Mason Alum: Tracy Dove '86

By Connect Mason Reporter Rashad Mulla
Photos courtesy of Dove

Tracy Dove remembers when East Berlin residents swarmed the checkpoints at the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989.

“I took chips of the Berlin Wall to [give] to my friends as gifts,” Dove, editor and columnist for The Russia News Service, said in a phone interview last week from Prague.

“It was the only time all Germans were happy at once.”

Dove, a former native of McLean, Va., is now also a history professor at the Anglo-American College in Prague and the Dean of Summer Programs for the Lessing Institute.

As an undergraduate student at George Mason University, Dove and some of his professors started a history club, which organized a speech given by survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp of Nazi Germany as one of its first events.

"The audience had filled the room to capacity," Dove said. "The event was incredible. We were looking for some way to bring history to life. They unfolded the drama in a way that kept the whole room silent. "

Dove said this event propelled him to continue his studies in European history.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in European History from Mason in 1986, Dove traveled to Germany to study Russian History at the Freie Universitaet (Free University) in then West Berlin. He earned his Master’s Degree in 1992 and his PhD in 1998, but his experiences abroad stretched far beyond his studies.

THE TRUE GERMAN EDUCATION

When he first arrived in West Berlin, Dove was shocked at how difficult it was to fit in.

“As liberal as I thought I was, it was very difficult to put up with the anti-Americanism,” Dove said. “As you live abroad, you become a 24-hour ambassador. I learned to see things from the other shore.”

Anti-American views were only one of the hurdles of becoming a full-time German citizen. Dove learned German, Russian and “rudimentary” Spanish while finishing his Master’s. He picked up Czech while studying for his PhD.

He said the languages were needed daily, to make himself more marketable as a potential professor, and to acquire a job that seemed to have come out of nowhere.

Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, CBS News producers approached Dove and practically handed him a job as a translator for CBS News in Berlin.

“All of the world’s media came in to watch the East Germans come across [the Wall],” Dove said.

REPORTING LIVE FROM GERMANY

He worked for CBS for three months, before deciding to finish his Master’s Degree. In 1992, NBC News in Moscow hired him as a producer.

The first story he produced was about an alleged lack of hamburgers in an area of Moscow. He was waiting in a kilometer-long line outside a McDonald’s restaurant, when a little boy approached him, offered to cut in front of the line to get a hamburger and then sell it to Dove for three times the regular price. Dove was shocked when the boy made good on his promise in about five minutes and came out with a hamburger.

Dove, tired of the news industry and calling it “ego-driven” and “superficial,” decided to pursue other avenues of work while continuing his education.

ENTERPRISING IN THE NEW WORLD

One of these endeavors was Bohemia Bagel, a restaurant he and others founded in 1996.

“I couldn’t get a cup of coffee in Prague,” Dove stated as the reason for the business. The Bohemia Bagel website states they were the first to introduce bagels to Prague.

Dove and his partners sold the business in 2005, after opening three stores. Now, there are five in Prague.

Dove regards his various jobs as chapters in his lifelong learning experience. Until 1998, Dove was living from “check-to-check,” he said.

At Mason, Dove said he learned a lot about cultural sensitivity, which he says is the most important thing a student can take away from college.

RETURNING TO NEWS

Dove himself has since taught in Prague, Moscow and Buenos Aires, and Argentina and currently teaches, among other subjects, a class on Cold War history.

He has also used his knowledge of history to get back into the news business. He writes a column called “The Naked Historian,” which runs three times a week on The Russian News Service website, which draws over one million readers per day.

“I don’t have to put up with a bunch of egotistical people now,” Dove said of the industry he left over ten years ago. “[The Internet] is a free-for-all. If you are good, you get read.”

The column itself is an analysis of the headlines in the news, with a little historical background on each subject Dove decides to cover for the day.

“The idea is to paint [these events] as colorfully as possible so people can form their own opinions,” Dove said.

NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR MASON STUDENTS

Dove returned to Mason on Monday, March 17 to give Mason students the opportunity to study some of the same subjects he did.

He met with the Center for Global Education and received the go-ahead to create a summer study program in Prague for Mason students. The program with transferable credits would be four weeks long and $3,600.

“I can’t emphasize enough that the learning experience of being [in the Czech Republic] cannot be replaced by the classroom,” Dove said.

He is a prime example of that truth.