By Danielle Capalbo, News Staff

In the mid-1940s, when jazz critic and former Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff was still a senior at Northeastern, it was customary for undergraduate students of his particular academic ilk ‘- that is, with perfect GPAs ‘- to receive certificates of recognition bestowed by the university president.
But Hentoff wasn’t just another gifted student, and when the time came for his special ceremony ‘- the sort of affair that typically went off without kinks ‘- President Carl Stephens Ell refused to show, Hentoff said.
‘Because I was the recipient,’ said Hentoff, now 83, via telephone from his New York City apartment. ‘It was the first time in his long history that he refused.’
Two weeks ago, Hentoff wrote his last column for The Village Voice, where he had worked for 50 years and traveled a character arc that transformed him in the public eye from a blue chip jazzhead to a dogged, if not occasionally indigestible reporter, willing to confront issues of education, civil liberties, anti-Semitism and politics.
Less than a month earlier, representatives at The Voice had publicly announced that Hentoff had been fired.
The Voice didn’t return calls from The News, but Hentoff said financial pressures were cited as the primary reason for his dismissal.
This was not the first dismissal for the veteran newspaperman. That one came nearly half a century ago, on Northeastern’s campus, and, in some ways, set the tone for the career Hentoff would build for himself as a writer and activist, he said.
In the eyes of the university administration in the ’40s ‘- particularly, those of the school’s second president, Ell ‘- Hentoff said he was something nefarious:’ an editor of the Northeastern News. The paper, then about 18 years old, ‘annoyed’ the former president, he said.
He redacted; ‘annoyed’ was an understatement.
‘We were muckrakers ‘- this was the honorable term in journalism, then,’ Hentoff said. ‘We didn’t just write about football teams or the quality of food in the dining hall. We considered ourselves one of the papers in Boston, as well as at the school.’
That ambitious off-campus bent formed the lotus of a smoldering conflict between the paper, then at the university’s beck and call, and the president. As the story goes, City Hall took issue with the university for the paper’s coverage of controversial local issues, said Dan