Growing up in a family dependent on the newspaper business, I have always been grateful that our country has a vibrant free press. That press freedom has helped identify and, in some cases, curb excesses going on at America’s colleges and universities. Most universities try to control the news about themselves by suppressing important information, such as how much students are learning, how many hours they devote to their academic work, how much senior faculty actually teach, how much intercollegiate athletics are subsidized, etc.
The Chicago Tribune rather immodestly once called itself the “World’s Greatest Newspaper,” and even today it is probably the single most important media outlet in the Midwest. But the paper deserves huge kudos for great work exposing dubious practices in public higher education in the Land of Lincoln. A while back, it exposed how politically well connected applicants for admission were given preference at the flagship school, the University of Illinois (from whom I have two degrees), fomenting a scandal that ultimately toppled the university’s president. Even now, the university is fighting in court over attempts to force them to provide specific information about the admission of politically connected students.
Closer to home, the Tribune has exposed financial shenanigans at Chicago State University. I have written previously arguing that Chicago State, with very mediocre graduation rates, in some ways is a more expensive school than tony neighboring Northwestern (based on dollars spent per graduate). Chicago State’s president Wayne Watson, like me a Northwestern graduate, rather viciously attacked me for that view recently at the annual meeting of the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education (NAFEO). Yet new revelations uncovered by the Tribune show that Chicago State in the era since Watson assumed the presidency did not even bill students for tuition one semester and mismanaged large sums of other monies. Now the Illinois legislature is talking of holding hearings. Would this have happened without the newspaper publicity?
Moving eastward, journalism students at Kent State University recently produced a first-rate video documentary focusing on intercollegiate athletics at Mid-American Conference (MAC) schools. The project made Cleveland television and showed that many MAC students had little knowledge of the high fees charged them to fund unprofitable athletic programs. In a follow-up, the students sought reaction from members the KSU Board of Trustees, which, in turn, led to the provost and dean putting pressure on the professor (and indirectly on the students) for bothering the trustees over something so trifling as an eight digit university subsidy of sports. To date, I understand this intimidation has had no effect. And the exercise of press freedom revealed something that the university no doubt wanted kept quiet.
Moving southwest, the administration of Texas A&M University briefly published data on individual professor salaries, teaching loads, number of students taught, research grants, etc. After a howl, the data were removed (but only after some, including myself, wrote about them in the press). Sanitized, less-revealing data have been re-released, but stories both in the Texas and national media have called attention to the huge disparities in teaching loads, salaries, and instructional costs per professor.
In a separate action, the Texas press has publicized the appointment of a reform-minded adviser to the Board of Regents of the University of Texas, which, in turn, led to a minor earthquake in Austin. Defenders of the status quo leaped into action, arguing that UT’s exalted status as a major research university was in jeopardy, since the adviser (now reassigned to other duties) apparently was skeptical of the utility of some academic research and thought maybe professors who teach more students should be more generously rewarded—what a radical and subversive thought!
The Chronicle annually performs a great service by publishing information on the salaries of university presidents. At a time when schools are claiming they are financially straining to meet basic needs, trustees are generously rewarding their top leadership (although, in fairness, overall salaries have risen only modestly in the past year). Yet there has no doubt been some negative political spillover effects from the salary revelations: How, for example, can the president of Ohio State University, Gordon Gee, effectively argue against budget reductions for his university in the cash-strapped Buckeye State when it is revealed he makes twice as much as any public university president in the nation?
What is the common thread in all of these examples? Universities only want good news to be disseminated about what they do. University news operations are very akin to what Pravda and the Communist party-controlled Tass news service did in Soviet Russia—provide a one-sided view that serves the needs of the apparatchiks in charge. The American press is able to occasionally pierce this veil of secrecy, thus bringing about some transparency and accountability. We need more, not less of this.
As a general proposition, I think virtually everything going on in universities receiving governmental funds should be open for public scrutiny, with a few exceptions (e.g., medical records of students, some (but not all) legal settlements, possibly—but only possibly—the deliberations of tenure committees, etc.) Check registers should be published, along with salaries, detailed budgets, results of surveys such as the National Survey of Student Engagement, etc. And a free, independent press provides a check against the excesses that inevitably arise where operations are conducted in secrecy and the dissemination of information is controlled. American universities achieved their greatness precisely because of the ability of professors to research what they want without much constraint, and disseminate those results to the scholarly world and broader community. Let’s expect the same with respect to the administration of universities themselves.
