Same Old Same Old in The Nation
By now, mainstream media outlets have published hundreds, if not thousands of pieces about the plight of part-time faculty. On March 31st, The Nation joined the fray with a piece titled, “Higher Education Takes a Hit.” Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s crucial for pieces about part-time faculty to be published in mainstream media. Heck, I think pieces about higher education in general are missing from the pages of our mainstream media. Yeah, yeah, the New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times—almost every big name newspaper left that you can think of has a higher education reporter. The problem is those reporters aren’t often particularly well-versed in the arcane language that is higher education-ese. They are journalists who went to college, not insiders. This means that readers of those papers never really get the inside scoop on the multi-billion dollar industry that educates 18,000,000 undergraduates each year.
So when these reporters try their hand at writing about part-time faculty, well, it’s often the same old same old. That’s because the reporters often interview the same old people. In the case of The Nation’s reporter, he turned to Marc Bousquet and Cary Nelson from
Short URL: http://www.adjunctnation.com/?p=2306


