his 1989 graduation from Yale as a political science major.

For most of his life, Anderson had a keen interest in news. During his SPEC fall speaker keynote address on Saturday, he explained to a packed Irvine Auditorium that he decided to begin his career in journalism by "traveling to the most dangerous places on the planet." Savings in pocket and fake press pass in hand, he traveled to Burma, the first of the more than 50 countries he has visited as a reporter.