Journalists Covering the Presidency

The writer is a current president.

A faculty member once told me, “If I could actually indoctrinate my students, I’d start by getting them to read the syllabus.” The notion that faculty routinely shape student thinking is, in most respects, wildly overstated.

But there is one place where I’ve watched faculty influence students in ways that trouble me—the student newspaper.

Time and again, I’ve seen faculty steer student journalists toward stories that echo faculty grievances against administration, stories that matter a great deal to the faculty and very little to the students doing the reporting. Budget allocations among academic departments. The distribution of distance education funds. One-sided accounts of union negotiations. These aren’t student stories. They’re faculty stories, handed off to students who don’t yet have the experience to recognize they’re being manipulated.

Critical coverage of university leadership is legitimate and often valuable. I’ve been on the receiving end of articles that were accurate, fair, and genuinely served students—including one that correctly identified a shortage of academic advisers and unacceptable wait times. That’s the student press doing its job. I’ve also been criticized in ways that were less accurate, but at least the subject was something students had a stake in. That’s fine, too.

I’ve also been luckier than most of my colleagues. My frustration here comes less from personal experience than from watching what’s happened to others.

The worst case I witnessed involved a president whose relationship with journalism faculty had badly deteriorated. The student paper spent years treating his tenure as a slow-motion catastrophe. What the coverage never acknowledged: Enrollment grew, fundraising grew, the institution was financially sound, and town-gown relations were better than I’d seen anywhere. Students, by any observable measure, were not suffering under his leadership. The journalism faculty were. And the student paper reflected that, reliably and relentlessly, without apparently recognizing the difference.

What bothers me isn’t just the unfairness to presidents. It’s what this practice teaches student journalists. They’re learning to accept assignments from sources with undisclosed interests. They’re learning that advocacy dressed as reporting is acceptable. They’re learning habits that the profession—and the country—can’t afford more of.

Whenever anyone has tried to address this, the response is predictable: freedom of the press, First Amendment, any interference is unconstitutional. And here’s the bind: Most of us genuinely believe that. We’re not wrong to protect press freedom. But that principle was not designed to shield faculty from accountability for how they use students to fight their institutional battles.

I don’t have a clean solution. I’m not sure one exists. But I do think faculty who care about journalism—and most of them say they do—might consider whether they’re serving their students or using them.