Paul Basken

Staff Reporter, The Faculty
The Chronicle of Higher Education

Background: Paul Basken joined The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2007 and has been chief science correspondent since January 2009. He came to The Chronicle with more than 20 years of experience as a reporter covering the White House, Congress, federal agencies, and other beats, both domestic and foreign.

In 2007 and 2008, Basken was The Chronicle’s chief correspondent for the Education Department, producing a series of groundbreaking articles on accreditation, student-loan scandals, and departmental politics. His exclusives included an inside account of top-level disputes among Education Department leaders over policy on accreditation; the revelation of a kickback system in which the University of California secretly accepted payments for referrals of students to a for-profit chain of colleges; and a series of articles on student-loan policy, including one revealing that a top official of the department had allowed the nation’s biggest student-loan provider—his former employer—to maintain a $250-million partnership with an outside company that was supposed to oversee its work.

From 2000 to 2007, Basken worked at Bloomberg News, where he started the State Department bureau and covered beats including health care and education. He also worked for United Press International (1986-2000), where he spent five years covering the White House, an assignment that included regular participation in televised presidential news conferences, often as the lead questioner. He also covered Congress, served as UPI’s chief correspondent in the 1994 health-care debate, led a five-person team of editors on UPI’s London desk, and handled a series of international assignments, including on-the-scene coverage of wars in the Middle East and Bosnia.

Basken is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, with a degree in journalism and electrical engineering. During college he worked as a stringer for the Associated Press and Newsweek, and also designed circuit boards at a company founded by his father in the Boston area. He worked for two years after college at The Springfield Daily News, covering the small towns of western Massachusetts. He has also worked as a substitute teacher in the Washington public schools, has served as an elected parent representative at his son’s school, and currently serves as an instructor in a parent-education program with hundreds of participants. He enjoys sports, especially baseball and bicycling.

Honors: First prize for enterprise reporting, National Press Club, 2008.

Media appearances: Basken has appeared often on television and radio, including the BBC, CNN, C-SPAN, and National Public Radio, as well as almost daily presentations on the UPI and Bloomberg radio networks. He also provided two months of near-daily radio coverage on the Persian Gulf war, in 1991.