If you’re here because of the IHE article, welcome! Look around, add comments, subscribe to the RSS feed, and come back often. Here’s the story behind Scott Jaschik’s piece: I was awake early Sunday morning (or in the wee hours between Saturday and Sunday) and in shape to do not much more than crawl through the overnight news online. I was going through some of the clips from Saturday night’s presidential debates and realized that moderator Charles Gibson had faked some numbers about faculty salaries.<\/p>\n
If you take a family of two professors here at Saint Anselm, they\u2019re going to be in the $200,000 category that you\u2019re talking about lifting the taxes on…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The Democratic candidates laughed at Gibson, and his comments struck me as representative of journalistic laziness on higher education. St. Anselm is known as a solid Benedictine (Catholic) liberal-arts college in southern New Hampshire, with about 2,000 students<\/a>. It doesn’t have the highest snob-marketing statistics such as average incoming SATs, but the college reports a four-year graduation rate of 74%. They don’t do that with highly-paid faculty, and after a little digging, I wrote a brief release mostly for local higher-ed reporters to talk about faculty salaries at USF<\/a> as well as St. Anselm.<\/p>\n
But I also sent it to Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed<\/a>, figuring he’d add it as a blurb to this morning’s quick takes<\/a> page, after stripping it of any material specifically from me.<\/p>\n
I guess it was a slow news day (or a slow news week) at the beginning of the year: I’ve been quoted for ABC Thinks You\u2019re Rich; \u2018U.S. News\u2019 Says Your Job Is Cushy<\/a>. For the record, I think Jaschik had the newsworthiness judgment wrong: GWU’s contract with adjunct faculty is more important than my comments (or Karl Steel’s letter of complaint<\/a> to U.S. News and World Report). And since Jaschik lumps the two issues together, I should note that at least in my case, the job is wonderful: I am overcommitted to too many projects that I’ve chosen, but at least I’m in the position of choosing them.<\/p>\n
But I’m grateful for at least the factual correction of Gibson’s glib comment in one of the (electronic) papers of record for higher ed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you’re here because of the IHE article, welcome! Look around, add comments, subscribe to the RSS feed, and come back often. Here’s the story behind Scott Jaschik’s piece: I was awake early Sunday morning (or in the wee hours between Saturday and Sunday) and in shape to do not much more than crawl through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-union"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-iM","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1164\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}