This morning The Chronicle reports a really important story — the departure of Karen Arenson from The New York Times.
Anyone who is reading this blog is likely to be a higher-education news junkie (bless all of you!), but for many Americans Karen was one of the few mainstream reporters who provided coverage of higher ed. She was the best the Times had, and I will always be grateful to her for turning her Metro Desk beat into a perch from which to comment knowledgeably and intelligently on what was going on in our colleges and universities. Karen took a buyout, in part to deal with pressing family issues, but also, I think, because of the increasing difficulty of doing her job well on a paper that is having a hard time deciding what it wants to be in an era of declining print readership and killing electronic competition.
I first met Karen about a decade ago when she came to Princeton to write a story on Jewish admissions to our University. Typically, she had picked up on the story by reading a brilliant investigative series in The Daily Princetonian by a freshman reporter (Richard Just, now with The New Republic). I was the “president” (= board chair) of the Center for Jewish Life, and Karen interviewed me at length. She wrote a long and acute piece which featured a large photo of me, and produced a series of quizzical responses from old friends who wondered when I had become a rabbi. My first encounter with Warhol-fame. My more important encounter, however, was with a reporter who has become a very good friend, someone with whom I have discussed higher-ed policy on a regular basis. I think I have occasionally been helpful to her in providing a sounding board for her story research, and even, much more infrequently, in giving her information. But, as a very well-informed and highly skeptical insider, she has been more important to me as I have tried to understand the larger higher-education picture.
I have learned a lot about how a good reporter operates from observing Karen. To be sure, she has had (thanks to the Times) the sort of job that permitted her to take the time to develop a story properly, and she has worked with fine editors — even if their news sense about higher ed was not always hers, or mine. She has worked hard to get the story right, and she has evinced the skepticism required to uncover the truth. She has frequently challenged my confident assertions about what was going on in the field, and she has more often than not been correct. Her knowledge of economics and her comfort with statistics has been a big part of her professional competence, as we saw recently in her reporting on university endowments. And of course she writes beautifully.
Reporters like Karen Arenson cannot be replaced. And it does not seem likely that the Times will even try to fill her position, since they are clearly downsizing their education beat. This will be a great loss to all of us in the field of higher education, since a well-informed public is essential both to legislative policy formulation and to popular support for what we do. We will miss you, Karen, but I thank you publicly for what you have done for us. But please keep calling me!
