The Chronicle, the Professoriate, and the AAUP

When did faculty become the bad guys in the Chronicle of Higher Education?

By Cat Warren

We decided early on not to have an editorial page. We never have published an editorial, never taken a stand, political or otherwise; we’ve just reported the news.

—Corbin Gwaltney, founder and publisher of the Chronicle of Higher Education, winter 2006

I make a sincere effort not to be a media alarmist, even in the increasingly hostile and overheated landscape for faculty, where we seem just one Zogby poll away from entirely losing the public’s respect. But the particular niche in which “just reporting the news” lives is environmentally delicate. And it’s currently being endangered in both subtle and blatant ways at the Chronicle of Higher Education—still considered the paper of record for academe. As a former journalist, I know the realities of getting quotations, meeting deadlines, and writing with space constraints. I accept “what is possible” as opposed to “what is ideal.” I never assume that one particular news account about any subject on any day will fulfill my expectations.
 
But a tipping point with the Chronicle of Higher Education and the American Association of University Professors has been reached. I’ve given considerable thought to whether June 8, 2007, might have been that point. That was when I and thousands of other members of the AAUP read and reread and read between the lines of the lengthy and denigrating cover story by staff writer Robin Wilson. Titled “The AAUP, 92 and Ailing,” the story ran under the subhead “Mismanagement, declining membership, and a schizophrenic mission threaten the premier faculty association.” Or we could reach even further back, to November 10, 2006, when Wilson wrote a lengthier, glowing cover story on the right-wing, self-anointed higher education “watchdog” group the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) and its president, Anne D. Neal.
 
A tipping point, by definition, is the effect of many events, often small and seemingly insignificant. As a close observer of the media environment, and an even closer reader of the Chronicle, I’ll argue that the tipping point with the AAUP and the Chronicle didn’t occur in November 2006 with the laudatory profile of Anne Neal. It didn’t even occur in June 2007 with that long and less than laudatory profile of the AAUP. Besides, one reporter alone is never responsible for a tipping point. It takes a village of editors, reporters, photographers, and designers. But ultimately, at a particular moment, the unusual becomes commonplace. That has happened at the Chronicle. Not just the AAUP, but faculty and higher education in general have found themselves in a strangely hostile media environment.

The Tipping Point

At the Chronicle, the tipping point finally came on September 21, 2007. That’s when the Chronicle published a short and seemingly simple story, also by Robin Wilson, on the AAUP’s Freedom in the Classroom statement. “AAUP Goes to Bat for ‘Freedom in the Classroom’” ran a week and a half after the AAUP released its statement. That story’s bland lead noted that the statement was released the previous week. It was already old, not worthy of serious coverage, and certainly reactive and overly defensive on the part of the AAUP, as the story goes on to explain: “[The AAUP statement] reads, however, more like a defense of the professoriate in the face of heavy criticism from people like David Horowitz, the conservative activist who has urged state legislators to make faculties more ideologically diverse.”
 
Let’s set aside the fact that the verb “urge” has a responsible and, well, urgent tone to it, giving an odd credence to Horowitz’s tactics. Even more problematic is this phrase: “the statement reads, however, more like a defense of the professoriate.” Of course it reads that way—it is a defense. The statement says so in its introduction. It’s a response to legislative efforts that are undermining academic freedom.

I didn’t expect the Chronicle to bring out the pom-poms for our statement: that’s not the function of journalism. But part of the Chronicle’s job is to report the news and make at least a passing effort to do so neutrally. Inside Higher Ed editor Scott Jaschik managed to write an article on the day the statement was released that was three times the length of the Chronicle’s and was neither especially laudatory nor especially critical. It was comprehensive and fair, and included a podcast interview with AAUP president Cary Nelson. AAUP leaders certainly anticipated, indeed relished, a lively and substantive conversation about the statement. They also anticipated a predictable pounding from the National Association of Scholars, ACTA, and, of course, Horowitz, among others.

But the Chronicle piece itself, though it was only 550 words, was a kind of pounding that the AAUP didn’t anticipate. Wilson quoted Nelson in brief bites that make him sound both threatening and a tad paranoid. Professors could now say to critics, “You shouldn’t mess with me.” Nelson referred vaguely to “kangaroo courts.” Of course he said those things. He also said many other things both in and around those decontextualized blips; it was not a brief interview with the Chronicle.

So how does the story end? ACTA president Anne Neal has the final say: the new AAUP statement is faulty precisely because of its “bald unwillingness to acknowledge academic responsibility as well as academic rights,” and once again, the AAUP has ignored “the academy’s frequent failure to regulate itself.”

Portraying the AAUP

Since ACTA’s inception in 1995, the Chronicle has consulted ACTA’s leadership on dozens of occasions. The most accurate description the Chronicle has ever used for ACTA was in one story by Paul Basken, who termed the group a “conservative- leaning lobbying association.” Take out “leaning” and there you have it. Overall, little of the Chronicle coverage has been negative. None of it has been hard-hitting—except for one piece written by Goldie Blumenstyk on the infamous pamphlet ACTA released after 9/11, Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done about It. The pamphlet (ACTA calls it a report) accused college and university faculty of being “the weak link in America’s response” after 9/11 and fingered professors, using quotations from the media. Journalists across the country criticized it as inaccurate, shoddy scholarship.  

But in Robin Wilson’s long cover profile on ACTA in November 2006, teased off the front page as “Keeping an Eye on the Professoriate,” Neal and her group were portrayed as conciliatory and careful but firm— training trustees to be watchful stewards, turning a deserved spotlight on the classroom and on professors. Of course, Defending Civilization—like many, if not most, of ACTA’s reports, from How Many Ward Churchills? to Politics in the Classroom—is neither conciliatory nor careful. But that foundational “defense of civilization” was missing entirely from the profile, which is not dissimilar to writing the history of America’s entry into World War II with no mention of Pearl Harbor.

In the ACTA profile, the AAUP “brags,” while Neal—and by extension, ACTA—speaks in “careful measured sentences.” Academe “howls,” while Neal, like a good den mother, “tempers her criticisms with compliments” and explains that academe overreacts by “displaying that well-worn professorial attitude that ‘no one outside the ivory tower understands academics.’”

In the AAUP profile, the organization is ailing, aged, and balding, with a schizophrenic mission, in desperate need of mandatory retirement. A remarkably haggard-looking Ernst Benjamin, the acting general secretary of the AAUP, graced the June 8 Chronicle cover, smiling stiffly and looking cramped in his small office, his chair facing obdurately into a closed door. “Where Have All the Members Gone?” read the teaser head. Inside, another photograph showed Benjamin obligingly shuffling through an ancient card catalog.

The choice of photographs and headline was only the beginning of a story that was rife with anonymous sources, misrepresentations, and partial quotations that changed the meaning of what was actually both said and meant. Thus, Nelson sounds desperate at having to pick a white-haired, balding retiree as a leader: “I didn’t have anyone else to go to,” Wilson quotes an uncharacteristically pitiful-sounding Nelson as saying. But Nelson didn’t say just that—he continued to say that he didn’t have anyone else to go to because Benjamin was simply the best person for the job. That critical second part didn’t make it into the long, 2,700-word article.

Then there’s Michael Bérubé, a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University’s main campus and a member of the AAUP’s Executive Committee, who saw his quotations conveniently shortened, so that in the article, he said that “the association is now referred to as both ‘toothless and dangerous,’” making it sound as though he quite agreed with that characterization. There was only one problem, Bérubé wrote in an e-mail: “Wilson declined to insert the word ‘erroneously’. . . . I was very clearly criticizing the dang fools who consider AAUP toothless or dangerous.”

The AAUP’s unfortunate profile begins with receding white hair and ends, none too soon, with death— Einstein’s, not Ernst Benjamin’s. The story noted that while Einstein’s death was quickly and duly noted by the AAUP back in 1955, “if a member died today, it could take months for the AAUP to notice.”

One faculty wag used a remarkably apt Harry Potterism to sum up the coverage: the AAUP had been “Rita Skeetered.”

Much skeetered, twice shy? What is the AAUP to do? Should the AAUP continue to grin and bear it because the Chronicle is, other than Inside Higher Ed, the only higher education news outlet in town? Should Cary Nelson answer the phone and continue to provide long and complex interviews when he knows he will be only briefly and selectively quoted out of context? Should he write a defensive letter to the editor, the publication of which would call more attention to the original story and cement the impression that the Chronicle is operating fairly and openly? It’s not just about the AAUP: the overall coverage of academic freedom issues has been uneven at best at the Chronicle. The Chronicle does not have a public editor. But it needs one to be the functional equivalent of a conscience.

I have never been a good student in the school of grin and bear it. As is evident from my writing this piece, I’m opting for direct commentary on the Chronicle. AAUP leaders have no responsibility for my particular take, and perhaps writing anything is illadvised. But I’m tired of explaining to curious outsiders, and even to AAUP members, that the Chronicle cover story on the national leadership and organization wasn’t just bad PR. It was bad journalism. And for better or worse, what the Chronicle says matters. It is inevitably cited in books on higher education as though it were a primary rather than secondary source—the first and often only draft of the history of higher education. The Chronicle probably also sets the agenda for the sparse coverage that mainstream media outlets give higher education, although that’s somewhat speculative on my part, as it is enormously difficult to track those spider webs of influence. Academic researchers, with few exceptions, have been remarkably uninterested in media coverage of higher education. That needs to change.

A Changed Landscape

As of early December, the AAUP’s Freedom in the Classroom statement was faring quite poorly at the Chronicle, which published Robin Wilson’s article, David Horowitz’s altogether predictable opinion piece, and, more recently, Mark Bauerlein’s piece on the Chronicle’s new Brainstorm blog, “The Conservative AAUP?” (At least Bauerlein’s attack had originality going for it.) Finally, there was a brief mention of the statement in Chronicle reporter John Gravois’s wrap up of academic freedom statements on November 9:

“This fall has been a season of flag planting for defenders of academic freedom. It began in September, when the American Association of University Professors released its statement, ‘Freedom in the Classroom.’”

“So, why the pileup?” Gravois asks, before quoting ACTA’s Anne Neal with her standard reaction: ‘“The caption of the AFT (American Federation of Teachers) statement might properly be: Give us more money and leave us alone.’ In the recent spate of statements, she says, ‘Academic freedom is reframed as freedom for faculty— without acknowledging students’ freedom to learn.”’

So, let us ask that slightly cynical question again: why the pileup?

The Chronicle should consider its own role in the need for that generous heaping of statements. Especially since 9/11, the Chronicle has allowed itself to become a forum for a small group of conservative think tanks and foundations, as well as an equally small group of conservative faculty pundits. ACTA has become a central feature in the changed landscape at the Chronicle, alongside the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the David Horowitz Freedom Center (Horowitz’s current institutional incarnation), the National Association of Scholars, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the Center for Equal Opportunity. Those groups’ studies (being far too tempted to put that last word in quotation marks, I will refrain), to say nothing of their lawsuits and news releases, are automatically considered newsworthy and often are only superficially interrogated; their leaders’ quotations are guaranteed; and their inevitability in any story involving academic freedom, teaching, assessment, curriculum—or even Lawrence Summers—is far too predictable.

As any journalist knows, sources are used to create a sense of objectivity around a story frame, establishing what a journalist already “knows.” Sources make the news. And easily available, quotable, and colorful conservative think tanks and foundation leaders have become the go-to folks for the Chronicle, which is giving its stories and opinion pieces on academic freedom the redundant feel of Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day. It’s true that conservative organizations and think tanks are more persistent than most in getting their accounts aired. They have the money, the muscle, and the dedicated leisure to manage to get the same story into multiple outlets. But this peculiar and particular shift, especially since 9/11, has not enhanced the complexity or quality of the Chronicle’s coverage. Just because someone is always willing to provide a quotable remark doesn’t mean you should have them on automatic dial. Just because someone has an editorial opinion ready to shoot off doesn’t mean an editor should run it. To me, it doesn’t matter that much whether a reporter places either subtle or cynical cues to indicate that he or she doesn’t entirely agree with the person quoted. Instead of asking hard questions and getting answers, instead of filing freedom-of-information requests and looking more closely at these groups’ agendas and methodologies, more than one reporter has been using quotations and glossy reports from conservative organizations as fodder for creating what is corrosive, and ultimately inaccurate, news.

The conservative technique of manufacturing skepticism and suspicion about higher education and especially about its so-called liberal faculty is analogous to what tobacco companies managed to do in the 1950s, in their media drive to create doubt about the link between smoking and cancer. But facts matter. They’re not always easy to obtain and they often involve much more than quoting various “sides” of an issue to create a facile sense of fairness and balance. Achieving such  “balance,” however, is not the same as “reporting the news.” And this particular coverage is not helping readers get any closer to what is objectively true—to the contrary. The Chronicle is helping a small group at the extreme right of the political spectrum set the news agenda.

New Yorker essayist A. J. Liebling once famously wrote that the press is “the weak slat under the bed of democracy.” I take the notion of the press as a fourth estate seriously enough to know that the Chronicle’s coverage matters. But progressive faculty members themselves have played a role in further weakening the slat under the bed of democracy. We have tended to ignore, downgrade, or disparage the critical importance of media coverage of higher education. We have not been as available and accessible as conservative groups. Our excuses— that our ideas are too complicated and get poorly translated by the press, that we are too busy, that our research takes precedence—all ring flat. We need to do some shoring up of our own. Because if we—and by we, I don’t just mean the AAUP, but centrist and liberal faculty more generally—can’t get fair coverage even out of the Chronicle, the major specialty publication of higher education, we are in deep trouble. 

Cat Warren is a former newspaper reporter and is currently associate professor in the Department of English at North Carolina State University as well as the president of the AAUP’s North Carolina conference.

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